In my “Freedom Camp 7” series I included a logistical auxiliary that made ammunition. Traditionally resistance fighters need a steady supply of ammo. The Israeli terrorists who fought against the British in the Holy Land even set up a 9mm ammo plant underneath a laundry, cranking out ammunition on a scale that a handloader (even with a Dillon on each hand) couldn’t hope to compete with.
I honestly don’t expect handloaders to ever supply the full needs of a successful insurgency (even in the American revolution 9 out of 10 balls shot from muskets were of French origin, I cannot overstate the importance of international support). However I do expect handloaders to augment the logistics of a successful insurgency as has happened quite a lot in the past. However in writing good fiction you have to have a plausible explanation, something that makes sense, to explain how things happen.
There are a number of steps involved in brass preparation for reloading. One of the most important as far as initial prep is annealing. This step can be done by one person, simply with a hand torch. Even in the middle of the woods (although hauling around a bunch of brass would get very very heavy). So if street kids get a nickel for spent brass, and they bring it to the “recycling man” who aggregates the brass casings who gets them to a “processing team” or “reloader” depending on how organized/complex the logistic chain is, this becomes a plausible, doable, and feasible way to ensure insurgents had bullets.
Honestly I don’t think a full scale insurgency could ever be fueled by reloading, although I do think that it would be entirely possible to arm sniper cells in an insurgency solely by reloading. That is only my opinion, and my opinion is jaded by my experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan where the insurgents used largely non reloadable ComBloc steel cased Berdan primed ammunition. Of course having wealthy international financiers to keep a steady supply of ComBloc ammo coming means you don’t need a complex network of reloaders.
Anyways, getting down to the brass tacks (or cases to be more precise)….
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Brass gets work hardened by any mechanical action, the friction of the work aligning the atoms into an ever more regular crystal pattern until the brass becomes so brittle that it cracks.
Annealing is the process of using heat to soften the brass, to allow the copper and zinc atoms to get move around a tad. This makes the brass softer, easier to manipulate (ie work) which will make it harder.
If your necks are getting hard, you may have uneven neck tension holding your bullets in place. Annealing will help even out the neck tension by uniforming how the brass behaves when the powder is lit off.
There are machines that will anneal brass for you, costing several hundred dollars. If you have a gas stove and a pair of pliers you can do it much cheaper (and slower). I anneal brass one case at a time, with a small propane plumbers torch and use my fingers to tell when it is time to drop the brass into a bucket of water. This is an easy way to burn your fingers.
Truth be told, the water does nothing for the annealing. Steel can be hardened by heating to critical temperature and rapidly cooling. Brass can’t, brass can only be work hardened.
I bring this up because annealing is a cheap way to get more shots out of your brass. If you buy once fired 7.62×51 milsurp Lake City brass you are most likely getting brass fired in an M240B machine gun (or other full auto weapon). Obviously in the fiction I wrote the brass would be “battlefield scavanged” from multiple weapon systems resulting in multiple headstamps, year lots, etc.
When I get unprocessed milsurp 7.62 brass the first thing I do is clean, anneal, then deprime/resize and then trim to length, deburr and decrimp the primer pocket. It takes a while to process a large batch but in the end the prep you put into processing the brass ensures long life and consistent accuracy.
I generally clean first because it is easier to see the “color shift” happen when annealing shiny brass instead of dirty brass. You don’t need to get the brass cherry red, simply watching the little blue line of oxidation work its way down the neck to the base of the shoulder is enough. Cleaning/shining is not an absolutely required step though.
Some people use the pie tin method of annealing, standing empty brass in a pie tin filled 3/4 of an inch with water, they hit the brass with the propane torch until they get the color change then tip the brass into the water. This method works, but I find it only works well for small batches that fit in pie tins, such as if you were reloading for a box of 20 rounds.
The big automated annealing machines are nothing special, just a disk with holes cut in that rotate brass across flame jets. The brass fits in the holes and the speed of rotation determines how long the brass is annealed. If I ever get into reloading as a side business (with requisite FFL) this is one of the first purchases I will make.
There are a lot of good articles on annealing out there, there aren’t any real secret tricks to it. Just heating the brass enough to make it soft without burning your house to the ground covers it.
Now, there is a danger of over softening the brass. You want to soften the neck and shoulder area, not the body, web, or cartridge head. This is why you head only the neck/shoulder area and don’t just throw brass into a campfire to bring back the spring. Truth be told my “rotate with my fingers” method is way on the conservative side (it normally only gets the oxidation line to just below the shoulder before I drop the brass into the bucket) but that is really all I need softened.
So anneal your brass, especially brass that wasn’t fired in YOUR chamber. You can’t make it factory new again, but annealing will get you as close as you can reasonably get for a very small investment in terms of time and propane.
http://www.6mmbr.com/annealing.html
http://www.gun-tests.com/performance/jun96cases.html
http://blog.sinclairintl.com/2012/02/22/the-not-so-arcane-art-of-brass-annealing/
There you have it. If there were ever an insurgency in the future of the US I think that handloaders would play an important role in the insurgent logistic chain.
http://randomthoughtsandguns.blogspot.com/2013/05/annealing-brass-rather-good-excuse-to.html