removing live primers

[Bob Wolff]

Benn learning on my Dillon 650 and now have a "collection" of cases with live primers, but no powder or bullets.
What method do you use to remove these or is it as simple as just taking to the range and "firing them"???????????

Inquiring minds want to know.

Cheers
Bob

[nuparadigm]

I keep a coffee can filled with about 4" of 30 weight oil. For the few pieces of brass I have that fit your description, I toss 'em in there and they soak. About once a year, I take them out and deprime them with a small pin punch. OR .... you could just fire them. For me, it's not a big deal because I've got tons of brass and the few "tests" don't hurt my inventory.

[gmckinl]

just run them back thru the sizing/depriming die. seriously. there is no problem doing this.

[WildBill]

just run them back thru the sizing/depriming die. seriously. there is no problem doing this.

Never had a problem with this method either. \
Remember to always wear your safety glasses while reloading.

[KD5NRH]

Benn learning on my Dillon 650 and now have a "collection" of cases with live primers, but no powder or bullets.
What method do you use to remove these or is it as simple as just taking to the range and "firing them"???????????

If the primers are seated properly, and you have load data for that type, why not just back the decapper out and finish loading them?

[arod757]

Benn learning on my Dillon 650 and now have a "collection" of cases with live primers, but no powder or bullets.
What method do you use to remove these or is it as simple as just taking to the range and "firing them"???????????

Inquiring minds want to know.

Cheers
Bob

I usually don't seat a bullet on the 20th or so case on my progressive when I'm loading a bunch of rounds and pour the powder onto my scale to check the charge and just throw the primed case in a bin. When I have around 100 or so of those accumulated, I pull the decapper on my sizing die, make sure there's no primers in the primer feed, and run these through the press again. I haven't had a problem so far.

[The Annoyed Man]

God must love pre-teen boys, keeping them alive so they can become useful later in life. . . .

When I was just a kid, there was a gun show at the local VFW post. I and a few other of the local street urchins rode our bikes down there for a look see. They had these bins just full of .30-06 cartridges - mostly surplus, I guess. Anyway, we "liberated" a few of them when the seller's attention was on a paying customer and took them home. The purpose we had in mind was to pull the bullets, obtain the powder, and build us a pipe bomb so we could go blow something up.

Look, I was only about 10 at the time, and it seemed like a good idea to my fevered brain. Weren't you ever a kid?

So we got the cartridges home to my garage. I put each one into my dad's bench vise, cinched it down a bit, grabbed the bullet with a pair of channel locks, and worked it out of the case. Then I dumped the powder into an empty kitchen match box I had set aside for the purpose and set the empty case aside. That's when my friend Ronnie Boudreaux from across the street suggested that we should get the primers out and use them too.

[aside]
Now, I have to weave two additional facts into the narrative at this point: one is that Ronnie was kind of a strange kid, and his parents were strange too. The last I heard about him was that he was serving a loooooooong sentence somewheres for being a recidivist child molester. But when we were kids, he was just another boy on the block - a little a weird, but then, so was I. The other additional fact is that I had never heard of berdan versus boxer primers, nor the notion that a lot of surplus military .30-06 wasn't reload-able because the primers were permanent.
[/aside]

[pan back to narrative. . . .]

Since I had never heard of a de-capping tool, a rat tail file and a ball-peen hammer seemed the next best way to back a primer out of a cartridge case. So I grab one of the empty cases, remount it in the vise, neck up, stick the file down into the bottom of the case, and begin gently tapping on the end of the file with the hammer. Now, I might have been crazier than an outhouse rat, but I wasn't completely devoid of knowledge. I knew that, if a pointy object striking the primer from one side would set it off, I also knew that striking the same primer with a pointy object from the other side could set off, and I was tapping very gently. Miraculously, the first primer backed out of the pocket, and I set it aside. The next case goes into the vise, and I repeat the drill. This primer backs out too, and I set that case aside.

