THE BRASS RING

In Range

- Terry Wieland

Quality Cartridge provides a great service to everyone by making brass in many old and obscure calibers - and it's fine brass, too.

Next to primers, which no one which there is no substitute, the most critical component for loading your own is brass - the shorthand we all use for cartridge cases.

Having been in this business for 35 years, I write statements like the above with both reservations and considerable trepidation. Undoubtedly, the next mail will bring a letter, possibly scrawled in pencil, or scratched out with a piece of burnt firewood on birch bark, condemning me back to four generations for ignorance of the fact that the writer has managed to reuse primers by stuffing some incendiary substance under the anvil.

Don't laugh. I remember distinctly in the 1960s reading in one of the gun magazines a report about native hunters in the far north of Soviet Russia. They perfected a technique for reloading .22 Long Rifle cartridges. Perhaps “perfected” is too strong a word; at any rate, they had managed to make it work, two times out of three, which is better than having no ammunition at all.

I have searched in vain for that article. With the exception of my 1960s Gun World collection, which disappeared somewhere along the way, I have every gun and outdoor magazine I've ever purchased. Alas, it's nowhere to be found. So this is from memory.

Apparently, the hunters would scrape the heads off “strike anywhere" matches and make this into a paste, which they would then manage, somehow, to stuff into the rim where it was not already compressed. By carefully positioning the cartridge so the striker would not hit the same place twice, they were able to get a half-dozen shots out of one case.