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I have 70 odd .308 once fired Federal Nickel plated cases here and was thinking about using them in a specific rifle as they will be clearly identifiable with the nickel finish.

Has anyone experience of reloading nickel plated rifle cases, personally I cannot see any issues other than they are Federal which have a reputation for being a bit soft and with limited primer pocket life.

I'd avoid using them Dave. They tend to produce very heavy neck tension, the coating can flake off and ruin a sizer die by scratching it, and brass that's nickel plated seems to suffer neck splits far earlier than plain brass examples. Metallurgists who also shoot say that the plating process affects the underlying brass behaviours.

There are several threads on this subject in the AccurateShooter Forum, here's one:


http://forum.accurateshooter.com/index. ... =3749024.0

oooo i want some nickel cases

Thanks Laurie, oddly enough I have always avoided them myself because I was worried about die damage and flaking and ultimate life cycle. I am tempted to test with a few just to prove to myself if this is the case. They were destined to go in the SSG P1 with 170 Lockbase which is realistically a 600m rifle and the different coloured cases were purely for identification even though I segregate all of my brass by rifle.

Can anyone think of any other cases that are a different colour to Brass and can be reloaded, cases are available in a steel phosphate finish and even copper washed and aluminium however I have not come across colour washed 'brass' before.

what about grinding off the stamping on the base and tapping in a number or even the name of the rifle


or would this remove to much metal

This would change the head spacing of case the almost certainly weaken the case at the same time. If I could find some cases without head stamps that might work. They do exist however they are usually of dubious origin and quality.

Colour washing the cases would be worth looking at though, maybe electro-less copper plating a few microns however I would be worried about the surface integrity and any changes to the parent metal. Where is Badger when you need him!

o yeah head space ....... tongueout

i wouldnt of thought electroplate would be very good as its such a thin coating and easily worn off , so subjecting it to a tumbler , sizing die , magazine, the head and pressure and expansion, you would probably have to recoat every time to .......


wouldnt any chemical process to change the colour also harden the metal which we dont want

just get your lathe out and spin up some cases with no headstamp

i just use a sharpie :shakeshout:

I use them - never had a problem . The ones I have are Federal and had a military crimp .Once the crimp was swaged away I loaded them with 155 sierra mks and started low with 41gr Varget and worked up .They have been reloaded several times and had one neck anneal .Easy cleaning in the tumbler , no problems with neck tension - no split necks ?? No Problems.

I don't use nickel plated brass after my experiences with them in pistol rounds.

Brittle, springy, short case life due to early case mouth splitting and the plating flaking.

Martin on the other hand has had no problem so why don't you just try them out, at worst you'll get a couple of firings out of them and be back where you started. I wouldn't worry about die damage I've never had a problem with nickel flaking damaging dies and you will see it on the fired case before hitting the die with it so don't size if it worries you. They could just behave as normal so your identification problem will be solved.

dromia wrote:I don't use nickel plated brass after my experiences with them in pistol rounds.

Brittle, springy, short case life due to early case mouth splitting and the plating flaking.

Martin on the other hand has had no problem so why don't you just try them out, at worst you'll get a couple of firings out of them and be back where you started. I wouldn't worry about die damage I've never had a problem with nickel flaking damaging dies and you will see it on the fired case before hitting the die with it so don't size if it worries you. They could just behave as normal so your identification problem will be solved.

I use them in my M65 Tikka to correctly identify loads , moderate loads as I usually only shoot at 300 , occasionally 600 , works for me !