Bulged Brass

[xzqzq]

I recently bought .300 Savage brass on Gunbroker, and about half were bulged a quarter inch above the base, and I can't get the cases to chamber and the bolt closed ... Is there any way I can repair the bulge enough to use these brass ? Thanks, George

[7of7]

Full length resizing would be appropriate, and then after first use, neck sizing. You may also consider a small base resizing.
Do consider that the brass has been weakened at that point, so it may also separate at that location if hot loads are used. Do have a ruptured case extractor on hand for the caliber of rifle..
I have sized brass that have that characteristic and have used them in my rifles.. successfully, but I am using a 30.06.. and don't run hot loads..(don't care for recoil)
Inspect them very carefully..

[versifier]

Welcome to the Guide.

I'm going to assume two things: you FL sized your brass as usual, and you have an older Sav model 99 that you have never had any problems feeding factory ammo through. The operative question here is: Will it feed previous reloads, or are you just starting to load for it?

The bulges are from firing in a worn (or possibly "modified") chamber. That's not a good sign. If the problem is simply the brass, there's not much you can do but recycle it., but with a .300, it might be the rifle.

FL sizer dies do not size the whole length of the case - they are designed to set the shoulder back, resize the top half of the case body, and resize the neck. They also, despite popular beliefs to the contrary, do not return fired brass to the same diameter as factory new rounds. Only a small based sizer will do that. Either could be the issue here.

Every time a chambering reamer gets sharpened, it loses a tiny bit of diameter, so there is a finite number of chambers it can cut before it produces a chamber too small. There is a small amount of acceptable variance in chamber size, and likely your chamber is at minimum diameter. Many target rifles have minimum chambers intentionally. Rifles with minimum chambers will not always feed FL sized ammo, but it is a problem most commonly seen today in semiauto rifles, hence the inexpensive and readily available SB dies in .308, .30-06, .223, etc. As any Savage collector can tell you, this is not an uncommon problem with m99's in .300Sav. My brother and my friend's dad both own rifles I can't load for. (You don't want to know how much a custom SB sizer in .300Sav costs, you really don't.)

The good news is that many of them don't have that problem and happily digest normal reloads. If your rifle has fed previous reloads without problems, toss the brass as it's bulged too far down for your sizer to correct. If it won't feed regular reloads, then your rifle is an excellent source of fired factory brass for someone else's .300 with a larger chamber. If your's has a tight chamber, they do tend to be noticably more accurate than their looser brethren, too, and that's no bad thing.

[xzqzq]

Thanks for the help, guys....