I do not shoot .223 but my dad and brothers do. They have been saving brass for years and must have 10,000 of them saved up all mixed headstamped. They finally decided to let me show them how to reload. i set up my presses for .223 and they came over sunday night and deprimed and resized about 500 of them. I wanted to get them some test loads made up tonight but am running into troubles getting new primers to seat in all the brass. I wanted to get 30 pieces primed to make some loads. To get those 30, I had to try about 40 pieces of brass. Some (mostly marked "LC") brass would not seat a new primer. It looks like the primer pocket has another ring of brass or primer thats not letting the primers seat. but i checked all the spent primers that got punched out and they all look the same. Is some .223 brass not reloadable? I have reloaded thousands of rounds of 22-250 and have never had this problem. Anybody know whats going on?

I also noticed that some brass the flashhole is not even close to center

__________________
The lab I'm wrestling in my avatar is Indy. He passed away in my arms the end of July. He would have been 14 in December. He was a great hunting partner and an even better companion. Its going to be weird this fall without him. Happy hunting buddy ill miss you.

There may be some brass where a crimp holds the primer in place. A quick deburr usually solves that problem.

You may have some military surplus brass may not I have ran into this with 30-0-6 brass as stated above a reamer is the way to go be careful when you resize them that headstamp has claimed a few of my primer popping pins

Need to ream or swage military brass primer pockets. Reloading tool makers have them.

__________________
NRA Benefactor Member
NRA Certified Police Firearms Instructor
NRA Certified Range Safety Officer
NAHC Life Member

"Firearms only have two enemies - rust and politicans" author unknown

How do i tell which headstamps are reloadable and which aren't? And yes mjyeagle, our session ended because of a broken decapping pin!

__________________
The lab I'm wrestling in my avatar is Indy. He passed away in my arms the end of July. He would have been 14 in December. He was a great hunting partner and an even better companion. Its going to be weird this fall without him. Happy hunting buddy ill miss you.

On the GI brass the edge of the primer pocket will be very close to square and maybe even slight curved inwards to a smaller diameter. I have dealt with it in two ways.

First, it is best to sort the brass into lots by the maker marking and even by year of there is a lot of it with common years.

Then do a few rounds each way and test the primer fit before proceeding with either method.

One way is to take the L.E. Wilson type deburring tool and, turning it by hand, cut a slight bevel on the edge of the primer pocket. If the primers will center on that and seat to full depth with light seating force and good retention that may be the answer. If you find variations in the setting depth, there may be a chance that the sharp edge on the primer is cutting a chip on the way in that is keeping it from seating full depth. In that case I use the swaging method.

As an aside, my standard test for a fully seated primer is to stand the case on a piece of plate glass. If there is any rocking motion at all the primer is not seated deep enough. Another good test is to lay the narrow edge of a short steel rule or straight edge across the base of the cartridge, hold it up to a light or window, and see if there is visible light at the center of the primer and the rule is in contact on both sides.

The other method I've used is the RCBS primer pocket swaging tool that is fitted to the JR and Rockchucker presses. That uses a precisely sized mandrel in the primer pocket and applies pressure from inside the case and directly down onto the mandrel to "rearrange" brass at the mouth and shoulder of the primer pocket a little.

The second method is the one I used most often on rifle brass (5.56mm and 7.62mm), the deburring tool method was used occasionally and usually on .45 ACP and 9mm pistol brass.

But don't process large quantities of brass either way unless you test the fit as you do the first few or you might produce a large amount of unusable brass.

Primers will be looser after you seat them and then unseat them so you have to waste a few not previously used primers to make sure of the fit.

Safety Considerations! When unseating live primers bring the decapping pin into slow and gentle contact with the live primers, don't hit live primers quick or hard for obvious reasons!

And still on the topic of safety, I have a de-priming die (essentially it just holds the decapping rod for the process) that does not make contact with the case so gases can vent if a primer goes off. It you are using a sizing die for removing a live primer, there is a chance that the gas pressure from a detonating primer could be sealed within the die. You can avoid that by temporarily screwing the decapping rod down far enough that the case is not sealed against the sizing die.

I have never once had an accidental discharge of a primer in many thousands of rounds of reloading. But I would never rule out that it could happen...

Good luck with it!

Jack

Fast and cheap solution: Chuck up a counter-sink bit in your cordless drill. Running drill at slow speed, experiment with how long to hold case to bit and how much pressure to use. IME it takes 1 or 2 seconds. You'll know you have it right when there is a barely visible bevel to the mouth of the primer pocket and primers seat normally.

