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Old July 14, 2009, 12:54 PM   #7
Unclenick
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Join Date: March 4, 2005
Location: Ohio
Posts: 21,057
Mike has it right. Pistol primers are not mechanically strong enough to be used in a rifle for anything but loads reduced to pistol pressure levels or below. If you look at very high pressure super magnum revolver cartridges that run at rifle pressures, you find the cases are often marked with an "R" for rifle primer, which is what they want you to use in them.

Below is an illustration from a James Calhoun article in the October 1995 edition of Varmint Hunter Magazine. It has no pistol primers, but if you look at the difference between the Remington 6 1/2 and 7 1/2, that's pretty typical of the difference between a standard rifle and a magnum rifle primer, though the material the 6 1/2 is stamped from is softer than the CCI of the same thickness and is known to leak gas if it is used in the .223. Pistol primers can be even thinner, though not by a lot.



Brissance is not primer gas push, as the pendulum device measures, but rather is litterally the explosive's shattering ability. It is measured by firing a standardized quantity of the explosive under test into graded silica sand, then sifting it to find how many grains the explosion broke down to smaller sizes?

The primer's push, on the other hand, is due to a combination of burning speed and total gas volume. Primers have both sensitizing high brissance material and fuel to make and sustain flame. Thus you can have a low sensitizing mix to high fuel mix ratio and wind up with lower total primer brissance but higher gas volume and push on the pendulum.

That pendulum information, incidentally, does not rank the primers proportionally. I had some e-mail correspondence with the author, who is considering doing some updated firing at some point, but hasn't got around to it. The problem with the listed information is the scale on the device used is in fixed increments of degrees of rotation. We all know, from pushing swings as kids, that the higher it swings the harder it is to push because you are working more directly against gravity. Same for that device, so the weaker primers get exaggerated numbers. To get the actual force, the numbers he measured need to be multiplied by the sine of the angle of rotation on the dial. Since the dial has 8 major divisions, and 90/8 = 11.25, just take the existing number, multiply by 11.25, take the sine of the resulting angle, then and go back and multiply that sine by the original number by it.

BTW, if your impressed by the consistency of the Russian KVB primer, KVB is who makes OEM primers for sale under the Wolf brand in this country.
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Last edited by Unclenick; July 14, 2009 at 01:11 PM.
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