Another interjection would be valuable at this point. Back then, I didn't know the word "primer." We called them "caps" back then. We also had cap guns, in which you inserted a roll of caps, which were little pencil-tip sized dots of black powder on at intervals along a roll of paper tape. As you pulled the trigger of your cap gun, it would advance the roll of caps one "round." The hammer would drop on that little dot of powder, and you'd be rewarded with a satisfying "bang!" Now there was no real force to that bang. The bang from a paper cap wouldn't blow something up - at least not so's you could notice it. (By the way, we small terrorists had another whole industry going where we would try to scrape enough powder off of rolls of paper caps to have enough to do something more enterprising.) Anyway, in my small simian brain, a "cap" from a rifle cartridge wasn't any different from the paper caps I put in my Mattel six-gun, so I was feeling pretty secure in the belief that if I did tap on a rifle primer too hard, not that much would happen even if it did go off.

A third empty .30-06 case goes into the vise, I insert the rat tail file and begin tapping. Tap, tap. . . . .nothing. Tap tap. . . . .nothing. TAP T-BANG!!!

The file shot straight up and stuck itself into the acoustic ceiling tile of the garage, and I stumbled backward, certain that my right hand, which had been holding the file, had been vaporized. But I looked, and there it was right where I had left it, on the end of my right arm. After a few minutes, my heart slowed down, and I climbed up on the bench and pulled the file out of the tile, leaving a 1/4" hole in the ceiling where it had stuck in. I swore Ronnie Boudreaux to secrecy on pain of dire threats should he ever blab a word of it to anyone. I never told my dad what happened, but a few days later, he happened to look up and see the hole in the ceiling. He asked me if I knew anything about it. I couldn't believe that he would even think I might have any idea of how it could have gotten there, and I told him no, I didn't know. He went to his grave without my ever confessing it.

There, I feel so much better now.



Anyway, my advice is: whatever you do, DONT'T use a rat tail file and a ball-peen hammer to get those primers out.

[WildBill]

God must love pre-teen boys, keeping them alive so they can become useful later in life . . .

Great story. I have a few myself, but that is another thread ...

[HankB]

Benn learning on my Dillon 650 and now have a "collection" of cases with live primers, but no powder or bullets. What method do you use to remove these or is it as simple as just taking to the range and "firing them"???????????

If you fire a primer in a standard case with no powder, it's likely to back out a bit. In extreme cases, it can bind up the firearm.

God must love pre-teen boys, keeping them alive so they can become useful later in life . . .

Great story. I have a few myself, but that is another thread ...

Same here . . . it's still a matter of some astonishment to me that I got through my childhood - heck, my adolescence - with all my parts still attached and functional.

There should be no problem using a standard decapping die in a press to remove the live primers - just move s-l-o-w-l-y and wear good eye protection.

[Bob Wolff]

Appreciate the input.
Guess I'll wait till the wife is out of the house and give it a try.

Bob

[tfrazier]

Primer Power!

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=20Px6Vz8tt8[/youtube]

[Keith B]

Primer Power!

I used to shoot 'wax' bullets in the house for practice back in the day. We only had paraffin to work with though. Be the glue-stick would work a little better.

[tfrazier]

Looks like a lot of work for just one, and it obviously wouldn't cycle the slide, but a fun little DIY effort if you have time and materials to throw away.
I think something really cool would be to make a little wooden DA gun that would fire these puppies. I wonder if that would qualify as 'firearms' manufacturing?

[DJB.45acp]

just run them back thru the sizing/depriming die. seriously. there is no problem doing this.

Never had a problem with this method either. \
Remember to always wear your safety glasses while reloading.

I have deprimed a few like this, and no problems yet. Wear Safety Glasses!

[DJB.45acp]

Anyway, my advice is: whatever you do, DONT'T use a rat tail file and a ball-peen hammer to get those primers out.

That sounds like Excellent advice!