....and I pray that its my last. Here's the story and I hope you learn from this without first hand experience.

I needed to make a bore guide for a rifle I acquired. I always make them out of a cartridge (with the head removed) and a piece of an arrow shaft.

Anyways, I didn't have an empty casing in this caliber so I took a live round and pulled the bullet and emptied the powder. Now I have an empty (but primed) case. I filled it with water to help neutralize the primer. Then I put the empty case in the rifle and fired it to be sure that the primer was blown. The rifle did not fire, but the firing pin did hit the primer with a nice little dent.

Then I took the case to my workshop and proceeded to remove the head from the case with an air-powered cutoff tool. about 30% of the way into the cutting, the primer blew. It shot backwards through the grinder disk and settled nice and neatly into my index finger. I then had the great joy of going back into the house and physically removing the embedded primer from my finger. Please don't try this at home.

Why didn't this primer fire in my rifle? This is a brand new unfired Rem 700. Does it have a problem? When I wet down the inside of the case, it is possible that I caused the primer to not fire in the gun, but still be able to go off from the heat of the cutting? Help me understand the error of my ways.

Thanks,
Mike

My first thought is "Why didn't you deprime the case before you started with the grinder ?"I think probably you wet the primer, that's why it didn't fire in the rifle. Then the heat of grinding dried it out and "cooked" it off.

trouble

quote:

---

This is a brand new unfired Rem 700. Does it have a problem? When I wet down the inside of the case, it is possible that I caused the primer to not fire in the gun, but still be able to go off from the heat of the cutting?

---

Nothing wrong with the rifle.....
I've soaked primers in water and then dried them in the sun and loaded them and they shoot fine.....water does not kill a primer.....but as long as it's wet it will seem dead.

You guessed right...heat from the grinder dried the priming compound and set it off.

oil is what I have heard works best for primers. next time either just fire the primer off or deprime

Best thing is just fire primer off in the rifle,
with no water;just loud noise, just leave a little room in front of muzzle.Ed.

My first thoughts on reading this was, "HFS!!" First leter stands for "How" and the "S" is for "stupid"!! You figure the middle one out!!! GHD

For what it is worth, I have read that you should always fire live primers before attempting to remove them. (Of course I have decapped many live primers without incident, but it probably is not the best way to do it) I guess next time, make sure you save a fired case, just in case you need to make a dummy round or whatever. Glad you weren't seriously injured. Many people underestimate the power of a primer detonating. Their small size is a little deceiving...

GROUNDHOG has never made a mistake in his life.an his mother would be proud of his potty mouth.
festus

I'll say one thing for Trouble; at least he's man enough to post that he made a mistake. Furthermore, he's trying to learn from it. I'd say that's a pretty mature thing to do.
groundhog, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be so mature. Oh, groundhog, one more thing. The word "letter" is spelled with 2 Ts. What were you saying about stupid?

I have a friend that was trying to do something like that. He was working on a military casing that was supposed to have inert primers and it went off. The primer blew out the backend of the shell and went through his coveralls and the pocket protector he had in his chest pocket. He was very very lucky. He has a whole new respect for those little primers now. Thanks for your reminder of how dangerous it can be--and your courage to report in the face of people "who've never done anything wrong"!

Gentlemen,

Some primers CANNOT be de-activated!

They are the ones with COMPLETE lacquer coverings.

We have tried to see what will kill them, and took 10 primers from each manufacturer, and soaked each one of them in different oils.

We left them for a week, after which we we loaded them in cases and tried to fire them.

Most were dead, and but a few still fired!

We repeated the test, this time making a note of the lacquer covering on each primer. Even those from the same box, some had the whole surface of the priming pellet and anvil covered, while others left a little area which was uncovered.

Those that were completely covered still fired, while those which had let the oil saok teh priming pellet were dead.

Saeed, I tried the same test a few years ago after reading somewhere on the forums that primers were "better sealed" than they use to be. (maybe here?) I tried a few drops of Breakfree or WD-40, I can`t remember, and a couple drops of water in primed cases and let them set for 5-6 days. They all fired when I tried them in my rifle.

It stopped my habit of a squirt of WD-40 and wait 10 minutes to deprime mistakes that I had been feeling safe with.

quote:

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Originally posted by Ol` Joe:
Saeed, I tried the same test a few years ago after reading somewhere on the forums that primers were "better sealed" than they use to be. (maybe here?) I tried a few drops of Breakfree or WD-40, I can`t remember, and a couple drops of water in primed cases and let them set for 5-6 days. They all fired when I tried them in my rifle.

