I have an RCBS turret press which for the most part I like. But I have one small problem which remains very annoying. This press uses a tube magazine to hold the primers, and on the downstroke you pull the priming rod back toward the tube to load a primer then push it into the ram and lower the ram fully to seat it. The end of the priming rod has a flat seat surrounded by a spring loaded cup. My problem is sometimes this cup catches somewhere inside the ram, which pulls it back under the spring tension until it pops loose. When this happens it flips the primer over upside-down and since the primer is inside the ram I am unaware this has happened until after I already have it seated. This may seem like a freak thing but I was loading some .44 mag cases this morning and it happened three times in 50 rounds. Its happened other times too so I'm left with about a dozen cases that have upside-down primers. Since these are new cases I would like to salvage them if possible but I'm a little leery of decapping a live primer. I was wondering if I left the cases submerged in water for an hour or so if they would be safe to decap without any danger of detonation?

Hey Rowdy you can remove the primers with the regular resizing die or a lee decapper. Just ease them out and you won't have any problem. A few drops of resizing oil, or gun oil, on the primers for a few minutes (WD-30 works well) will quickly neaturalize them. Then you can take them out without a concern. But I got away from using any kind of primer loading device attached to a press and put all my primers in in a seperate operation using a lee hand primer. This way I can feel the primer seat and you don't run into the problem you are having. You can remove the primers and save the cases. Just don't try to scrape out all the contents of the primer to neaturalize them. I had one explode trying that. Just oil them and then you can remove them ok.

Thanks I'll give them a good shot of WD-40 and decap them.

I am like Bob and use and hand primer. I used to size/deprime/prime and still do on occasions. Take your dies out and run the ram up and swing the prime arm over like you were going to prime. Look down through shellholder and make sure cup/anvil is pretty well centered. If not you are going to have to modify arm or ram to get it centered properly. But first I would take the shellholder and primer arm out of press and look for any kind of burr or sharps. Steel wool or emery the cup and shellholder to make sure they are smooth and give it another try. I have seen shellholder that I had to drill /taper out because hole was just too small. Primer cup is hanging or catching on something and causing cup to compress and flip primer. This can also happen when you are retracted and loading new primer.
James

I used the primer on my press. Was unhappy so I bought a bench mounted primer. It was OK. Went to a hand held priming tool and will never go back. Gives a lot more feel to seating the primer. Far quicker than loading that tube.

I also gave up on press mounted priming tools. It was just less hassle to prime with a Lee hand held tool.
- mike

I think I'll get a hand primer before I try loading again. There is another problem I have with mine...since this is a turret press I set up all of my dies and the powder measure in the turret head. I just rotate the head for every step and I make a complete round without taking it out of the shell holder. But the primer tube is mounted too close to the head and the powder measure won't go past it. And I agree, it is kind of a pain filling the tube anyway. Thanks for the advice

quote:

Originally posted by mho:
I also gave up on press mounted priming tools. It was just less hassle to prime with a Lee hand held tool.

I agree totally with this.

With the Lee tool, you can dump however many primers you want to use into the tray of the priming tool, then shake it a bit and it will flip all the primers over so that they are right side up for going into the cases you are loading.