Annealing?

  Definition Annealing is a heat treatment process that changes the physical and sometimes also the chemical properties of a material to increase ductility and reduce the hardness to make it more workable. As you can see if you did the whole case it would in fact make it ductile when you only want the neck shoulder area done.

My experience with case annealing goes back a long time ago and I have not used the process in over 50 years. Way back then I was trying to neck out 30-06 military cases to make 35 Whelen ammo (it was a wildcat back then and brass was not commercially available). I also had a 222 Remington and 223 brass was plentiful so I resized and shortened them. The old guys who were counseling me back them taught me to stand the brass upright in a pan of water so approximately half of the case was submerged. I heated the upper portion of the brass with a gas torch. The whole idea was to keep the lower portion of the brass from being heated and softened.
It worked slick to neck out the 30-06’s. However the 222 Remington project had less success due to the need to resize a much larger portion of the case and push the shoulder back so far.
Based on all of that and everything you guys have said here I would agree that the oven idea is not a good one.

Pooh, he was talking about bottle neck cases, as to your cookies I understand they are off the BHN scale and barely still in the Rockwell Hardness scale and the only solvent is Hackers coffee which has a ph of 2.

Pooh, "that far out of line" is why I brought the subject up "looking for reason" with knowledgeable people. By the way I could have been a little clearer in the beginning.

Poohzilla, Brass and lead do not react the same to cooling. Quenched lead hardens. Quenched brass does not.

Could make some smart remark about being late, I won't though. Just glad you are here! To bring you up to date about my annealing, I now have 2 "wild cats" one is the K Hornet the other is very similar to a 6.5-.280 improved, it is a 6.5- 270 Steagall Improved, those plus the apparent brass shortage inspired me to start. I bought an Annealeez and it is easy to use and seems to be very consistent. I looked at an tried your method but I could not be consistent .

Just to add to the confusion of all of this I’ll throw my understanding into it.
As a boy I had an old Nebraska Farmer teach me to make knives out of old Hoof Rasps. These were steel about 16 to 18 inches long, about two and a half inches wide and maybe half to three quarters inch thick. We heated them until they were red and when we drug a file across them the marks had to be straw-yellow. Then we stuck them into powdered lye and allowed them to slowly cool over-night. He said this was annealing and made the steel soft and workable.
Once we had shaped the blade we again heated it until it was bright cherry-red and when we drug a file it left white streaks. They we quenched it in cold water. This hardened the metal and we could sharpen it. He said this was tempering the metal.
Years later (the 1960’s) I did my first reloading that involved annealing the brass to allow reforming. I was taught the process of standing the cases in water so approximately a third of the case was covered. We heated the upper portion of the case until it turned dull red and then knocked them over to quench them. If we allowed them to cool on their own the brass would be too soft and most likely crush when we reshaped them.
So based on a Nebraska Farmers instructions back in the 1950’s that is my education in metallurgy, both of these processes accomplished what we set out to do.