Slower, more expensive solution: Buy one of the various tools that allows you to swage the primer pocket, giving it the standard, rounded edges of commercial brass.

Both work and if you take your time with the first few "cases", the counter-sink is ideal.

__________________
Ask me about QDMA.

They're all reloadable.

As a default (that is, until/unless you inspect each headstamp's primer pocket carefully to determine whether its primers are crimped or not), assume that all "LC" brass has crimped primers. For that matter, assume all military-headstamped brass has crimped primers.

Cutting brass away from/out of the primer pocket as has been suggested by several here will work. It's a little more likely you'll destroy some brass by overdoing it if you don't watch yourself. I prefer the swaging method, myself, though I've used both ways.

Some of your brass may be Berdan primed. If you see more than one flash hole, and/or a 'bump' in the center of the primer pocket that protrudes out toward where the primer was, that's a berdan-primed case. Those actually are reloadable, but tools for depriming are not common in the USA, and neither are the Berdan primers you'll need to reload them. If it was me, I'd take all the berdan-primed cases to the recycler and sell them there.

__________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." --Gerald Ford

The military began crimping primers in the late 1920's or early 1930's, IIRC. The reason was that a lot of machine guns, in particular, had loose enough chambers that a primer could back out far enough to pierce during firing, and if that happens often, as it could in a machine gun, it ruins the bolt by gas cutting before long.

Below is a photo of the U.S. military round crimp used by Lake City and the Greek military staked crimp used by HXP. Removing these crimps is necessary for smooth priming. You may be able to push past it in some cases because depriming has pushed enough of it aside, but not in others. Damage to decapping pins is not uncommon in the heavier U.S. crimps (remember, their designed to make it hard for the primer to back out) partly because U.S. military brass has drilled rather than punched primer pocket vents (usually called flash holes, borrowing from muzzle loading terminology). These vents are often slightly off-center because the LC brass forming gear doesn't guide the drill tightly, so it can walk a little. The combination of fighting a crimp plus doing it at an angle can break the pins. They also get loosened in their chucks faster because of the angular deflection, so you want to keep checking that they're tight.



You can remove the crimps several ways. Here's a video of a fellow using the angled tip of a drill that is wider than the primer pocket to do it. It's the same method you use with a countersink. Here's another video showing a fellow using the tougher Lee depriming tool followed by using a box cutter to shave the crimp off (he's using a Lee Loader). Here's a fellow using a commercial primer pocket reamer (Hornady in this case) chucked into his drill press, though they can be used manually with a handle. Here's a fellow using the RCBS swager in a Lee press. Here's the Dillon swager with a rubber band and wire (running underneath) to speed it up a little. I get about the same rate (1200 and hour, give or take) without the rubber band and wire just by getting my right and left hands in sync. It's not rocket science.

All the above videos show all the above methods are about equally fast except the manual turning. So, what are the advantages and disadvantages of one over another? The chamfer tool and drill are most economical. They are absolutely all you need to get you reloading. The advantage of the reamers and swagers is that in addition to removing the crimp they tend to uniform the diameter of the primer pocket. Some brass has slightly different dimensions than others, making it harder to push some brands of primers into them. In particular, the excellent (for muzzle velocity consistency) and cheap Russian KVB primers are a little fat. If your brass has tight primer pockets it is harder to seat those consistently. But using the swager or the cutter corrects that. Indeed, I often run new uncrimped brass through the swager to get that uniformity and improve seating feel sensitivity.

The drawback to the swagers are they raise the brass slightly around the perimeter of the primer pocket. That flattens back out on firing, but in the case of Lake City crimps it may mean you need to run some of them through a second time because that flattening pushes a little of the raised brass back. That never happens with a cutter.

For critical accuracy brass I use the primer pocket reamer I got for my Wilson trimmer. It is slower than anything shown in the videos, but cuts the cleanest, smoothest profile. Primers slide into these pockets so easily, I would not personally use that cutter freehand for fear of cutting too much, but I haven't actually tried it. I like that the Wilson shell holder in the trimmer forces a rigid case position and that allows me to detect an off-center primer pocket by how the cutter favors one side of it. I sort such cases out for long range precision loads.