It stopped my habit of a squirt of WD-40 and wait 10 minutes to deprime mistakes that I had been feeling safe with.

---

We deprime live primers all the time, and have never, ever, had any problems whatsoever.

Of course, one has to be careful doing it.

Thanks Saeed for the report on primers. It seems as if the only safe method is to fire them off in the correct firearm.

I had not read the latest on the disposal of primers and every now and then one gets damaged and needs to be scrapped.

To be safe I am going to go thru the work of loading them in a case and firing them.

I want to thank the post orginator also for sharing this with us. It's a wake up call.

one of my brothers and I threw a 20 guage shell in a wood stove many many years ago. The powder of course burned in a flare rather quickly but the rest of the shell stayed there in the coals for probably 5 minutes or so. My brother went to put a log in and the primer went off and hit his thumb, went under the skin and travelled about 1/2". Of course we cut it out and did not tell anyone.

The ONLY other time I have had an accidental detonation was running some military brass through my dillon. I hadn't completely removed the crimp on a shell and it appeared to have cocked the primer sideways and set it off. I fixed that problem by not using military brass anymore.

GHD...Of all the replys on this post, only one had absolutely no positive contribution to anyone who wanted to read this message. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Thanks to everyone else for the info. I thoght the water would have killed the primer, by firing the case I thought I was taking an additional precaution. I learned something new and hopefully someone else read this before something similiar happened to them.

Mike

Trouble,

I haven't ever done what you did, but in the early 70's I decided to get into reloading. I bought one of the old Lee Loaders for my .44 Mag. Each step required a hammer and punch (including seating the primers). I should have known that pounding primers into the pocket wasn't a good idea but I thought it would be safe if the manufacturer recommended that method. After bandaging burned fingers, digging the primer seating rod out of the ceiling, and changing my underwear I bought a hand primer. After that happened my brother in-law would sneak up on me while I was reloading and yell BANG and watch me sling things all over the room.

Some people learn from others mistakes, some learn from their own, and some never learn. Count me in the second group. Don't feel bad, everyone makes a few mistakes and as long as there isn't any permanent damage done and they learn a lesson, it may all be for the best.

Someone put a quote out here one time that goes " There are old reloaders and there are bold reloaders but there are very few old and bold reloaders) how true.

Dennis

Trouble, dont take GHD to heart, he means well. He just likes to get a laugh out of eveything in life, that way it makes things that do go wrong seem like they were intended. He has taught me to reload(He is good at reloading and is a mountain of information), and caught me making a few mistakes. Like the time I prepped 30+ cases for my .22-250 and weighed and charged the cases with powder. For some odd reason, the powder kept coming out each time I picked up a case. Hmmm...sometimes it helps if you put a primer in them! HAHAHAHAHA! Just remember to learn from your mistakes each time, and think things through. I am still a novice reloader, and I learn new things every day! Glad I could learn from your mistake. If I were in your shoes, next time I would just fire the round at the range and take the empty case home...seems easier to me, but there are so many ways of doing things. Find what works for you, and if the loads are safe and accurate, stick with your methods. Keep it safe, and like my wife would always tell me when I do something silly and hurt myself, use PLENTY of Neosporin!

quote:

---

Originally posted by bowhuntrrl:
My first thought is "Why didn't you deprime the case before you started with the grinder ?"I think probably you wet the primer, that's why it didn't fire in the rifle. Then the heat of grinding dried it out and "cooked" it off.

---

This would be my guess also, but I would not consider this a "reloading" accident. This could happen to anyone who was trying to make a bore guide that way, whether they were reloaders or not....

I recently had an "accident" myself, involving the detonation of a primer. Although I somehow wasn't seriously injured, I did require the services of a surgeon to remove the spent primer from my hand, and missed the final 6 weeks of good golfing weather. A small price to pay...
It seems to me, there are 2 basic ingredients for most accidents such as this. First, you need intimate knowledge of what you're doing, to the point where you lose a little respect for the inherant danger. I've reloaded tens of thousands of rifle, pistol, and shotshell cartridges without the slightest problem.
Second, you have to be "in a hurry" to do what you're doing. It's amazing how much time, money, inconvenience and injury we cause ourselves when we're in too much of a hurry to just take a few extra seconds to do something the way we know we should!
Regards, George

Hey Trouble, I remember a fellow, who's opinion I highly respect, doing an indepth study on what it takes to "Kill" a Primer about 6-7 years ago. Unknown to a lot of folks, Primers just aren't as easy to kill as they used to be say 20 years ago and before.

