Primer Reloading Pics and Tips

[P Flados]

NOTE:

For general discussion of primer reloading please post at the Sparkplugs (https://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?434882-Making-Sparkplugs-My-first-100-primers) thread

Please do not post in this thread unless you have experience with primer reloading and want to share a photo, tip, trick or warning.

My first posts will be a photo heavy walk through of how I just reloaded 50 SPP.

I also plan to go through the Sparkplugs thread and copy over some of my content from there. I hope to make this a single shorter thread that may assist others who want to join in yet another incredibly tedious activity that allows you to shoot more without spending more.

[P Flados]

Here is my 20 hole aluminum anvil removal plate with some spent primers loaded anvil side down

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After loading the plate I slip my "wooden shoe" over it

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I then flip over the whole thing, slide the plate & shoe out from underneath and start prying out anvils. Note the safety pin pry bar.

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Note that a cup popped out during anvil removal and was sitting open end up. I just squeeze the tweezers, slide the end inside the cup and release to pick up loose cups like this.

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After all anvils are removed, I dump cups into a small container.

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As show below, 4 cups did not freely fall out. These cups were flattened just enough to "mushroom" a little. The holes in the anvil removal plate are 0.177"

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The mushroom cups are pushed out into a separate container

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[P Flados]

The mushroom cups are then run through a sizer die I made. It sizes them down to between 0.1755" and 0.1760".

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After sizing, the mushroom cups are tossed in with the rest and I move on to indentation removal.

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The punch I made has a shoulder on it. If a cup gets pushed outward during decapping, this shoulder gets the cup flattened back up. The tip is a press fit piece of 0.140" hardened W1 drill rod that extends 0.094" above the shoulder.

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The underside of the die has a recessed flat surface

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[P Flados]

Now it is time to load cups into my reloading plate. This plate is 0.119" thick and has 50 holes 0.178" in diameter.

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I then spread the powder and scrape off the excess. I then do a first pass light tamp with a square end skewer.

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After the first pass tamp is done, a little tapping on the plate helps settle any loose powder down into the cups. I then do a second pass firm tamp with the other end of my tamping skewer. It started out as a cone point, but is now more rounded.

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Next I use a pipette to wet the powder for 10 primers.

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10 anvils are placed and seated. I then move to the next ten. With my current sequence I am having an issue I need to work on. I am getting some liquid wicking under my plate and over to wet cups I don't want wet yet.

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[P Flados]

I have previously said that sorting by type is good and sorting by type and brand is better.

The above was my best guess at the time. Recently I played a lot trying to get happy with some amount of mixing brands for cups and anvils. Very disappointing results.

Bad combinations make "in plate" anvil seating by hand more problematic and less consistent. Stray SRP can be a real reliability problem when loading SPP.

I have changed my recommendation. Yes some brands may allow good results with some mixing. Do not bet on it until you have proven the specific mix you are interested in. My current best guess guidance is:


Mixing type and brands will be a royal PITA and will adversely affect primer performance.
All one type with mixed brands is likely to be a PITA and may adversely affect primer performance.
Zero mixing may be something of a PITA up front, but is worth it.

Many reloaders have a huge stash of spent primers. When starting primer reloading, it is just so tempting to try to sort out some to use for reloading. I strongly recommend not bothering to try to sort mixed primers. You will have enough issues getting started in this slightly tricky game without fighting anvils that don't want to seat properly in a "wrong brand" cup.

Instead, sort old / pickup brass you have or can gather. Then decap in batches with the same headstamp. Inspect and sort primers from these batches based on primer color and anvil appearance. Do not hesitate to toss ones that look different. At my range, much of the brass I pickup comes from commercial reloads that the range sells. These reloads are all mixed headstamp so you know that most have headstamps that are not a match to the primer brand.

Over the past few days I have tossed a bunch of fully processed cups and anvils into the recycle bin. I became convinced that my "I hope this is good enough" effort at sorting primers was a huge waste of time. I then dug out all of my stash of my old reloads and range pickup brass and started over with spent primer harvesting and processing.

