Thread: 308 Brass what is a good brand?

Originally Posted by No.3

Lapua is the pick at the moment, although the new packaging seems to have more flat case mouths.

If buying it, I'd consider a couple of 50-boxes of loaded Sako Gamehead - that will give you 100 cases and you can almost save yourself $$ for the first reload at the price of a box of Sako vs reloading (based on $100 for pills, $90 for 100cases, plus powder primers and time). And, you get them fire formed to your rifle and the cases are perfect out of the box (the bullet jammed in there tends to keep the case mouths round!).

As far as the other brass brands, Federal tends to be really soft but dimensionally good. The Hornady and S&B are both hard as reported, a mate has good results from it annealing before the first reload but he's basically getting the brass free so... PPU, PMC, Win, Rem are all OK, Norma up there with Lapua but I have heard and seen people having issues with it as it can be a bit less resilient which I think could be the fact it's a little higher case volume than the Lapua so probably a little thinner. Another is the ex-military brass - don't overlook it as it is rock solid and typically heavier than commercial brass and if you can deal with the one-time job of de-crimping the primer pockets it usually lasts near forever. I have a set of Starline brass there, but haven't used it yet. Looks OK though.

I'm using Win brass at the moment for my sub loads basically just to keep it segregated from my standard loads - it's all range scrap bin salvage and it's been absolutely fine for subs (some people hate using 'recovered' brass for subs as it could have dimension issues or fit issues with the lower pressures, but so far for me it's been golden).

I only ever tried reloading S&B once, never again. But I reload a lot of Hornady for hunting, because it's easy to get hold of as lots of people at the range shoot factory Hornady incl myself. I find Hornady much better than S&B.
Granted I do like PPU and PMC quite a bit more than Hornady, but for brass that is going to be lost in the scrub or grass in the heat of the moment, I find Hornady is good enough to use and bad enough loose.

I am also using Winchester for my sub loads in .308 and for the same reason of being able to know what is what. Not sure if it's just the brass but the loads work well, with holes touching at 100 even though the holes are the same shape as the side profile of the projectile.