I believe the best thing he found to kill them was dropping them into a jar of Penetrating Oil. But of course, they were not in a case. He had very mixed results with "Spraying" or "Pouring" oils and water into cases. It just didn't always work.

Anyway, it is always good for someone to take the time to post about something that didn't go correctly about our reloading. It helps keep us "seasoned" reloaders on top of things as well as alerting the Rookies to potential problems.

Thanks for coming forward with the issue. Speaks well of you.

Thanks for the info. I may not have got caught
THAT way, but some people don't realise that
when we are head down and tail up on a "job",
well, sometimes we work faster than we can think.
Another ingenious way to get hurt with a primer.
Fella I met once had a glass eye.
He stuck a live CF in a hole in a tree. Got back
a bit and shot it with a 22RF. Yep, got it, and
got the primer back into his eye.

Trouble, Thanks for having the guts to admit your mistake, just maybe you've saved someone else from injury.............DJ

Hey folks thanks for the encouraging words. I am a newbie reloader and I should have thought about firing the empty case before I had the great idea to sink it in water. I won't have a problem like this again. I hope someone else can manage to put this little tip away in their mind for future use. Fire that primer. They are way too cheap to risk fooling with.

Dang finger looks like hamburger....

Trouble,thanks for the info,the primer is something one has to deal with,wearing safety glasses,not a bad idea...

Another couple of examples of how touchy primers
can be. One character reckons he had a case
eject from an auto pistol, come down on his
ammo box and set one off.
I think it was local here where a woman was
killed. A shooter was hammering out a stuck
cartridge with a cleaning rod. The bolt was
right out, and the round went off and the case
hit the woman in the stomach.
I'm not known to be ultra safe, but I tend to
be more supprised when a primer doesn't go off.
Like in my Lee primer for example.

Trouble,

I just started loading last July. You may well have prevented an accident for me. I don't know if I would have ever tried anything like that or not, but now I know I won't.

I lost the vision in my left eye in 1994 because of ignorance. Some buddies and I had a firework that was supposed to shoot 50 times. We lit the thing and it fired once. We had the hair-brained idea of taking the cover off, thinking that the fuse had burned in two, so that we could re-light it. The fuse on the inside burns much faster than the fuse on the outside. I guess it shot the other 49 times. I only know that I caught one of the blasts in my left eye damaging the retina. It ended a potentially great archery career for me.

Ignorance is making a mistake because you don't know any better. Were all ignorant about something...most of us are ignorant about a lot of things. Stupidity only comes into play when one doesn't learn from his mistakes made in ignorance.

So, I for one say, "Thank you."

Trouble,

If you havn't made a mistake at the reloading bench, you havn't reloaded. Just the way it is.

Roger QSL

I had a near miss a couple of weeks ago. I was annealing some 243 cases and had read an article about holding them in your hand so that you can know when they get too hot in the head section. I didn't like the idea of burning my fingers, so I decided to use the case spinner from the Lee case trimmer so I could spin them in a drill to evenly heat them. Well somehow, I had primed a case and not loaded it, and when I heated the neck/shoulder it went bang!, luckily I had the case pointing away from me. Just goes to show, you need to pay attention all the time.

Many years ago when I got into reloading I remember reading how to make primers inert. It stated that they had to soaked in motor oil for up to a week.

It has always stayed with me on how tenacious they are to deactivate.

Trouble:

Even though I am smart enough to not make that mistake ( knowingly), YOU present a good point to even the most seasoned reloader: Pay attention and don't be in a hurry!

Every little mistake that I have seen happen is when I am in the middle of something and of course the wife, sticks her head in the garage and tells me she needs me to do something for her or help her with something RIGHT NOW!
Well trying to be Dudley DoRight all the time, I drop what I am doing and that " 2 seconds" she needs me, turns into 15 minutes. Enough time for me to mentally loose a step in what I am doing.

Nowadays, I tell her to wait until I am at a point where I can stop what I am doing.

