Annealing cases, small stuff(Ok, one more thing because I forgot to publish it a couple of days ago)

By the way: this is one of those projects I realized would make a good post, and then thought "Would've been better if I'd thought of this before I got everything cleaned up."

Also, the Disclaimer:
I'm doing this after having read on the subject and tried some things over time.  It may not work the same for you, depending on individual factors.  Also, it involves fire.  So if you burn yourself or heat something you shouldn't have, or in a bad location, that's on you.

I've written something on the subject before, but I can't find the posts right now.  Those cases it was mostly annealing .45-70, but this is smaller stuff: .32 Smith & Wesson Long.  It's an old cartridge, at one time it was commonly used as a self-defense round, at one time a lot of police departments, including New York City, had it as their issue sidearm.  Now it's primarily a target and small-game cartridge.  More on that later.

Annealing is heating a metal up to a suitable temperature to relieve stress in the metal, in the case of cartridge cases mostly in the neck/shoulder area where repeated resizing and firing has caused the metal to work harden.  One of the things that can cause is, in the case of lower pressure loads, the case cannot expand as well as should, which means the case isn't sealing the chamber as well as should, which can leave fouling streaks on the outside of the case.  Which was the problem here.

With brass it's usually heating the affected area up to about 650-700 degrees F, which softens the area heated without any softening of the base area; that has to be harder to help hold against high-pressure stresses.  In most, if you overheat the base area you might as well crush it and put it in the scrap bucket.  The usual method of preventing that is to put the base either in a holder that acts as a heat sink, or applying the heat in a short enough time that the base area doesn't heat up that much; often dumping it in water when done to make sure.

Here I picked up a cheap cake pan, stacked a bunch of resized and mouth-expanded cases in lines(so I could keep track of where I was), added enough water to cover the lower 1/4 of the case, and got out the propane torch.  Based on earlier work with larger cases, a little watching showed that with the torch set with the inner blue flame at X length, holding that part of the flame about 1/2" above the mouth of the case, took about 4-5 seconds to get the color I wanted.  Ran through about a hundred, then dried them thoroughly and loaded some using a load from the newer Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook, using a 100-grain semi-wadcutter bullet.

The result was wonderful.  The cases showed no sign of gas leakage around/below the case mouth, and no sign of the cases being overheated or damaged.  

Depending on what you're shooting, it may not be worth it to you to reload cases after they get a bit too hard.  Or, for some cartridges, it may well be so.