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I am slowly getting together the necessary bits and pieces to, in the future, reload for a new rifle, its SEC 58/2 atm but as soon as I get near to the end of the shopping list a variation is going in- that may be a few months away! Can I legally fire-form the cases whilst the rifle is 58/2 or will I have to wait until it is Sec 1? Or, can I take it to the range and ask a RFD friend to fire-form them for me?
I cant find anything relevant in the H.O. guidance.

I think you would fall foul of the law as you are firing the rifle (albeit without projectile) so this takes it away from ornament or curiosity. Even if you only wanted to fire blanks e.g for re-enactment you need to have the rifle entered onto your FAC.

There used to be some guidance that mentioned this but it has disappeared. Even possessing the components could be taken as an intent to fire the weapon so you could be sailing into trouble already. My advice (I'm no lawyer here) would be get the variation up front using the reason to posses as "occasional firing and test firing for research purposes", this way you don't need to prove any frequency of firing as "good reason" to continue to posses.

spikedueller wrote:Even possessing the components could be taken as an intent to fire the weapon so you could be sailing into trouble already.

Possessing cases is fine for anyone and I'm fairly sure that Meaty is allowed primers and powder as he has a FAC so I can't see how he'd be in trouble for that. I think the question here is simply can the rifle be used for fire forming the brass before coming under section1.

My best guess is that to fire it legally for any reason - section 1. As in the act of firing it changes it's status. Personally I'd just ask Mark, Paul or Roy ( from grove ) as I'm sure they've dealt with this before.

Question: why would you want the formed brass before you could fire it anyway.? Patience is a wonderful thing ;-)

Technically I suppose that you could argue that you are assembling blank firing ammunition if there is no projectile used as you don't need a slot for such ammunition on your ticket, but then they need to be fired in blank firing adapted guns.

If there is a "projectile" loaded then you have no slot for such ammunition on your ticket regardless of whether you fire it or not.

I wouldn't risk it myself.

Thanks for the replies,
I certainly dont want to get into any situation where I have to argue technicalities on what appears to be a grey area in legislation so I think the best course of action would be to put in for the variation asap before the moulds turn up.
I was hoping to have a few fire formed cases to hand so that I could do comparisons between the cases and the chamber cast as I was toying with the idea of making my own dies, or at least seeing if it was feasible to modify the Lee 8mm Lebel dies to suit, plus I need to make a copy of the Lyman M expander die that is specific to the case.
Lots of tinkering planned for the cold evenings before the new rug-rat arrives

I looked at something similar with a 3 band Snider recently. I think that the key is 'intent'. If you buy a wallhanger and you then buy dies, projectiles, cases, powder etc that shows intent that you planned to fire the firearm. I think that the advert that I saw even said that they would only sell the dies and the other stuff if it was going on a section 1.

Best to get the ticket in and then you're covered. Hopefully you've got a force that's doing fast turnarounds.