First You Cry / Brass Management

 We said goodbye to Gordon* for the last time in late June 2025, and we won’t soon forget him. I say “we” as I think I’m speaking for all of us who knew him as a colleague, friend, family member, or some combination thereof. A colleague at our former mutual place of employment once asked someone who worked for Gordon’s preceding employer, do you remember Gordon, to which he laughed and replied, nobody who’s met Gordon can ever forget him. Amen.

*rule 17 doesn’t apply here, i.e., I think in this case it’s okay to use someone’s real name without their prior consent; see his obituary for more detail: https://storkefuneralhome.com/storke-funeral-home-obituaries/?id=2283

I could write a lengthy tribute to Gordon, but I won’t tire you with that – his obit did a perfectly good job. Instead, I’d like to offer a few unique encounters from which we might all gain something. But first, I’ll ask Percy Sledge to help set the mood:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCMdjgaTLDs

I played this for Gordon once at the office when we were testing the audio on a computer. He loved it. During his military career, he had a side hustle as a DJ at the officers and enlisted clubs, and therefore was familiar with a wide range of pop music, but he said the old school R&B that he grew up on was his favorite genre.

Brass Management

Many firearm enthusiasts at one time or another entertain an interest in handloading ammunition, i.e., assembling their own cartridges rather than buying commercial ammo. Various motivations may apply, including, (1) saving money, (2) customizing for accuracy, (3) recycling, (4) a hedge against commercial ammo shortages, (5) the satisfaction of craftsmanship, (6) making ammo for obscure calibers, for which ammo is expensive or difficult to find, and (7) there are probably other motivations that haven’t occurred to me. Let’s discuss 1-6 for now.

1)     Saving Money – somewhat valid but for most calibers it would be at least a few years before you break even.

2)     Customizing for Accuracy – this is valid, but again, you won’t see results overnight. Takes a while to get good at assembly and experimental techniques.

3)     Recycling – not really valid; the only thing that gets recycled is the brass. More on this later.

4)     Hedge Against Shortages – somewhat valid but handloading supplies and components, and equipment as well, suffer the same economics as ammunition. The only winners in this game are those who stocked up on components when they were more readily available.

5)     Satisfaction of Craftsmanship – this is my big motivator, i.e., a creative hobby with practical application. Plus #2 and #4 above apply for me as well.

6)     Obscure Calibers – valid for some handloaders. Ammo for vintage or obscure calibers can be expensive or hard to find. I only own/shoot the “normal” calibers myself, but I do know guys who have some esoteric ones.

Back before Gordon retired, he picked my brain clean on reloading (BTW, reloading means assembling cartridges with used brass; handloading just means doing it with new brass). He had, among scores of other firearms, a 50 BMG sniper rifle which was prohibitively expensive to shoot at ~$5/cartridge. So he wanted to learn to reload, thinking he was going to make inexpensive cartridges for that behemoth. I offered what paltry wisdom I could supply, which was basically, you’re going to spend way more on equipment than you could ever hope to save, and you don’t have the borderline OCD personality necessary to succeed at such an undertaking in the first place.

The other siren song for Gordon was the production rate of the progressive presses (I use single-stage presses myself, for reasons I won’t bore you with). In a progressive press, several things happen with each pull of the ram, and a complete cartridge pops out the end each time. With single-stage, only one or two operations happen with each pull. My point here for Gordon was OK, the progressive press does assemble ammo very efficiently compared to single-stage, but that’s only a tiny percentage of the time you put into the overall process. The biggest time suck is brass management.

Let’s step back a bit for now. Gordon was a retired Army E9 (Sergeant Major), with experience mainly in infantry. Therefore, he was around guns and firing ranges a lot, with a couple of key outcomes: (1) he suffered hearing loss and (2) he loved guns.

Due to the hearing loss, Gordon spoke rather loudly, which initially unnerved me. Apprehension abated when I discovered that the voice was not accompanied by the anticipated overbearing personality. He did have a strong presence but not to anyone else’s particular detriment.

He once asked me, why do people say I’m intimidating? Is it because I’m black? (We were rather candid with each other; my office was unofficially designated the non-attribution zone.) I said no, I think most people around the office are pretty level-headed about race; I think it’s your loud voice and command presence (Gordon was once a drill sergeant in military life as well). We discussed what he might do about it; my general guidance was to just be aware of it and try to not scare people.

Speaking of race, it came up in a different context in 2016 during the presidential campaign. Politically, Gordon was a staunch republican/conservative, but said to me, I don’t think I can vote for Trump because he’s a racist. Personally I tend to avoid politics around the office, but I could see he was distraught, so I advised him to research the topic himself, as the only things I’d heard about Trump’s supposed racism were from the DNC and the media, neither institution being reliably objective during a heated political race. About a week later he came back and said, you’re right, Trump’s not a racist. He’s had many senior-level black employees, and supported black businesspeople. And a bunch of other things – he really did his research!

