Primer popped on the press last night

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anothernewb

anothernewb

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Strangest thing. Loading 223. on the 650. Everything was going smoothly. Seated a primer and BANG. primer fired while seating it. Heard about that happening, but in close to 100,000 rounds loaded - first time for me.

Nothing on the face of the primer indicated anything. looked like it went into the pocket perfect. Still looked like a new primer. My only guess is that there was foreign material in the pocket that caused it to fire.

Also rather surprising that it wasn't that loud. a lot like the old paper cap guns IMO. Didn't do anything unusual on the press either. just a little smoke out the top of the case.

Didn't find any material or anything odd in the case when I extracted the spent primer. so I'm guessing it must have destroyed/ejected whatever the object was through the flash hole.
I wonder if a piece of media stuck in the pocket would have enough resistance to set one off. Who knows.
 
In my experiences with primers exploding when seating were only with Lee Loaders. Never had one pop when priming on a press or hand tool, but I've heard it does happen. One thing about the OP that I noticed and may be a clue was the primer wasn't loud. Every prime that popped when I was seating was loud! Even small pistol primers in 357 Magnum brass was loud and left my ears ringing for a several minutes...
 
Interesting. I just had this happen a couple of days ago. I was loading up some .357 and ‘dented-crunched the rim of a case while flaring. In normal times I’d just toss the case but decided I would reclaim the primer.

Put the case on the Lee single stage with the decapping die and raised the case slowly as it was a live primer to push it out of the pocket.

BANG!!! Loud as all git out…was a WSPM. Turns out the primer arm that normally falls out of place when raising the ram for some reason didn’t fall out of place and provided a surface for the primer to be crushed against.

Could never figure out why it stuck. I cleaned that press just a couple of weeks ago with Qtips and Ballistol. Anyways, the die pin wasn’t bent. Won’t be doing that anymore. Took a while for my BP to go down.
 
I've been very lucky in my 51 years of reloading that I haven't set one off yet. And that's using an old Lee Auto Prime ll that mounts on top of the single stage press. I have mangled some primers with that thing over the decades but none have exploded yet.
(fingers are crossed behind my back as I type this with the other hand).
 
Glad nothing happened to you when it went off! Thank God!!!

Never had it happen to me. Never tried to reclaim one.

I don't think I'll ever try but who knows with primers being so scarce and their prices being up! Stay Safe and God Bless!!!
 
Been a number of pictures posted of blown up presses when primers popped. Due to all the shrapnel in the backgrounds, I think it is smart to wear glasses or safety glasses when using a progressive.

The thing is, primer sensitivity should not be taken for granted, primer cake can be very unpredictable. When I used to warn about slamfires in Garands/M1a's/M1 carbines and even AR15's, I received a lot of push back and denial. I have come to the conclusion that the deniers want everything to be under their control and they want everything to be predictable. Something like a primer going off accidentally with very little effort, or, a primer squibbing, does not fit into their delusion of a perfectly just and controllable world. But, primers are unpredictable. Not only do sometimes they go bang with very little effort, sometimes they don't go bang with a lot of effort.

Primer goes off in a Purse!

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sidesho...ide-woman-purse-shoots-her-leg-232052308.html

By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow – Tue, Jun 12, 2012

A Pennsylvania woman was shot in the leg while shopping at a local department store on Tuesday. But in a nearly unbelievable twist, no gun was involved. Apparently, the woman was carrying the bullet in her purse, when it mysteriously exploded.


"She did not have a gun in her purse or on her," Montoursville Deputy Police Chief Jason Bentley told the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. Bentley said the woman, whose name has not been released to the public, "was not aware" she was carrying two or three bullets inside her purse at the time of the accident.

The 56-year-old woman was taken to a local hospital and was eventually discharged. In fact, the woman initially declined medical treatment, only heading to the Williamsport Regional Medical Center after her son reportedly encouraged her to do so.

"Something must of hit the primer of one of the bullets," Bentley said. "The bullet stayed in the purse, but its casing put a hole in the purse and caused a minor leg wound."

Bullets exploding outside of a gun are a rare occurrence but are not entirely unprecedented. In March, a bullet being used as evidence in a court case exploded in a bag and shot 20 feet across a courtroom. No one was hurt in the incident. It was surmised that the bullet exploded after its tip bounced against another bullet tip in the same evidence bag, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
 
I’ve notice a very slight uptick in defects in commercial ammo since 2020. I wonder if there are just a few defects in the primers they make as well. From the soft sounding pop I’d say there was something wrong with that primer.
 
I've never had that happen, but know it's possible. Accordingly, I always wear OTG safety glasses under a full face shield like one would use while operating a grinder.
 
I had primed a case on my Lee turret to test powder drops with the auto drum.

