ORIGINAL: eldeguello
ORIGINAL: turkeyreaper
I was priming a few cases this evening and started having a problem seating the primers (very hard to seat). It looks like when I re-sized & decapped my brass it left part of the primer in the casing. Is this normal? and is the brass shot?
From what I can tell from your photo, the anvil from the old primer is still in the primer pocket. But there's note nough light going into the pocket to tell for sure.
IF that's what's happening, your decapping pin is not entering the case enough to push ALL of the fired primer out! It has to EMPTY OUT the primer pocket completely. Then you take a small flat screwdriverblade and clean all the soot & crud out of the primer pockets before you try to seat the new primer!
I agree that it
LOOKS like you may have a crimped-in primer, BUT the headstamp implies it is
NOT a military case, as it is marked "223 REM", and NO GI brass is marked like that! If indeed the pockets do have a crimp, you can reamout or swage out the crimp edge with a tool made for that, or even a small pocket knife blade. I've prepped many hundreds of GI cases with just a pocket knife!
I have to disagree, I have 1,000 pieces of PMC 223 rem brass I had saved after popping off the whole case in my mini-14, I figured one day Id reload it.
The day did come the first case I tried to resize caused the decapper pin to push up out of position on my die. thinking maybe the decapper pin was just loose I reset it and tightened it up and proceeded to decap and size another case it happened again. I now had two 223 rem case where the primer buldged out but did not leave the case it was also a pain in the rear to get these cases out of the shell holder. I brought these 2 cases and a hadful of a few others and showed them to a friend turned out these cases had a military style full circle crimp on the primer pocket. the headstamps are marked as 223 rem not 5.56 like military ammo. Id have to say it is very well possible that his cases might have a crimped primer pocket.