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1. What would actually happen if a primer went off in a RCSB hand priming tool? A loud bang I expect, but about safety (beyond safety glasses, which I do use) and damage to the tool, or me???

2. Some of my brass takes the primer with no effort at all, for others I really have to squeeze hard to make the primer go in, what causes the difference??


3. I figured out with the 45acp I can measure the taper crimp (.469) and test them by putting them in my Glocks barrel, they seat very well. However with the 44mag roll crimp, what do I gauge it by? I see references to a tight or heavy crimp, but what exactly is a heavy crimp?? What is measured by, from??

PS Thanks to all for the previous advice !!!!!!

I had a small pistol primer go off due to a careless act on my part, burned my hand a bit and stung quite a bit.

Some brass have crimped primers. They will be more difficult to seat the primer. Some reloaders do not use military brass to reload, because of the tight primer pockets.

Unsure of the 44 question, sorry.

JS

1911jerry

Thanks, I forgot to include I was priming a box of 50 Winchester cases that where from the same box of factory ammo. That’s why I'm so surprised by the large variation in force needed to seat the primers.

mcub,
#2
What is happening with your primers is that you are probably loading military brass (at least that's the case with rifle brass). This brass usually has an added crimp to hold the primer in place (I assume). When you decap the brass, the crimp material is still left in the primer pocket.
Look at the brass and see if there is a little 'ring' inside the primer pocket. I had written a post a few days ago thnking that it was part of the old primer left in the hole, but I learned since then it is a crimp. This should be removed fairly easily by a hand deburring tool, I also have heard that there are deburring tools that you can hook up to a hand drill, but haven't found any yet. I need one badly.

Within the past few months I have seen brass from bulk Winchester White Box ammo that has primer pockets just like a lot of S&B brass. They are not crimped primer pockets but they are just a little on the small size and you can certainly tell the difference when priming. I have nothing to back up my theory but I believe it is because they are coming from outside the US and are manufactured to metric dimensions resulting in them being on the low side of the tolerance.
If you look at the Winchester brass from the current White Box bulk ammo you will see batches with the lettering much smaller than the lettering on other Win 45 brass.

Houston1944 wrote:Within the past few months I have seen brass from bulk Winchester White Box ammo that has primer pockets just like a lot of S&B brass. They are not crimped primer pockets but they are just a little on the small size and you can certainly tell the difference when priming. I have nothing to back up my theory but I believe it is because they are coming from outside the US and are manufactured to metric dimensions resulting in them being on the low side of the tolerance.
If you look at the Winchester brass from the current White Box bulk ammo you will see batches with the lettering much smaller than the lettering on other Win 45 brass.

If you look closely, you will see a small period, or dot, at the beginning and the end of the name winchester. We call this brass winchester double dot, it is made by the same company as S&B.

JS

How interesting, I took mine out and looked, as it is from a Winchester white box, and wouldn’t you know it, 1/3 of it is the double dot. Which I suspect is the difference. How odd there are two difference cases in the same box, aw the glories of modern assembly lines.

Thanks for the info.