neck turners

[casullman]

i am going to buy either a forsner or rcbs neck turning rig . rcbs is 2x as much as forsner but both have good reviews any insights? thanks

[versifier]

Do you have a custom barrel with a match chamber? If you don't IME & IMO they are a waste of time, and effort. Using them inappropriately in normal factory chambers can result in neck/shoulder separations, split necks, and they can render conventional neck sizers useless and require special bushings for the fancy ones. If you have factory production barrels and chambers don't waste your money, it will only profit the brass manufacturers as you will drastically shorten the working life of your cases as the thinned necks then are worked so much more in firing and then in sizing each time.

Some loaders use them to uniform brass, but I have found that if the necks in a particular lot of brass are so bad that they are in that much need of uniforming, it is usually best not to even use that lot, even for practice ammo. My neck turning tool has been gathering dust after much experimenting over several years a while back, I no longer bother with it. Even my custom wildcat doesn't need it if I am careful about what brands of brass I use to form the cases from.

I would spend the money instead on a concentricity gage to measure bullet runnout, that is a tool that every loader can benefit from using.

OTOH if you have a custom match chamber with a very small diameter neck, then they make sense. Both companies make good products and stand behind them, and both tools work like they are supposed to, though none of them works as well as a lathe with a proper sized pilot. If I needed any neck turned brass today, I would just use the lathe. Of the two, the Forster tool looks simpler to use, though my old case trimmer-mounted Lyman tool works just as advertised, too.

The only shooters I know that actually need to turn necks (and benefit from the practice) are serious long range or BR competitors and all have custom rigs (costing more than my car) whose special chambers have been cut to absolute minimum tolerances, so minimum they don't usually need to size their fired brass and it lasts them forever. They turn their necks down to fit their chambers exactly, and one of them travels quite a way to use my lathe to do his.

[casullman]

I dont have match barrels just factory savages I am trying to tweak a bit more accuracy from. The brass I use is Norma,Nosler and Win of which the necks seem to be close ... that is measured with a caliper, all three brands are within half of a thousanth variation in thickness although a caliper is not the most precise tool for that task. Now that I think on it most guys at the range that turn necks are using Krieger or Shilen barrels

[runfiverun]

the only other time i have wanted to turn a neck on anything was when making some extremely off the wall ammo, and i would rather have inside reamed.
anyways the above is exactly what conclusions i have come to about neck turning.