has anyone ever experienced a hang-fire or delayed primer in a hunting situation.? I have been loading my brother-in-law's 280 rem. for many years. yesterday evening he had this happen on a nice buck.. WLR primer 54 grains of H4350 140 sierra B.T.

There are several possible causes. First thing to do is pull the firing pin assembly and check for accumulated crud that is slowing the pin. I had this happen on a new M700. Too much grease at the factory.

Are you sure the primers are seated "firmly" in the bottom of the primer pocket?

quote:

Are you sure the primers are seated "firmly" in the bottom of the primer pocket?

pretty sure,..yes, I load all my primers with my RCBS load press ram to seat the primers, they are in there bottomed out. by the feel of my finger they are not sticking out..

I'm betting dirt in the bolt, or after "many years" the spring may have gone south. Both are easy fixes.

I used to have delayed firing in my shotgun reloads. I later figured out feathers from the birds I killed were getting in the hulls, essentially putting a barrier between the primer and powder. Don't rule out debries in your case.

Shoot the rest of that lot to see if it was just one dud...

By chance did you tumble the brass before you reloaded them i.e. could a chunk of cleaning media have somehow got stuck in the primer pocket?

The brass color (unplated) WLR & WLRM primers I have measure undersize in diameter and fit loose in good primer pockets.

Winchester made this batch and did not allow for the loss in diameter leaving the plating off brings!

Once. Very Cold weather. Good thing the deer was running towards me and I kept swinging. Went click, bang, 458 cast hit her at about 5 feet away. She ran into the ground about 5 feet behind me. Deer dead.
CCI 250's that were very old and I had several of them fail at the range in the same manner. Used them all up in the summer, changed the load a bit, used Dacron filler and problem gone.

The worst series of misfires I had was working up loads with a .338 Edge burning approximately 92 grains of H1000. Or to be more specific sometimes burning the powder and sometimes turning it into a compacted yellow mass that had to be scraped out of the case with a nail.The primer fired, the powder didn't. The weather varied from 30-40 below and at the worst point I was getting half misfires.

I checked all the normal things, cleaned the bolt and being that it was built on a Savage action checked that firing pin protrusion was correct. That didn't help, so I put in a 32 pound striker spring. Still didn't work on the coldest days, but did OK when it was warmer. This was one or two component shortages ago, and I was using CCI 250s for the load development to conserve my stash of 215Ms for rifles with established loads. Finally, in frustration I broke into the 215 stash and the problem instantly went away and stayed gone.

I also had a high percentage rate of misfires in a 22/250 coyote rifle that also was used in cold weather. The culprit turned out to be the CCI benchrest primers. 210s cured that.

A hang-fire or delayed fire, same thing maybe different time lapse, is not normally caused by anything mechanical i.e. primers not seated properly, weak firing pin strike or too much head-space, as a primer will either fire or not fire.

Hang/delayed firing is a powder issue with the powder slow to ignite even when receiving the full flash of a primer. This phenomenon starts to appear with low charges of slow powder, often with the slow powders 4350, 4831, etc and cast bullets but will also happen with jacketed bullets and smaller than usual charges of these slower powders. This is, and should be, taken as a warning sign of impending detonation.

Perhaps in this case a lighter charge of H4350 was thrown and not noticed although if weighing each charge rather than throwing from a measure this would be unlikely to occur. I have experienced delayed ignition with a few different cartridges when working with light charges, cast bullets, big cases, and when working up loads for a couple of oddball European cartridges with jacketed bullets.
The load for the 280 sounds normal if that was the powder charge actually in the case.

Of course damp powder will also result in hang-fires but you would expect that to occur often in a batch of reloads and not just one unless it alone has been dropped in water or snow and drawn in moisture?

Weak firing pin spring or a dirty/rusty bolt assembly has shown up at the worst time

Take the entire bolt apart and clean everuthing

Sand the firing pin in a drill with 600 wet/dry till it shines

Put it all back together with a Wolff EP spring and I bet it never happens again