cci or winchester

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colt1911fan

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what are the best primers for loading 7mm and 45 acp, and 357, the most common around here are cci and winchester which ones are the best
 
I use Winchester and CCI for Large pistol. CCI-500 for small pistol. For large rifle it depends on the powder, but if you plan to use a ball powder, I'd go CCI.;)
 
Lee recommends those. Going on 20 yrs.
But, a lot of companies have merged.
Go to the Hodgdon site.
 
I like Winchester across the board, but I can get CCI cheaper right now. So until there is another price change I'll be useing CCI.
 
I've never had a bad Win primer, in large or small pistol, so I dont know any other:D
 
colt1911fan,

Personally I haven't had a problem with either of them nor do I see any accuracy difference so I will buy which ever one is the cheapest at the time.
 
If you use Dillon presses, they don't recommend CCI. I use Winchester or Remington but have still used CCI in my 550. Dillon indicates that the quality control is not quite as good.
 
My 650 will not feed CCI primers of any kind but will utilize any of the other primers available (Win, Rem, Fed). I have not tried magtechs but when I try to use the cci's it jams about every time.

Vince
 
I've had issues with the CCI Small Magnum Pistol primers in my 586. Could very well be because the previous owner of the pistol messed around with the springs a wee bit to get a lighter DA trigger pull.

I've never had a Winchester primer fail to go boom on me, though.
 
ojibweindian: more than likely, that is the case. The CCI-550 needs a heavier blow from the hammer. If someone's lightened it, it will cause failures to ignite.

One reason I prefer CCI-500 small pistol primers is because I've had a few instances where the WSP didn't want to ignite dense ball powders in high pressure loads. If you use extruded flake propellants, WSPs are fine. Very few instances, but using CCI-500 will eliminate the issue and many times the CCI-550 isn't necessary.;)
 
I have used Winchesters with good success but have never tried CCI. I just picked up some Federal large rifle primers to try out.
 
Hey quit bashing my state's exports

I have used a lot of CCI, Winchester, Remington, and Federal primers over the last 30 years (I just went through 5,000 in the last 3 months) and I can't distinguish that any one primer is better then any other. scrat if you are having that many FTF with CCI you need do some investigating and find out it the primer is really dead or whether your gun is not dimpling the primer enough. I don't doubt that the hardness of the primers vary between the manufactures but if your having an issue with one brand of primer over another I suspect that the culprit is the weapon providing that they were handled the same and used in exact same reloads. I read here recently here on the Forum that primer not seated deep enough can cause a FTF. I don't know whether it is true or not; I would think that a protruding primer would go off easier since they are closer to the firing pin and more prone to cause a slam fire instead. True or not I always check my primers when I load my cartridges into their storage boxes more so because I am more worried about slam fires instead of FTF. In 33 years of reloading I don't think I have had more then 5 primers FTF. Three of those were because I sprayed down a gun while out hunting with WD40 that I soaked it in a snow storm and it was two hours back to camp where I could clean it properly. I didn't remove the three rounds in the magazine and the next day they wouldn't fire, the primers were dead.
 
Must be a seating depth issue. I bet I've used close to 100,000 CCI-500 primers and the only time I've ever had misfires, and they were very few and all in one particular shooting event, was due to a very well used LEE Autoprime that didn't seat the primers to proper depth. Any primer used would have acted the same way. Didn't take long to figure out because of the previous track record of CCI-500 primers and checking primer seating depth.;)
 
It depends upon your weapon.

CCI are harder than Winchester which are harder than Federal.

I use Federal to load .45 Colt, due to the fact that my 1892 had an action job to slick it up and needs the softer primer. I load .223 with CCI so as to give me some extra protection with the floating firing pin. I load 9mm with Winchester due to the fact that I was given about 10K of them.
 
Sportsmans was out of CCI primers so I picked up some Winchester. I had 3 failure to fires out of 100 with with my XD 45 ACP. I've put 500 through with CCI primers without any FTF.

Not sure what happened but I have a few hundred left over I'll try again with.
 
Sargenv

It's funny that you say that your 650 does'nt like the cci primers. That's all i use in my 650 and never had one problem. A friend at my range was telling me he was having the same thing happen in he's 650. He later told me that he had a problem with the primer system and dillon took care of it. I'am not sure what the problem was . It's funny that it was only one kind of primer.
Maybe you have a problem Vince.

Loco
 
I'm a relatively new loader, but to date I've used 2,000 CCI 500's in 9mm, .38, and .357 without a single problem.
 
I'm with shadowwalker... I too had 3 dead Winchester small pistol primers in 100 bought from Sportsman's in Portland, OR. After I use up the several hundred more I have, then it will be no more Winxhester primers for me... Federals have been perfect for me over the years.
 
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