Good illustration!
emory's post is a service to all who might pay attention.
The cautionary comments about trying to achieve excessive chamber pressure via +P or overloading via hand loading should help increase shooter safety insofar as people realize they don't have to achieve more "manly" chamber pressures and muzzle velocity (and why bother out of such short barrels?).
Also worthy of note are the following considerations:
1) "De-bulging" fired cases in order to use them over and over and possibly over, increases the likelihood of case failures due to the metal becoming work hardened--i.e., made more brittle and prone to rupture due to being flexed repeatedly. Case ruptures might seem rare or unlikely to the casual shooter who does not shoot thousands of rounds of reloads and has not had it happen to him, but whatever the statistical likelihood of such a failure, it only needs to happen to any one person one time, and it is unpredictable when it might happen to you if you reload the same cases repeatedly (or pick up other people's case at the range--not knowing the history of their use). When I was reloading modest pressure .45ACP and .300WinMag ammo, my rule was to only re-use cases one time, to include full-length re-sizing and trimming the cases to spec as well.
Of course, somebody might chime in here as say that it is OK to re-use brass over and over if it is annealed after X number of firings, but once you introduce enough additional steps to re-using these cases, you cannot really control the quality of the metallurgy and the reliability of the cases to the level where they should have left the factory.
2) Any case metal other than brass might be even more likely to fail under such treatment. Aluminum in particular will work harden more quickly or easily than brass, so perhaps it does not make sense to try and reload these at all???
An aside--aluminum can also corrode and therefore become weakened. This can happen under poor storage conditions, such as any time there is opportunity for exposure to salts of various types or possible galvanic reaction when in contact with other metals. I am not an expert on this, but recall that the aluminum-cased GAU-8 ammo for the A-10 had corrosion problems under conditions where it was stored/deployed, which led the AF to move toward steel cases (perhaps in the search for a cheaper material than brass). Of course, for the GAU-8 ammo they also applied protective coatings to the cases to improve corrosion resistance--which I don't know anyone does for pistol ammo.
Finally--to improve extraction of spent pistol cases, I am thinking that it might help to use a silicon cloth on brass and especially aluminum cases to improve lubricity and reduce any tendency to stick in the chamber. Does anyone have any experience or insight about this?
