Some reloaders do come from the shallow end of the gene pool. I was at the range one day when a fellow and his "apprentice" showed up to do some shooting beside me. They unsheathed a Browing BAR and a Savage 99 as well as a selection of ammo and tools, incl a cleaning rod, pliers and a claw hammer. The "teacher" started out by firing a few of rounds from his BAR which included a few failures to fire followed by a failure to extract a fired round.
He started thinking out loud about what might have caused the misfires so I took a look at his reloads. About half of them had the primers reversed. I then found out what the cleaning rod and claw hammer were for; extracting stuck cases from the chamber, what else? He proceeded to whale away at the end of the rod to drive out the brass so that he could have another go. A couple of pops, then another failure to extract. The rod treatment didn't work that time, so he started hammering directly on the bolt handle to get the brass out. The brass came out and the handle didn't break, a fine testimony to the quality of the steel in the BAR, I thought. I suggested that the reason that he was having extraction problems, besides the other problem of reversed primers, was that he was either not resizing his brass properly, maybe not trimming the brass and probably not cleaning the chamber with a brush to remove fouling. This all seemed to be a mystery to him.
After tiring of the BAR he went to work on his M99 Savage, a well designed and reliable action when used properly. He felt he wouldn't have too many problems with it because he had it "greased up good". After seeing all of the grease in the action, I had enough and put my stuff in the truck and went home so that I wouldn't need to be part of any MEDEVAC operation. Maybe he still walks among us. The Lord is often kind to the unknowing.
