- Location
- Somewhere on the Hudson Bay Coast
Many of us believe that putting a dab of oil on a primer will neutralize the priming compound so that we can safely discard the primer. I've just conducted what some might consider an interesting experiment to determine if this premise is correct. I had accumulated a number of live primers, which needed to be discarded. The primers were a mixture of large rifle magnum - Remington 91/2M which had firing pin strikes but did not go, and a mixture of large pistol primers.
Yesterday, I put all of these primers in the cap of a can of break clean, and covered them with new 5-30 motor oil. Today, twenty-four hours later, I dumped out the oil, spread the primers on a steel bench, donned a plastic face shield, and began hitting them one by one with a 10 pound sledge hammer to see if any would fire.
My criteria to determine if the primer was live was if there was a bang, flash, or smoke, I considered the primer live. In my opinion, none of the live primers exhibited their full strength, but they still fired, and I saw a flashes at least a dozen times.
This becomes sort of a good news - bad news kind of thing. Given enough time, oil will neutralize priming compound, but apparently 24 hours is not enough time. Therefore, in the future I will not automatically assume oiled primers are inert. The good news is that I believe this proves that misfires are unlikely to be caused by the natural oil from your hands. I never really believed that anyway.
Yesterday, I put all of these primers in the cap of a can of break clean, and covered them with new 5-30 motor oil. Today, twenty-four hours later, I dumped out the oil, spread the primers on a steel bench, donned a plastic face shield, and began hitting them one by one with a 10 pound sledge hammer to see if any would fire.
My criteria to determine if the primer was live was if there was a bang, flash, or smoke, I considered the primer live. In my opinion, none of the live primers exhibited their full strength, but they still fired, and I saw a flashes at least a dozen times.
This becomes sort of a good news - bad news kind of thing. Given enough time, oil will neutralize priming compound, but apparently 24 hours is not enough time. Therefore, in the future I will not automatically assume oiled primers are inert. The good news is that I believe this proves that misfires are unlikely to be caused by the natural oil from your hands. I never really believed that anyway.
