Super 1050 crushed primer observation

[Old Vark WSO]

Hi all -

Today was a good day to camp out in the garage and spend some quality time with the blue machine (I guess only the case feeder is blue on this one). I have a couple of CAS monthly matches coming up as well as an out-of-town big annual shoot in October, so needed to load up a few hundred. I shoot .38 Special in my pistols and rifle (gamer ) and like the Federal primers in the rifle as they "appear to be" softer and go bang all the time. I use brass exclusively for the rifle and save the nickel plated for the six shooters.

So I started slow, and as has been happening occasionally - I was now dropping a primer on the bench every third pull, Okay - have read every thread on this forum and swapped out the blue feeder tip. Bingo - no more dropped primers. The sad part was realizing that I had 85 primers left in the tube before I could swap out the tip - that took a while. The next few hundred rounds I checked and found about 3 - 4 per hundred crushed, off-tilt primers. Hmm ... Federals. Winchesters don't do this.

But then the light bulb came on - I throw those rounds in a small yogurt bucket to deal with later. I dug out all the rounds, over 20 from this and my last reloading session. All but one round was a Sellier & Bellot piece of brass. Has anyone else noticed primers not feeding into S&B brass? Since I scavenge at the range, I have many, many different headstamps of .38 - but the S&Bs were nearly the only ones with crushed primers. I'm even running the swager - so I imagine if the S&B primer pocket is tighter, that would take care of it.

Just thought I would throw this out there to see what everyone else has seen on their machines.

Cheers -

OVW

[Daan]

The S&B brass in 9mm definitely has tighter primer pockets. Chances are that the .38 special is tighter too.

[DWFAN]

Yep, S&B is tighter, and Win is slightly smaller than Fed primer. Thats why the Win dont do that.

I sort out all my S&B .38 cases, load them with Win primers to be shot and left somewhere.

Is your swager set to swage the cases? Just wondering if that would help the S&B.

[Steve RA]

.45 S&B primer pockets are pretty tight also. Should last a long time if you don't lose them.

[gigs]

Swaging should help, S&B aren't really much tighter, they just have sharp edges without a radius, which makes priming hard with some brands of primer. It can take a lot of swage to get a radius, you need more than the nose of the swage rod in there, you actually have to bump it with the swage rod's shoulder (the shell plate might pop up very slightly when you have it right). Adding that much swage might throw off your other dies though, so recheck everything else if you do that.

[RiggerJJ]

Swaging should help, S&B aren't really much tighter, they just have sharp edges without a radius, which makes priming hard with some brands of primer. It can take a lot of swage to get a radius, you need more than the nose of the swage rod in there, you actually have to bump it with the swage rod's shoulder (the shell plate might pop up very slightly when you have it right). Adding that much swage might throw off your other dies though, so recheck everything else if you do that.

If the hold down rod is set right the shell plate will not move up or down at all.

jj

[gigs]

I like to set it so it just barely pops the shell plate with the hold down rod up, and the lower the rod. In theory you could get everything just perfect so it does not pop up at all, but this method has been easiest for me (especially since I'm motorized so I can't guarantee the ram is exactly all the way down), and I don't think a slight pop is going to hurt the plate, after all the priming station causes a slight flex as well.

[mds131s]

Most S&B that I have delt with has been crimped.