FredC wrote on Jun 16^th, 2020 at 9:12pm:

. . . On a Krag annealing the shoulder is not so dangerous as on a bottle neck cartridge, but personally I do not think it is good practice.

1. The Krag cartridge is a "bottle neck" design.
2. I'm guessing the distinction you intended to make is between rimmed and rimless bottleneck cartridges.
3. It's standard practice for manufacturers to apply a final anneal to neck and shoulder of all new bottleneck cases. For commercial sale, the resultant color gradient is polished off afterwards - but for military contracts it is retained as evidence of the anneal. The unfired US military cartridge shown in the attached photo shows the annealed portion clearly extending about 1/4" past the shoulder - as is normal.

CoRifleman - The sizing difficulties you describe may be the result of inadequate lube and/or insufficient die adjustment. Many of the products currently marketed as case lube are pretty poor. Try plain, cheap castor oil, applied sparingly with fingers or lube pad and see if it helps. In addition, be sure to screw the sizer die at least 1/8 turn beyond simple contact with the shoulder to compensate for press flex under sizing stress. Look carefully where die and shellholder meet during actual sizing. If there's a visible gap as in second image below, that's press flex.

(The first image below shows sizing a .30-06 case down to 7.65x53, done easily in a single pass with castor oil lube.)

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