__________________
Nick

__________________________
Orange Hat Family Member
CMP Certified GSM Master Instructor
NRA Certified Instructor
NRA Patron Member

"First contemplation of the problems of Interior Ballistics gives the impression that they should yield rather easily to relatively simple methods of analysis. Further study shows the subject to be of almost unbelievable complexity." Homer Powley

As stated, military cartridges have primers that are crimped or swaged. Most are sealed as well. Lee decappers will remove them easily. I have been successful at removing the crimp with a light touch of the neck chamfering tool and have never used a reamer.

And here is another thing that I don't think has been mentioned. If the brass was fired in semi-auto or full auto weapons the cases will be swelled more and further down the case (nearer to the base of the brass). So when you resize you may need to resize with a "small base" resizing die.

The typical setup is to bring the shell holder and ram all the way up and screw the sizing die down until it just touches the shell holder or maybe even has a small amount of "spring" when they contact. If using carbide dies contact and spring is not a good idea because that can loosen the carbide sizing insert over time. For carbide dies I bring them to a touch and back off 1/16 of a turn or so, they do not actually touch.

So size and test them for chambering to see if this is going to be an issue for you.

There is a work around if you don't have a small base sizing die but it is really best to get the SB dies if you need it.

Jack

The previous posters have done a good job of describing the methods of removing the primer crimps.

I'd like to encourage you to separate the cases according to head stamp. I use a lot of Lake City brass for varminting and even separate it according to year. Probably not necessary but I know that all their cases aren't exactly the same. This is easily detectable when deburing the flashholes and seeing the difference in the champher.
Also separating the cases you will run into some that are Berdan primed, those get tossed into the scrap can. The times I had issues with primer pins was when trying to cycle one of those pieces of brass. Now I use depriming dies to avoid possable damage to my resizers.
I've seen more Tacoma (TW) brass with offset flash holes. Some are so badly offset its like they are using the pocket as a drill guide.
Good luck Mossy, you'll love the .223 after sorting thru the issues.

__________________
Still Learnin' as I go!

NRA Life Member

Just a reminder about decapping dies. Standard sizers with a decapping pin and spindle are NOT designed for decapping military cases. Every die maker offers a Universal Decapping Die with a heavier spindle and pin that is designed to handle those heavily crimped in place primers.

Just got done arguing this very point in another forum where the guy was taking Hornady to task when they told him to stop using the standard die for decapping 5.56 brass and breaking the die three times in a row.

__________________
NRA Benefactor Member
Illinois State Rifle Assoc.
U.S. Navy Vietnam

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice - Barry Goldwater
When Injustice becomes Law, Resistance becomes Duty - Thomas Jefferson

Not all brass is "easily" reloaded or useable. Sort as suggested and you may find an "odd" headstamp. Check to see if there are more than one hole on the inside of the case where the primer fires into the case. Your primer punch is not set up to de-cap Berdan primed brass. If you don't carefully sort your brass, when you break a de-caping pin you will find what a Berdan case is. Keep extra pins handy and know how to change them. It only takes one case to break a pin.

One other suggestion is to remember to trim each case to length or it could jam in the breach or not go to battery.

Another suggestion: Operate your press S-L-O-W-L-Y...

This way if your de-cap pin comes in contact with bredan case, it'll stop and you'll feel the 'clunk'



.

I had forgot how easy it is for users of dies other than Lee to break their de-capping pins.

__________________
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." --Gerald Ford

The Lee universal decapping die is the only one I have ever broken. Lee made it good and I'm back up and running. As far as the brass goes, it needs swaging. I run every piece through my Dillon 600 Swager especially if its range pickup.

I think the brass is usually the fault when depriming pins get bent or broke. Usually off centered priming holes or even brass that was poorly positioned in the shell holder.

I've never found the RCBS replaceable pins to be a problem. If I have replaced 5 pins in nearly 50 years of reloading I would be surprised.

I own some Lee stuff and it has worked as well as the RCBS stuff. I have about 5 RCBS loading presses and 50 sets of re-loading dies and all but maybe 5 of the sets of dies are RCBS dies.

I have a home made depriming die that uses RCBS depriming rods and pins and I don't think that has ever broken a pin...

Jack

You're trying to load crimped primer pockets. Separate LC and F C BRASS. The LC brass is mil spec, and federal runs the plant, so federal brass is likely crimped too. A quick visual should allow you to know. Look for a concentric press in a ring around the primer. If you see that, it's crimped. Get a RCBS swaging die and knock those cases out. I don't know of other factory loads that may be crimped, but they surely exist. Good luck.

__________________
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
-Winston Churchill

Great minds think alike



.