Old Primers

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Keyfer 55

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Got 500 win. Wlr from the 80's they have been in an ammo can should I trust them or dispose of them???
 
Primers kept dry have a shelf life measured in decades, as in several. Same with powder as long as it has been dry and not in high heat like an attic for those decades.

I'll bet they are fine.
 
Most of the time I put a date on them try to use the oldest first. Tested 1 from each box.
Snapped 5 of 5 !! Shelf life must be longer than I expected these are some old primers
If they had not been in an ammo can I would not use them.
 
I'm still using primers from the 70's. If properly stored they will be good. Load and shoot them. The Winchester back then were Ni color and I thing are better than the newer brass ones.
 
Got 500 win. Wlr from the 80's they have been in an ammo can should I trust them or dispose of them???

For all intents and purposes, non corrosive, lead styphnate primers will last forever.

You can look at the document Percussion primers design requirements http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a114616.pdf , you can dud out lead styphnate primers with heat. If you dissolve the sealant covering the primer cake, water will dud out the primer. The old corrosive, chlorate primers, they will dud out with age.

Primers will last orders of magnitude longer than gunpowder, so from an insensitive munitions viewpoint, they are infinite.

This is a real interesting presentation on the aging of propellants, a bit of advertising for Reinmetall propellant, but what you can see, they are not worried about primers. Gunpowder deteriorates so much faster than primers, they ignore primers.

Effects of Long Term Ageing on Small and Medium Calibre Propellants

https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2016/IMEM/18686vogelsanger.pdf
 
Yeah I shot up some primers that were in boxes on the beams in my grandfathers unheated/uninsulated workshop they were from the late 50's. All 3K went bang and worked as well as the current ones FWIW. Load up a few to test first if unsure before loading them all up but I bet they are GTG.
 
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