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?

I still need more information to answer your question?

It appears that part of the primer is in the primer pocket, can you see the ring inside the primer pocket

It appears that your cases have a 'military' style crimp on the primer pocket. I don't believe it is part of the primer. If that is the case (no pun intended), you may want to buy yourself a primer pocket swager (RCBS) to remove the crimp and allow you to seat new primers. I purchased 1000 Federal (FC) .223 once fired cases on Ebay and had to swage every one prior to repriming.
If you use too much pressure trying to seat the primers, you could damage them particulary the anvil and have misfires.

was it difficult depriming them? I dont know for sure but I dont think federal ever crimped their primer pockets on 223 brass. unless its the American eagle brass? thats stuff I believe may have a crimped primer pocket. from the looks of the picture it does almost look like the primer pockets are crimped.

try cleaning out the primer pockets with a primer pocket cleaning tool and see if that does it. if not I wouldnt mess with the stuff since they may actually have a crimped primer pocket and all you will wind up doing is wrecking your equipment trying to load them.

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!

Sure, it does happen, but it should be rare. There are several conditions that can result in this, but it requires pretty close inspection to determine cause. I discard the case on those rare occasions. Might be superstition on my part, but It can be foolish to ask for trouble twice!

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.

I made theimage bigger and brighter, and i can't see anything in the primer pocket that shouldn't be in there...

Over the years i've run onto cases where they just plain was hard to get primers into.. I think this is one of those cases...

I have used a neck chamfer to take the edge off of the primer pocket to help give the new primer a better start... Don't get carried away doing that though!

Drilling Man

[/b]

I stand corrected! That's what I get for not keeping up with what's happening in the .223 world!

It is certainly easy to tell if the primers are crimped in! as you say, it puts a strain on your decapping equipment. In addition, the pocket crimp ledge has to be removed in order to get the new primers in (usually). But this is also easy to do. If you have a lot of cases, it is worth getting one of those "primer-pocket crimp-removal swagers" like RCBS makes.....