Thread: Primer issues

am I the only one who will recock and refire a dodgy round a couple of times???? that rules out a dead primer....

If I had found the rounds I would have put a pic up but no such luck. Would have fired 200+ rounds without issue but like I said what is weird is that I fired a round the morning we walked in to check zero and then one off the hut clearing after the incident and it went off. When I got out I put a primer in an empty case to check the strike on the primer and it gave a nice strike and went off.

here are 2 recently fired cases. The one on the left is definitely a shallower strike and has some sort of raised rim where as the right is just a normal crater

You gotta wonder why they are different?

Different charge weight
different projectile
different primer
different primer seating pressure
different case prep ( resize etc )

Think about what was the same in each case ( pun intended ) and what wasnt and you may start to head down a track of whats causing it.

I believe they were both 140ssts. Seated the same, same powder weights, same primers and all my cases are prepped the same.

Well I am almost certain they were the same haha

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

am I the only one who will recock and refire a dodgy round a couple of times???? that rules out a dead primer....

The only misfire I have had with a centrefire was a factory 30-30 round. I recocked and pulled the trigger repeatedly with no response (easy and safe to do with a lever action). Primer indentation looked fine. I threw the round in a swamp , didn't want it going off in my pack or my pocket!

Originally Posted by superdiver

Attachment 99648 here are 2 recently fired cases. The one on the left is definitely a shallower strike and has some sort of raised rim where as the right is just a normal crater

Pretty sure that sort of things happens to the left one with low pressure... Whats the charge of powder like?

Left hand cartridges primer looks cratered which I normally associate with high pressure but it doesn't look flattened on the rim. The right hand one looks to be low pressure with the rim still being nice and round.
Primers are pretty resistant to harsh handling, i have a lee hand loader the one where you hammer the primers in and would have loaded hundreds if not thousands of 3030 with it over 20 or so years and cant recall ever having a mis fire, on the other hand i did spill meths on some primed cases, after drying them out in the hot water cupboard they were loaded and several failed to fire, perhaps some lube or something got on a few?

I am sure this has been put up before but it is still good refference material. Scroll down to the bottom for the primer info, most of it deals with overpressure.

https://www.primalrights.com/library...nding-pressure


And this article gives similar info but in a shorter script.

Reading Pressure Signs - MassReloading


Personally if this happened to two consecutive hunting rounds of mine, I would pull the lot, deprime them and start again. JUST for those that I hunt with. The rest i would relegate to practice rounds.

I am going to have a blast up with my hunting rounds as I loaded my target rounds after this happened

CCI primer is harder than federal, I had misfire with cci primer but never with federal.
Firing pin light strike cause misfires is common on the older tikka.

When you reload a round , do you full length resize or just neck size ? .