Well, at some point I walked away, returned, and started loading in earnest.

I ran the case up and felt / heard a primer (live) get punched out. Oops!

I recovered it, installed it, and kept that round separate. The loaded cartridge fired like normal. Forget what pistol cartridge it was.
 
Slamfire said:
It was surmised that the bullet exploded after its tip bounced against another bullet tip in the same evidence bag, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
Click to expand...

Really???, just goes to show all the more the media knows about our craft. Bullet tip against another bullet tip, were they explolding tip bullets?

I would have loved to have seen that though, I would have laughed my but off and probably been ejected from the court room.
 
I was selling primers to someone at work and he wanted to test one of them.
So he hit one with a two pound ball pein hammer in the machine shop at the Locomotive shop I worked at. Holy Mackerel was that load inside a steel building. They heard it clear in the front office.
The owner wanted to know what that was, I told him an air hose broke and they pop pretty load when they let go. I don't know if he believed me but he didn't seem as concerned after I told him that.
 
I have never set one off outside of a gun before, but I can tell you in a revolver or "manual" rifle with just a case and primer it is not that loud, and when I was doing that my ears still worked.

Story time:

When my kid was 6-7 (he just got married last week and is off on his honeymoon) and we are to the point of him "being old enough and smart enough" to have a gun of his own we did basic firearm safety stuff with a revolver with cases loaded with just a primer. And he was "in charge". I would just sit back and watch his handling, and say go do this. Mix up some "dud" cartridges to see how he dealt with that....we did it with both bolt/lever rifles as well as revolvers, you can't really do it with an automatic. And I was also shocked to see that just a case would load just fine "most of the time" and that again was good "training" for him. I think he got his first 22 that christmas....been so long ago it might have come before that, I just don't remember.

Point is I don't remembering them being loud at all. A bit louder then the OP talked about. I came away thinking that is the cap gun we all wanted as a kid. Now again I have never had one go off outside of a gun, so that may make a difference but I don't think that much difference.

He had been shooting with me for a while then (at least a year) so he had it basically down....now that I am thinking about it more, 7-8 years old....hate getting old, bet the wife remembers, she bought the 22. So he had good habits, or at least as good as mine, by then but he never really did much past sitting there and me handing him a loaded gun and say shoot away. This was handing him a box of "ammo" and saying get the colt revolver out of the safe (I unlocked the safe) He did everything else past that. Got the gun out checked it to make sure it was clear, put it in the case, grabbed his ears and "ammo" all the way to putting it back up. He passed with flying colors.

Sorry did not mean to turn this into a "teaching your kids to shoot" thread, but the "ammo" I made seemed to fit in with the topic.
 
Frulk said:
Interesting. I just had this happen a couple of days ago. I was loading up some .357 and ‘dented-crunched the rim of a case while flaring. In normal times I’d just toss the case but decided I would reclaim the primer.

Put the case on the Lee single stage with the decapping die and raised the case slowly as it was a live primer to push it out of the pocket.

BANG!!! Loud as all git out…was a WSPM. Turns out the primer arm that normally falls out of place when raising the ram for some reason didn’t fall out of place and provided a surface for the primer to be crushed against.

Could never figure out why it stuck. I cleaned that press just a couple of weeks ago with Qtips and Ballistol. Anyways, the die pin wasn’t bent. Won’t be doing that anymore. Took a while for my BP to go down.
Click to expand...

I have to clean my dedicated Lee single stage decapping press about every 300 primers or mine starts to stick. I’ve tried all manner of light lube and nothing seems to work great. May try case lube next…
 
Just enough to keep your eyebrows perked up for the next few thousand......it will wear off with time.

Sounds like you did all that you could do, you just got unlucky.
I know I had a few where the primer pocket was either not swaged enough or not reamed enough, and the priming was ROUGH! Even visibly crumpled around the edges. I'm lucky those didn't snap on me. Maybe deprime and check it next to a healthy one is about all you can do.
If it's one in 100,000 Maybe the anvil is mis-shaped or other defect.
 
mdi said:
In my experiences with primers exploding when seating were only with Lee Loaders. Never had one pop when priming on a press or hand tool, but I've heard it does happen. One thing about the OP that I noticed and may be a clue was the primer wasn't loud. Every prime that popped when I was seating was loud! Even small pistol primers in 357 Magnum brass was loud and left my ears ringing for a several minutes...
Click to expand...
This is an interesting theory. It happened to me a couple months ago, and it wasn't nearly as loud as I expected. It was exactly like those red plastic caps that are in the ring shape. No obvious reason for detonation either.
 
I had several go off in a Lee Loadmaster years ago . Had the explosion shield on it . Other than scaring the crap out of me the only thing that broke was the primer tray lid .
Kept the lid as a reminder !
 
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