Primer Blowing Off While Seating

[Martyn4802]

I've gotten away from seating primers with a tool mounted primer seater.
I now use the Lee hand held auto-prime tool. If the primer pockets are good and clean, there is no chance of a primer going off, unless you have a primer cocked and try to seat it. I've never had that happen as I watch the next in line primer to make sure it's flat before pushing on the seating lever.

Martyn

 

[BluesBear]

After seeing several rounds of .40 S&W (produced by a well known second hand ammo company that uses orange labels) that had primers seated sideways in the "squib bucket" at one of the local ranges I felt like experimenting a bit.

So I purposly seated 10 CCI small pistol primers sideways into .38 Special cases.

I mean completely seated flush with the case head. None of them detonated.​

I then carefully deprimed them with my Lyman Universal Decapping Die.

After decapping they were square.​

Then I got the crazy idea of reseating them.

So I gently chamfered the edges of the primer pockets with my RCBS deburring tool.​

I then slowly, very slowly, attempted to reseat all 10.​

Yes I was wearing eye and ear protection.​

Ya know, modern primers are pretty sturdy.

With a little help from a pair of vise grips, I managed to get all 10 seated again.​

By the way... all 10 fired perfectly in my T/C Contender.



And no I didn't try to fire them while seated sideways.
Because I didn't think of it until just now.