The above may seem drastic, but after getting over the joy of getting some reasonable performance, I started thinking ahead. There is a danger to having ammo that is not real close to 100% first strike ignition. I am more willing to "experiment" than most handloaders and have experience with less than desired ignition reliability. The big danger is getting into the habit of assuming "it was just a primer that did not go off". Each and every time you pull the trigger on a live round and you are not sure the bullet left the gun, it is time to stop, take a break and wait a moment, open the action and then confirm the barrel is not obstructed. In the past, I have had a couple of near misses of pulling the trigger on a live round with a bullet stuck in the barrel. In my first trip to the range with reloaded primers, I had one squib with the boolit stuck in the barrel. It was easy for me to catch as the range was near empty that day, but that is not always the case. Even if you try to be good a checking your barrel, you can become distracted at the wrong moment and make a big mistake.

If you want to reload SPP or LPP and feel you absolutely must use some of your mixed spent primers, go through and find primers that were obviously fired in a locked breech autoloading pistol. My son's Glock leaves a very telltale rectangular convex impression in addition to the firing pin indent. Other fixed breech autoloading pistols have firing pin drag marks from the barrel dropping down before unlocking.

You will also want to sort by the appearance of the anvil. CCI and RP are pretty distinct. FED has the smallest "holes" alongside the anvil legs. WIN and some of the imports all look very similar at fist glance. I have found that I can tell the difference between WIN and S&B. The holes between the anvil legs on the S&B is more of a half circle where the WIN holes are kind of "narrow and tall".

[P Flados]

Nitrocellulose Powder (NC).

EPH 2x mixtures use finely ground smokeless gunpowder to boost the bang from the primer pellet.

Over at MeWe and Aardvark reloading, most discussion for making NC powder is limited to:


The Dry Method. Toss 5 gr of ground glass and 5 gr gunpowder process in a mortar/pestle and have at it
The Puck Method. Acetone is use to liquify gunpowder and allowed to dry into a "puck". The dried puck is filed, sanded, ground or otherwise mechanically converted to powder.
The Wet method. Acetone is used to dissolve gunpowder and this is put in alcohol and agitated (I think).

None of the above satisfied Castloader or myself. We saw some discussion at MeWe of using a coffer grinder for direct processing. He ended up with a cheap mini electric blender style coffee grinder and converts Power Pistol to an under 100 mesh powder. I bought a small hand coffee grinder that uses ceramic burrs to grind particles. My tool seems to take a lot more effort and I settled for converting Promo (bulk version of Red Dot) to under 80 mesh powder.

Be aware of the potential for ignition and a flare up.

Speaking of the above, storage of NC powder or any EPH 2x mix containing NC powder should be discussed The stuff we are making is very finely ground and has to have a "off the charts" super fast burn rate compared to how it started out. I am now storing my stuff in plastic pill bottes made of a material similar to the what is used for the jugs that we get our smokeless gunpowders in. I was using a glass jar at one time and then thought about the fast moving glass fragments that could result if an ignition were to occur inside a closed glass jar.

[mvintx]

Great posts and pictures pflados. You're helping a lot of us get started on the right foot.

This needs to be a sticky also.

[Dieselhorses]

Hi! Yes I’m over on MeWe also! Great posts so far! Been doing primers for about 6 months now-gonna venture into more recipes soon. EPH25 seems to have proven itself for most of my needs for now. I just got to get busy with some “production method tweaks”. I’ll check back soon!

[trapper9260]

I use cap gun caps and 3 or 4 fg black powder. I use a flat punch to take out the dent in the cup. That is what I do for the box primers, for the shotgun I add some magnesium that is 325 mesh at the flash hole of the body of the primer and put about 50/50 with black powder on top and then 3 caps in the cup . Need to watch about the shotgun primers that to see what ones are European and what ones are American because of one is bigger then the other . as to what put over the flash hole of the body you can use the paper from the hole punch for putting 3 holes binder.

For the OP you are using the smokeless powder you stated and then turn to a powder just like that after you put in the cup? also can you use Everclear for when you wet it after , Why I ask is the fumes of some things bother my asthma.

