Primers -- how delicate?

[Rags]

When I first got into handloading about three years ago, one of the books I read said that primers should never be handled with the fingers, and that they were very delicate and subject to malfunction easily. (In the case of the primer, about the only malfunction I can think of is failure to fire.)

A few days ago I dropped a primer on the basement floor and couldn't find it. Yesterday I came across it when I stepped on it. I picked it up with my grubby fingers. Just out of curiosity, I seated it in a .38 Special case, loaded it and pulled the trigger. Bang.

So -- I'm not saying the author was wrong, but I do wonder if primers are quite as delicate as he said. Other people's experiences with mishandled primers?

[macphisto]

A gentleman selling reloading supplies and reloaded ammo at a recent gun show told me that you could cover primers in oil and they'd still be good. I thought that was what you did if you wanted to deactivate them.

[Pred]

Seen an article in a recent gun magazine about this. I don't remember the specifics but the gist of it was that you have to try pretty hard to get primers to fail.

[Pinnacle]

Yup - primers seem to be pretty sturdy little critters.

I just loaded some ammo with 25 year old primers - worked just fine stored in a humid basement for that long.

I was skeptical of them - but they all worked fine.

[gunnerbmg]

I loaded some .38 brass with a hand held primer seater in 1974 or 75 and the brass sat empty (powder) till last winter when I loaded it up and I have been shooting it all summer. I was sure that at least some of them would FIZZ but so far all bangs!! The brass was in a can and storered the first ten years in a walkway into a moble home, from then on in my basement ,so they saw lots of weather changes and temps, high and low.

[Seismic Sam]

I agree - primers are reasonably durable, BUT there are a few key exceptions that can get you seriously hurt.

WAAAYYYY back when in the 1970's when the Minneapolis pistol club was still allowed to use the Minnespolis 2nd Precinct range in Nordeast, the range master related a story about an officer who had just used WD40 to "clean" his gun month after month, and when he finally chose to fire it (can't remember if it was on the range or on the streets) it went CLICK!! CLICK!!

Can case lube kill a primer if you wipe it on and then shoot the round the same day? Doubtful. Two years later?? Do you really want to find out??

Another newbie mistake is to prime a bunch of shells, and then discover that somehow one of them was upside down, so the anvil and colored primer material is facing OUT of the case. As it is, it's a dead round, but I had a friend who was a reloading newbie with a 7mm Mag, and he did this, and then used a depriming punch to knock the primer out of the case while he was holding it with the other hand. The Federal 215 primer did fire with just a light strike of the depriming punch, and he wound up with a deep, black hole in his palm.

The one other accident which can get your attention is to have some sort of jam or strike on a tube full of primers (that's one primer on top of the next and the next...) and the whole stack can detonate. Incredibly rare, but again if they're Federal 215's, it can be a pretty big boom and there will be metal flying everywhere.

The same can supposedly happen side-by-side with the Lee Autoprime that I have been using for 30 years, but I have never actually heard of this happening, and with them scattered in the tray the chances of a chain reaction would seem to be much less.

The other thing you will find out is that primers tend (based on my own personal experience) not to go off if they are stuffed sideways into a case, and this can happen with any priming setup, so they are safer than the lawyers make out. That being said, I have never handled primers unless my hands were completely clean and dry, and I will continue to treat them like they could be killed by oil or blow up on me if I don't handle them right. That's the kind of attitude you need to have if you're going to be a safe handloader.