TECH Tip: Check Your Primer Tools If You Have Primer Problems
From time to time, we all encounter a primer that doesn’t go off. It’s normal to attribute the problem to a bad primer. But sometimes there are other explanations. George S., one of our Forum members, experienced a couple failures to fire, but he learned that the issue was his priming TOOL, not his primers. Here’s what George told us. There’s a lesson to be learned:
“I had issues with CCI 450s when I had my first 6BR barreled. I had probably three or four out of 20 rounds that failed to fire. the primers were dented but didn’t fire. I called CCI since I had bought a case of them. The tech was decent enough but had the audacity to tell me I was not seating the primers all the way in the pocket. I proceeded to let him know I had been reloading longer than he had been alive and I knew how to seat a primer.
Turns out that I did and I didn’t! I was using the RCBS primer tool I had used for years and the primers felt just fine to me. I finally decided to check the tool and since I had a new one I took the seating pins out and measured them. The seating pin on the tool I had been using for years was shorter by a few thousandths! I then used the pin from the new primer tool and darned if the primers that didn’t seat down to the bottom of the cup.
I switched to a K&M primer tool for seating the CCI primers and have not had a problem since. It was the combination of harder cup and lack of proper seating. I did call the CCI tech back and apologized for being an idiot.”
Another Forum member witnessed a problem cause by misuse of a priming tool: “I did … see a failure to fire on a Rem 9 1/2 primer only a week ago. That was in the new Rem muzzleloader that uses a primed case to ignite the pellets. After watching the muzzleloader’s owner seat his primers, I believe that it was operator error not the primer. He was seating the primer and then squeezing the priming tool so hard that his hands hurt after a few. We got that corrected.”
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Tags: CCI, Primer, Primer Depth, Priming, RCBS, Reloading, Tool
If the handle of your hand priming tool touches the body of the tool while seating primers, you have a problem. You need to be able to feel the primer touch the bottom of the pocket and then add a little more compression beyond that, as a preload. That way none of your energy of your firing pin is wasted completing your primers seating, and moving the anvil into contact with the priming pellet. Every part is in contact before your pull the trigger. Every time that I read a post that mentions seating by depth, I cringe. IMO and that of the vast majority of short range Benchrest shooters, primers should be seated by feel, not to a specific depth.
I wore out a couple of Mr. Lees excellent little “Auto-Primes ” over the years.
ABSOLUTE “feel” of every primer in every pocket.
Also, with minor modifications, they worked fine with the process of seating BERDAN primers. (RWS 5608 and 5627) Tens of thousands of the little buggers.
Bought one of those fancy “bench-mounted” jobs for “large” primer seating, but once I figured out the “foibles” all my 9mm loading on my dinky Lee 1000, uses the “factory” primer feed with a little bit of “stabilization” of the tray and chute, and the use of a “ball-chain” that operates the powder thrower, to rub on the primer rig and “jiggle” it, for reliable feed.