Hounddawg, the rude dismissive attitude in the last question in post 10's first paragraph is written after the manner of a troll. Your previous answer was perfectly civil, and I don't know what changed, but troll-like behavior is unacceptable on this board. Trolling is against
the board rules. Cut it out. And while you are at it, you might refrain from suggesting other people need qualifications you yourself do not have to post on this topic. That just read as a self-important snark attack. Please stick with being civil.
I will explain my comment about overheating, briefly, as I oversimplified and gave the wrong impression about the splitting issue. There are two reasons to avoid overheating. First, as I've described in numerous past posts, it factors in to how many reloading cycles you can get without neck splitting. Getting too few cycles is the OP's original complaint. I say to be careful of overheating because of an observed pattern reported by Barker, starting with Milek and Herrett's experience with red-heated necks, is that they split after too few reloading cycles. I did not make this clear in my previous post—my fault—but it is NOT that soft, large-grained brass splits, but that it re-work hardens too quickly and then splits, while harder, finer-grained brass outlasts it. DeSimone is reannealing every load cycle, so he would not see this phenomenon even with significant extra heat application.
The second reason to avoid overheating is the OP is shooting a cartridge intended for the AR platform. My assumption is that he is using an AR-style rifle which means the brass has to withstand rapid feeding. From William Dresser's 1962 American Rifleman article:
"Most reloaders excessively heat the necks, causing formation of a large-grain brass structure, extreme softness, and lack of "spring", or ability to hold the bullets in the necks. This results from the usual advice, "heat the case necks until red hot and then knock the cases over into water". While the necks so treated are, indeed, unlikely to crack, they may be so soft that they can be squeezed together between the fingers…"
I have intentionally softened necks to this degree in the past. Such necks will bend on a feed ramp. Shoulders that soft can collapse and become too wide to chamber. DeSimone is single-loading a bolt-action rifle, so his cases don't need to withstand rapid stripping from a magazine and slamming up a load ramp, and so, again, he could overheat to a significant degree and not see the same problem.
I will add that I don't actually know that DeSimone is over-heating. He works in low light, as one should using that system. In normal light, glow is apparent at the Draper point, which Draper established as 977°F way back in 1847. But if you cast bullets and have turned off the light while the melt is hot, you'll know you can see it glow at nowhere near that temperature. Hearth.com puts the
lowest light glow visibility at 752°F. Chapman's Workshop Technology puts it way down at 709°F. Different people's eyes won't have the same light sensitivity, making the actual temperature he's reached impossible to know without measurement.
