Ammunition Quality Control

[Homer]

I’m going to give an answer of “it depends” on reloading plastic hulls and steel cases.

High quality hulls like Remington and Winchester with brass bases that can be resized can be reloaded- my local clays league does it. I think five times or so is the general rule of thumb or sooner if the plastic goes. Where you run into trouble is with steel or other non brass based (usually silver) cartridges. They either tend not to be resizable or the plastic may have split since they tend to be cheaper material. High brass rounds are reloadable, but they may not work well with certain brands of dies. All brass, which is rare in practical use outside of odd calibers or cowboy action shooting, is probably one of the easiest shells to reload. As far as I know there’s no really practical way to make a new plastic lining at home, although people do it with paper (BTW plastic killed all brass and paper for most everyday applications). FWIW I know a guy who made a homemade hand load using a saboted muzzleloader bullet in a homemade crimped paper hull sealed into a high brass base just to see if he could do it.

Steel ammo cases are iffy. Most reloaded I know (including me) don’t do it, mainly because steel can be hard on resizing dies, trimmers, etc. Also, steel seems to have wider range in quality than brass. Most brass is good for at least one reload, but I’ve seen some steel that has bulged, split or otherwise become suspect on one firing. Not to mention steel rusts, requiring lacquers for weatherproofing. That said, boxer primed steel case ammo can be reloaded with what a loading shop would normally have on hand, with some added wear on equipment. But, a lot of what’s out there from eastern bloc or former eastern bloc sources is berdan primed, which is much harder to reload, with special primer removal tools required and damage to the case head often ruining the reload value of the cartridge (I don’t know anybody who reloads berdan). The offset is that berdan primed ammo is normally cheap (Wolf brand).

So, everything you ever wanted to know about reloading!

Apparently the Yugoslavs were making boxer primed brass cased pact type ammo in the 80s and (part of) the 90s. These will have some value in T2K for ease of reload.

Another option is to adjust the rate if exchange for pact ammo (which was mostly steel cased and berdan primed) to reflect the lower reloadability. Instead of 10 cases for 1 reload it may be 20 or even 50 to 1.