Originally Posted By: ARCOREYCatshooter, it's no wonder this keeps coming up. Brownells of all people posted a cartridge schematic on Facebook last week showing the difference between about 6 or 7 different 223/556 reamers making a big deal out of it. When big names like that keep stirring the poo kettle, it's going to keep coming downwind. I started to argue the point, but my fingers were too sore to scream on the internet
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The sad thing is...
None of this stuff means anything. The drawings vary by a thou, or sometimes a few tenths of a thou - real machinists laugh at drawings like that.
You can't buy a reamer made to those dimensions ANYWHERE, for less than $5,000 - no one make reamers to 0.0001" tolerances. And brass cases that come out of a 10 ton stamp mill at 10,000 pieces an hour are no where close to even +/- 0.001" in neck thickness and 0.003" or greater tolerance on other dimensions.
The "folks" throw words and dimensions like that, as though they mean something... they don't... but it makes them sound important.
There is an old saying, "If you like sausage, don't watch it being made."
The same applies to guns and cartridges...
Do people really think they can order a chamber reamer cut to 0.0001" accuracy - I mean, NOBODY makes chambering reamers to that tolerance.
And if you ever watched a brass making operation at work, you would be amazed that the damm things actually could fit in a rifle.
Get a box of new, empty brass and sit down with a micrometer and start measuring it - even from the same lot - it is all over the place.
The pressure of the 5.56 is not higher than the 223 - the military just measures it differently, at a different place.
5.56 will fit and shoot fine in a civilian chamber, and visa-versa, as has been proved about eleventy million times.
If you have owned many .223's you will know that the chambers, leades and throats are all over the place. There is no standard, just loose recommendations.
But when guys quote this garbage... "I'm using a 1.7362° throat, and it's much better than a 1.7246° throat.", and talk about "Pressure" and "Tolerances", they sound so... well, you know... "EXPERT", and "IMPORTANT".
And in the world of the new social media, what you sound like is what is important -- not what you actually do or know. It is what impresses people.
We just spent a few days here in a food fight with an expert on magnum primers, who threw around numbers and talked about going blind over 20 fps... in the end, he knew nothing - he read stuff somewhere that he didn't understand. But he impressed himself a lot.
At my last gig, we were manufactures of 223/5.56 and also dealers of civilian AR-15's and Mil surp M16's - the 16's were true military guns that came to us from Unka Sam, via the local police departments.
We made tons (and I DO mean tons) of 223/5.56 loaded with both the M-855 62gr ball, and the SS-109 62gr w/steel penetrator (politically correct for teeny armor piercing).
The ammunition was equally at home with either the M-16 or the AR-15 chambers, as was the Lake City Military issue SS-109... there is so much slop in both of their chambers that it would not surprise me if you could fit a 243 in them
But the more people pay attention to this garbage, they more of it we will have.
It gets old...
... real fast!!
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