Getting back to brass management, there are several steps between picking warm brass up off the floor and assembling a cartridge from it.

1)     Cleaning

2)     Inspecting / sorting

3)     Annealing

4)     Resizing

5)     Depriming

6)     Trimming

Cleaning – some reloaders consider this unnecessary; I do it to remove the toxins (part of the attached soot is lead fulminate from the primer), to facilitate inspection, and aesthetics. Two methods for cleaning with which I’m familiar are vibrating and tumbling. Vibrating happens in a hopper filled with crushed walnut shells or similar media with a light coating of cleaning goop. I used to employ this method, but switched over to tumbling when I started getting concerned about lead exposure. Tumbling basically uses a rock polisher filled with water, soap, and polishing agent. Tumbling doesn’t work as well for aesthetics, but is better for removing lead residue, as you rinse everything away at the end.

Inspecting / Sorting – the reloader should inspect every case for cracks or deformities, and of course discard the offenders – you can’t repair a case. Sorting – if you’re trying to maintain optimum consistency, some reloaders will just use one headstamp (brand of brass) per batch.

Annealing – brass becomes harder and more brittle when worked. The neck of a rifle case, from continued expansion and contraction, will stiffen and lose its ability to be crimped to grip the projectile. To restore its strength, it must be annealed, which takes the form of heating it up (just the neck, not the whole cartridge) to a faint glow, and letting it cool slowly. This doesn’t have to be done very often; full disclosure – I’ve never had to do it.

Resizing and depriming – treating these together as they’re usually done with a single die. The ram of the reloading press pushes the brass up into the die to restore it to the proper diameter and squeeze out any nonuniformities. A pin in the center of the die pops the old primer out the bottom, at the top of the ram motion. The reloader should then clean (scrape or brush) the primer pocket with a handheld tool.

Trimming – brass is a “soft” metal, relatively speaking. During the firing event it expands and stretches within the chamber, and then shrinks upon cooling, but not necessarily completely or consistently. Sometimes it stays a bit long (it rarely gets shorter) and needs to be trimmed to a uniform length. A tedious detail beyond the scope of today’s discussion – the importance of trimming depends on the type of crimp you intend to use, which depends on… well let’s stay out of that rabbit hole for now.

Note – some (most?) reloaders do resizing and depriming last; I do trimming last, as the process of resizing can lengthen the brass (the extra metal from squeezing the sides has to go somewhere).

After all this, the brass is ready for reloading.

I won’t go into the rest of the reloading process in this level of detail but will instead just mention the basics: install a new primer, charge the case (put in the powder), install the projectile, and crimp the neck around its base or crimp groove. Voila, a shootable cartridge!

 

Is that all there is to it? Yes. So how do you get “good” at it? Good ammo is safe, has the correct ballistics, and is consistent. To get there, you must (1) get it right, and (2) control the variability. (1) means use a recipe within safe tolerances; (2) means understand the sources of variability introduced by each step of the process, and endeavor to control it.

Needless to say, when I dragged Gordon through all this detail, I think I pretty well talked him out of attempting to reload ammunition. He was plenty intelligent, but attending to the above details was definitely not in his temperament.

One more Gordon story: he worked for the US Army as a civilian, after retiring from active duty, and had a passion for developing a certain type of system for use in the field. He did not succeed at the time, and came to our agency to continue to pursue this goal. He and his team worked valiantly on it for years, but alas he was aging out. He wanted to retire, and had the means to do so, but really wanted to get this system fully developed and fielded. He expressed this frustration to me, and was essentially conceding failure. I said no, you’re not a failure. Your contribution was developing people, not systems. I proceeded to enumerate all the team members and colleagues that he coached and mentored, both in professional and life skills, and how much they had grown as a result. I further advised that others will pick up where he left off, and they’ll get the system fielded. With this, he said thanks, he could now feel good about retiring.

Which he did in March, 2023.

The big tragedy was that after decades of hard work, saving, and investing, he only got to enjoy a couple of years of retirement. His family is well taken care of, but I’m sure they’d rather have him around, as we all would.

So my message to Gordon, if they’re allowed to read the internet wherever he is: don’t worry, your team members and former colleagues will continue to pursue your legacy, and I’ll take care of the reloading. For the rest of y’all I say this: it’s good to have life goals, but don’t let them get in the way of living!

Dear reader: did you know Gordon, and if so, do you have any good Gordon memories to add? Please leave them in the comments. Note, your comments won’t appear immediately; I have to filter them for spam first.