Good job! Now I see why you didn't take me up on the beer for brass sorting offer. You'd lost money on the beer! 
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Sorting Brass
- Thread starter 78Bronco
- Start date
Good job! Now I see why you didn't take me up on the beer for brass sorting offer. You'd lost money on the beer!
Yeah, I woulda been to sort to drunk...
Got it all posted up for sale, break your wallets out and help be raise $ for my new tractor fund!
Bronco, you did great.
I like the way you approached this logically-- first sort by the obvious difference in neck diameter, then go to a different angle and sort the remainder by height.
I recently sorted out two full 5-gallon buckets of mostly pistol brass in various calibers, and I did it by hand, but also using two of your steps. First, I picked out the ones that were obviously a certain caliber and didn't need to be eyeballed too closely to tell. Second, I stood them all up and looked down at them (they were on my garage floor) to better see the case mouth openings. I'd grab the "TALL" ones that had rims, and had the same size mouth opening and no shoulder. Since that means I'd scoop up both .38 specials and .357 mags at the same time, I only grabbed a handful at a time and then quickly sorted them in my hand, dropping them into the two buckets I had ready just for those two calibers. I didn't often look at headstamps, but just visually compared the length.
I did the same for the shorter rimless cases with .355- .358 case mouths, but that caused me to sometimes grab .380s along with 9 x 19 mm. So, I had two different buckets handy. I'd hold several cases in one palm and poke through them with my fingers from the other hand. Every case was quickly ID'd and dropped into the appropriate bucket waiting just below it.
My job only took an hour. Yours probably took more like 8 hours, right?
I like the way you approached this logically-- first sort by the obvious difference in neck diameter, then go to a different angle and sort the remainder by height.
I recently sorted out two full 5-gallon buckets of mostly pistol brass in various calibers, and I did it by hand, but also using two of your steps. First, I picked out the ones that were obviously a certain caliber and didn't need to be eyeballed too closely to tell. Second, I stood them all up and looked down at them (they were on my garage floor) to better see the case mouth openings. I'd grab the "TALL" ones that had rims, and had the same size mouth opening and no shoulder. Since that means I'd scoop up both .38 specials and .357 mags at the same time, I only grabbed a handful at a time and then quickly sorted them in my hand, dropping them into the two buckets I had ready just for those two calibers. I didn't often look at headstamps, but just visually compared the length.
I did the same for the shorter rimless cases with .355- .358 case mouths, but that caused me to sometimes grab .380s along with 9 x 19 mm. So, I had two different buckets handy. I'd hold several cases in one palm and poke through them with my fingers from the other hand. Every case was quickly ID'd and dropped into the appropriate bucket waiting just below it.
My job only took an hour. Yours probably took more like 8 hours, right?
Thanks!
Yeah, took me about an hr per 5 gal bucket and there were 10-12 buckets that were mixed. Got lucky and some buckets I had were all one caliber.
