Small rifle primers rather than small pistol for .45 acp small primer pocket?

C

condor bravo

New member
Loading .45 acp with small primer pockets calls for small pistol as I have done previously. Is there any objection to using small rifle primers instead? Both as I recall are the same height and I have an excess of small rifle primers. Other forum posts seem to primarily condone the substitution.
 
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I wouldn't.

Rifle primers generate higher pressures than pistol primers, in order to reliably ignite larger quantities of slower burning powders typical to rifle cartridges.

You may also run into failures to fire because rifle primers are "harder", the better to avoid pierced primers. Your handgun therefore may not set 'em off.
 
Yes, either way re: failure to fire, I would be using the harder CCI pistol or rifle primers but would avoid the #41s, harder I believe than the standard small rifle 400s.
 
I used a couple of bricks of Winchester rifle primers back in 2013 when I ran out of pistol primers. I did not have any problems and loaded only 100 rounds and then shot it. Reloaded them again and again until I had cycled through the two bricks. As a side note I only lost 1 case due to splitting over the 20 cycles. They were fairly mild target loads.
 
That sounds like a very good recommendation for substituting the rifle primers. There have been more positive than negative responses to that effect. Quite contrary to the .45 Winchester cartridge boxes even saying that the cases cannot be reloaded.
 
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I use CCI-400 small rifle and Win-SR in handgun loads often. There is no pressure risk of any sort unless you ignore proper load development techniques. What I mean is... if you were already running some kind of over-book, over max, nutty load that you always run with a small pistol primer and then willy nilly throw a rifle primer in and shoot it -- YES, that would be quite stupid, reckless and dangerous.

Doing proper load work-ups, starting low and building toward a rational goal... then no, a small rifle primer in your revolver or pistol load is ZERO worry of any manner of over pressure.

You might definitely have a problem with ignition, especially with double action fire in a revolver, and perhaps in a striker-fire pistol, but otherwise there is no safety risk when you use proper and safe load development.
 
Ignition was a bigger problem back when tuned revolvers were used a lot more for competition. They tend to make lighter hits than pistols with trigger jobs do. A standard SRP is about like a magnum SPP. You want to avoid magnum SRP's because they also have thicker cups, but the standard ones and especially the Remington 7½ primers made for the .22 Hornet and other sub-50,000 psi cartridges are mild and suitable for handgun rounds.
 
Back when primers were hard to get, I used small rifle primers in my .357 mag loads in my S&W revolvers. My model 19 that was highly tuned would fire them off just as well as small pistol mag primers. None ever failed to fire. I also didn't notice any higher pressure on starting loads and I worked up to the same loads as with small pistol mag primers...

Tony
 
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