What's the best gauge brass wire to make spent shell casings in 1/35th scale? I've got some 28 gauge and can't decide if it's too thin.

I want to make some 5.56mm to 7.62mm/.30cal.

5.56x45mm M855 cases are .377 inches at the base. This would correspond to approximately .010 or 30 gauge wire. The scale length of your 5.56mm brass should be .050 which is close to 3/64 inch.
7.62x51mm NATO cases are .470 at the base so in scale they would fall between 27 and 28 gauge. The scale length of your 7.62mm brass should be .057 which is a little shy of 1/16 inch.
I think your 28 gauge wire will be fine for both applications. Somehow, I don't think a contest judge will catch the dimensional discrepancies. You are on your own for making the tapered shoulder, mouth and extractor groove.
Hope this answers your question.
Andrew

Thank You!

Doesn't someone make these in turned brass?

I think even in plastic or resins

Marc/ubi

Well, there are several commercially available brass spent casing kits available, I believe. But, they haven't gotten great reviews and are expensive.

Call me "old school", but if I can get a realistic final product by fashioning it myself, I'd rather do that than order a kit. Andrew's post was very helpful!

Yeah, a pile of .50 cal casings would cost a couple of hundred dollars! Definitely not worth it. I've also just used suitably sized brass wire.

Glad I could help out. Funny thing is, I was always terrible at math until it came to practical applications like this. I used the same formula's to make some 1/6th scale 9mm rounds complete with copper jackets and hollow points. Alas, they were still to small to make them live though
I figured since you were talking about using brass wire that you needed a lot of them so aftermarket parts were out of the scope.
Andrew

Personally I don't use wire. If find that wire, and even worse, cut up pieces of sprue are sadly lacking in realism. Get brass bicro tubing. Two diameters. The smaller is for the taper. I posted about three years ago on how to make these very realistic casings. Sure, it's a tad time consuming, especially if you take the time to bevel the outer diameter tube with a file.

Can you post a link?

The best I can do is tell you to go through my old posts. It would have been around August of 2011 though.