My Rifle Brass Annealer

[Crusty]

Here's my rifle brass annealer in operation as the first step in reloading precision long range rifle ammunition. I don't think I even wrote anything down as I built it much less any sort of documentation. I used a rotisserie motor for drive, a 10mm XL timing belt (5mm pitch) and sprockets (40:26 ratio to achieve 6 sec rotor revs from the 10 sec motor revs), half inch shaft stock, cheap bearings I bought at the local hardware store, various aluminum pieces from my materials bin and a cake pan. The frame is 1/4" mdf with an aluminum sheet overlay on the front and a mahogany perimeter frame. You can't see them in the video but there's finishing nail pins that guide the cases from the input slot into the heating position.

The big discovery for me was that if the cases landed on a downward moving surface they tended to stop rotating and skidded in place, but when I offset the top rotor so that they landed on an upward moving surface then rotation became reliably 100%. A rotor diameter of around 2" gives enough rotations for uniform heating.

The angular relationship between the two slots is adjusted to achieve the desired heating time (best determined empirically with Tempilaq) and in the video it's set for 5-5½ seconds, which puts my cases in the 700-750º range. Each rotor is fastened to its driving shaft with two grub screws so it's simple and easy to adjust the relationship between the two. A small flame with the tip of the inner cone directed at the neck/shoulder junction (barely visible in the video) is adequate to reach the target temp range.