[justindad]

If using an electric grinder, know that most electric motors created multiple sparks for each revolution of the motor. If you can find a motor that is “brushless”, you will not have the internal electrical arcing.
*
I design consumer & commercial products that use electric motors, and I know of an instance where someone turned on a motor in a room with gas fumes that resulted in an explosion.

[P Flados]

When using my plate for primer seating, I was having problems getting all of the anvils seated flush with the plate. I finally figured out that the plastic material under the loading plate was flexing. I changed from using plastic material under the loading plate to using a piece of 1/8" aluminum and now seating is both easier and much more uniform.

[P Flados]

Over at the MeWe site there is a bunch of info, but it tends to get "lost" in all the chatter. To make things easier to find, I am going to post some info here from the MeWe site.

To start with, how about some photos with comments to help identify brands of SPPs. MeWe has "photo albums". I created on in the Primer Reloading For Beginners thread with photos and comments that provide info to go along with the photos.

https://mewe.com/group/611a4959d56ba522c1f18bd8/media

To get there, go to the Primer Reloading For Beginners home page, click on photos/videos, click on albums, click on "paul flados primer ...". Click on the individual photos, and the "comments" will pop up that provide more info.

[P Flados]

At MeWe, someone posted one of the better figures for getting applicable dimension info:

[P Flados]

Here is some info on sorting small primers by weight (thanks to Vincent Apuron)

These are empty cups with anvil removed.

SPP - 380acp under 2.00 grains
SPP - 9mm etc. 2.08 - 2.30 grains
SPP magnum I’m guessing they are the ones weighing 2.25+ grains to 2.40
SRP - 2.40 + grains
LPP - 2.80 - 3.00 grains
LRP - 3.40 + grains

[Manns50]

Awesome read! Very cool!

[stubshaft]

Wow!

[P Flados]

Here is some interesting info posted to MeWe by David Goble.

Since i had acquired multiple brands of small pistol primers and had made some changes to how I make/pack/wet my primers I did another chrono session keeping all the reloading variables the same except primers. I used federal 100s, remington 1 1/2, winchester wsp, older stock of eph25 and newer stock of eph25. The biggest difference is I now do not go for frugal instead opting for filling cup as much as possible. My test rounds were cast 9mm in lee 356-125-2r using range scrap powdered coated with Eastman ford light blue. 5.4 gr of accurate no 5 using blazer once fired brass. Reloaded primers were nickel plated cups with cci anvils. The composition of the old and new eph25 is textbook ratio of components using same batch of lead hypophosphite and lead nitrate and using 325mesh borosilicate ground in mortar and pestle with accurate no 5 for my NC. No paper foil. Shot out of an M&P 2.0 with 5" barrel.
Now this was a quick 5 round test per primer so the sampling size isn't huge but here's what I got

Winchester 1012 fps
Remington 1005 fps
Federal 1021 fps
Old eph25 958 fps
New eph25 1023 fps

Now I had one major outlier that I deleted from the new eph25 which was ridiculous low, like 625fps or something along those lines so I assume it's the chronograph but I'll be doing some more tests to verify or refute my findings. And I did have one fail to fire......one of the remingtons! But if this stays consistent then at least in non magnum pistol primers I'm getting close to commercial speeds. I'll keep you informed with what I find.

[P Flados]

I am going to re-post info I have shared over at MeWe a number of times.

More than most, I have promoted brass sorting by brand, then primer harvesting followed by inspection to toss out any that look different. I have found a number of "mixed combinations" of SPP anvils and cups that are marginal at best or just do not work at all. With nothing but CCI anvils, you can be ok if all of your cups are US made, but you are more likely to have anvils fall out with Winchester cups (some of these are 0.003" bigger for ID than typical for the other brands). If you include import primers (do not forget that range pickup brass can have any available primer regardless of head stamp), "bad combinations" are more likely. S&B cups and anvils are bigger than any other brands and any mixing with S&B is asking for either anvils falling out or anvils refusing to seat in the cup. At the MeWe site, you can go to Groups, click on Primer Reloading for Beginners, click on Photos/Videos, click on Albums, click on the paul flados primer ..., and you will find pictures and good info on sorting SPP primers.