Thank you all for the input.  I'll keep it ALL in mind when I finally get the rifle back out to shoot.

In the meantime, I ordered a single stage cast iron Lee press today (my regular press is the classic turret which is a cast iron base but the turret is milled aluminum and the turret ring is cast aluminum.  I'm going to see if the cast iron single stage doesn't do a better job on hard to press shoulders and full length cases.

Thanks again.

Right now we are thinking that peculiar circumstances led to the extreme effort to resize and annealing the shoulder to solve the problem. The new press and segregating your brass may make it a non problem.
Now we have a theoretical quandary on did the shoulder length change with #213000. I did notice the SAAMI chamber dimension notes the chamber shoulder has a .155 MAX radius. I guess .002 is less than max and would be much easier to measure. I sold my 35/40 reamer to a new KCA member so I can not verify it but I remember a miniscule or nonexistent radius on that corner. May have been a SA practice to make the corner with a minimal radius when new and hone a radius on the corners as it got dull. When .155 R was reached the reamer was discarded.

Just measured the shoulder depth on a loose Krag barrel and got 1.669 calculating the shoulder depth from SAAMI using a .064 rim thickness I got 1.6644 with a plus or minus tolerance of  .015. Kind of odd to have a plus or minus tolerance of .015 from a four place decimal dimension, but 1.669 measured is in tolerance. Way different than the 1.62 on the Frank Mallory sourced drawing. The mystery is getting deeper.
The loose barrel just measured was from #410864 so it was later production, #266389 is similar but it is assembled and the measurement is not exact.

I love this place!

CoRifleman wrote on Jun 19^th, 2020 at 3:52am:


Yeah, no one gets mad when there are misunderstandings, we just dig a little deeper till we understand or give up. Sometimes the answers are lost in time and can not be figured out.

For BR on that drawing, could the label been mis applied by the publisher and that should have been wearing the label for pre 1899 less than 213000? I deal with some illustrations from a Swedish company catalog and the part numbers go with a different illustration that you would think. I believe they use a different labeling convention that we are used to.
Take a look at that 1.00 Radius on the outside of the barrel, have you ever seen that on any US Krag? I only have Krags with serial numbers higher than 266XXX and have not seen that profile. Do your 1896s have it? I looked at official photos on the KCA page and they all have hand guards so I could not tell if earlier barrels have that feature.

Edit:
Looked at BR's last chart again that is not the price of the change but a decimal length! Was that a temporary change to boost velocity and pressure for the 2200 fps experiment? Unlikely. Massive repeated typos? Doubt it. One would expect the latest permanent change to be the basis for SAAMI drawings. The earlier dimension became the became the basis for SAAMI? If you asked me last week I would say implausible!

We are missing something and now I have no clue what it is.

If anyone has seen that radius on the outside of any Krag barrel please raise your hand.  It would be interesting but right now I am not sure what it would tell you.

FWIW - Before dabbling with Krags, I never expected 'fired brass' from different rifles of the same caliber to fit, almost interchangeably, without being sized.

Tolerances, wear and dimensional differences, made Full-Length Re-sizing almost a given.

It has only been with Krags that I have experienced the pleasant experience of having 'fired cases' fit in a number of rifles and carbines, without resizing.

It has not happened with all my Krags, but, does with most of them.

I have a model 1896 chamber that allows a bit more expansion in the diameter of the case body. That rifle is my sole exception, now.

(When our Krags were made, the U.S. Military was not reloading fired brass. The early Mercuric Priming had made that unwise!
Cartridges were a one shot deal and rifles just had to accept the production from Frankford Arsenal and war time contractors.

Eventually, Frankford Arsenal developed some reloading sets. It is hard to tell to what extent these were utilized. It certainly would have risked producing ammo of substandard quality.
Reloading seems to have been mainly a civilian shooter thing.
There were those reduced 'gallery practice' reloading sets, which make sense).