What Are These

[ETG]

I think the right one is a 12 gauge roll crimper The one on the left has me stumped. I got these from an estate sale.
Thanks,
ETG

For some reason the pictures got rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees!

[Winger Ed.]

Any chance the left one would work as a primer filler tube & seater station?

[ETG]

I was wondering about a primer seater but there is no cartridge holder In one position the plunger can go through the hole. Rotate it the other way and it just hits the bottom of the plate. I'm not sure if something is missing or not.

[Bent Ramrod]

It looks like a shotshell decapper. You put the shell under the plunger, pushed down with the heel of your hand and the primer would pop out. The plunger would spring back up automatically. It would work on the old paper shells, at least. Probably hard on the hands with the modern plastic shells.

It doesn’t look like an Ideal. Maybe made by BGI (Bridgeport Gun Implement) Co.

The other, as Winger Ed said, is a roll crimper for shotshells.

[jrmartin1964]

The primer seater is Lyman's post-WWII version of the old Ideal "Straightline" Re- and De-Capper, which originally appeared in the Ideal lineup c.1901.

To de-cap, the rod in the center is removed and inverted (loosen set screw at the bottom) and inverted (de-capping pin is now pointed up), a shotshell placed over the rod, and top plate rotated so that the hole aligns with the center rod and spent primer. Pressing down on the handle raises the de-capping pin, which pushes the spent primer out of the shell and through the hole in the plate. To re-cap, the center pin is once again inverted (now with the de-capping pin down and the opposite end, with the hole in it, pointed up. A de-capped shotshell is placed over the pin, a shotshell primer placed over the primer pocket, and the top plate is swung around so that the solid part of the plate is over the center rod, shotshell, and primer. Pressing down on the handle will cause the center pin to force the shotshell and primer against the solid plate, seating the primer.

The process is actually simpler to do than it is to explain.

Hope this helps,
Jim

[Mk42gunner]

Jim, Your write up makes sense to me.

Primers are not difficult to knock out and reinstall even in plastic shotshells, as long as you aren't trying to install a 209 size in a Remington hull that is supposed to take their oddball size (57 IIRC). Of course there probably aren't a lot of them left in service these days. I loaded quite a few with Lee Loaders when I was a kid in high school.


I never did try replacing the primer in a battery cup, that was before my time.

Robert

[ETG]

jrmartin1964 hit it on the head. Loosened a thumb screw at the bottom of the rod, turned it over and there was the de-capping pin.
Thanks,
ETG

[beagle]

Can't tell from the photos but in the early days, Lyman/Ideal set up their reloaders for "caps" as well as battery cups. Had two sizes of primer decapping pins. Used several thousand when I started reloading. These were basically berdan primers. My tool had a small punch which punched out the old primer and anvil. The cup remained in the case. To reprime, you reinserted the anvil and then seated the berdan type primer. The ones I had were CCI. It was slower but worked good. I never had a missfire. Cost was $6/thousand which was considerably less than the $12 for battery cups for a young man strapped financially. Shot came in 5# bags then too. Looks about like the era./beagle

[curiousgeorge]

I still have several thousand of the "Berdan" shotgun primer only, both 209 and 57 size. During the shutdowns in 2020 I took several hundred fired shotgun primers and replaced the primer in them. Slow work for sure but still kind of fun to learn how to do something the old timey way. And it's nice to know that I can have shotgun primers with a little extra work for a long, long time. Getting the little anvil to set up correctly was really the only tricky part.