It got hammered home when ONE of the cubscouts I was letting reload some light downloaded ammunition on a one on one basis. As usual the wife pops her head in with the "honey I need your help for a minute" routine. I tell the kid not to touch anything until I get back. Of course kids won't listen, but I should not have put the urgency into the little "honey do" thing my wife put into it.

Instead of 10 grains of SR 4756 powder in a 22/250, this kid double charged it, by not doing the steps in order I told him to do. I was watching him load each case and correcting his mistakes. But that 15 minute, 'honey do" project, resulted in the 20 grains in a case.

The rifle is a Mauser. Thank God for how tough that thing is built! The primer blew and sent back gases and locked up the bolt. I did not realize how bad it was until I removed the stuck case with a rubber mallet taping on the bolt handle. The load had acutally blown off part of the end of the Mauser's bolt face, into about 3 small pieces.

I showed my wife the extracted case so she has a point of reference, that I am just not playing in the garage, and it will not hurt anything for me to drop what I am doing for "two seconds" and come play the "good husband" routine for her.

YOu bring home a point for all of us. Safety and patience and recheck your steps. Develope a flow that is not orientated to high volume reloading in a short period of time.

Welcome to the forum and to reloading.

Cheers
thunderbolt

Trouble,

Thanks for sharing that valuable info.

Safe Shooting to 'Ya,
CT

Trouble is, Thunderbolt, it can work both ways.
One day maybe She may be tapping her foot waiting, and by the time you get there the
kitchen may be well and truely alite.
Say, why P47's, wern't they big old clunkers?
Beauty in the eye of beholders ??

Jal:

Why a P 47? Don't know who told you they were clunkers. Maybe some RAF pilot who had to fly them after he had trained in Spitfires.

Planes like the Mustang and Spitfire were like nimble race horses. A P 47 was like a bull in a china shop. It may have been big and heavy in comparison to the other two, but it was heavily armed, fast as the other two, if not moreso, heavily armored, tough as a brick, and a good pilot who knew his aircraft, the T Bolt was on par with any Mustang in combat.

The comparison of Mustang vs Thunderbolt, is akin to the comparison in the Battle of Britain between the Spitfire and the Hurricane.

The Spits, got all the glory and glamour. The Hurricane got more of the enemy aircraft. In fact records show that the lowly Hurricane shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied aircraft.

So right you are. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A Mustang is like a Nimble Cadillac.
The thunderbolt is like a big old Buick. Give me the Buick.

'And that is all I have to say Bout that'

Cheers
Thunderbolt

Thanks for sharing, and thanks for all of you who have mentioned how hard it is to "dead" a primer. I recently stuck a primed case in a resizing die (don't asked how it got primed and in there.) I knew I had a problem, but until tonight, I did not know how big or how lucky I was in suceeding in "deading" it.

As a precaution, I soaked it with WD40 overnight and when I started to drill it out, I took a heavy steel tin can, and made a shield which fit over the case, and through which it put a small drill bit, made a "starter hole" and drilled out the primer, all under the shield. It did not explode, but I feel less foolish about using the shield after this discussion.

By the way, there is a reason that you resize and then prime as I found out. It is a great idea to stick to that order of things. Kudude

I don't bother trying to kill primers, they are either popped off with a firing pin or punched out with a decapping pin in a universal die. I've yet to have one go off from the process but I do not do it quickly.

JAL, a perspective on the Jug. My family doctor of some years back flew P-38's and P-47's during the big one. He preferred the Jug. Reason was learned from first hand experience after getting shot down post Normandy. "the engine does a good job of moving trees out of the way" sez he. I'd second the Buick analogy, or even go a bit further. Mebbe like Big Foot, turbochared with a bad attitude.

P47D,

You got a good woman. If I would have told my wife that Honey-do's were causing dangerous conditions, she whould have told me to get out of reloading.

Roger QSL

My question would be, that if you had tried to fire the primer in the rifle prior to cutting the case,..why would you proceed when you did not hear it go "bang"? That is a hard thing to miss,..even with no powder. There is only one ABSOLUTE WAY to kill a primer,...chamber it and fire it.

Hence the HFS statement by one of the most experienced reloaders I have met. Yeah yeah,..he may have been a bit harsh, but if he saves you from doing it again,..then I don't see the problem. Tuff Love.

I am however glad you are OK,..and I hope I can avoid similar detonations while at my bench,..in the future.