Tag: Primers

The Great Pandemic Primer Ripoff

By Joe Berk

If you reload, you know that one of the toughest things to find over the last two or three years has been primers.  I was one of the lucky guys…I laid in a stock of primers and I came through the shortage in fairly good shape.  Primers are available again, but good Lord, the prices are obscene.

Before the pandemic, primers typically cost about $35 per thousand.  That seemed to generally be in line with the last few decades of inflation (when I started reloading about 50 years ago, a brick of 1000 primers cost about $7).  Then the pandemic came along, and BAM!, primers are now selling for $80 to $125 per thousand.  As a former manufacturing guy, I can tell you that is outright gouging by the manufacturers and distributors.  There’s nothing that changed in the materials that go into primers or their manufacturing processes that could possibly justify the 300% to 400% price increase.  The manufacturers and distributors are gouging their customers.

The price increase has attracted at least one new player to the US market (the Argentinean firm Aventuras).  But even those are $79.95 to $95 per thousand.  The manufacturers, distributors, and resellers know that we’re willing to pay those prices so that we can continue to reload, but it’s an outrage.  My message to the primer supply chain is simple:

Shame on you.

Want to know how primers are used in the reloading process?  Check out our series on reloading .45 ACP ammunition.

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Shortages, Gougers, and Trolls

Gougers.  People who overcharge simply because they can when supplies are low.  Someone who takes advantage of a bad situation. There’s a lot of that going on in the ammo and reloading components business today.  What’s driving it is extreme demand induced by the pandemic, the breakdown in law and order in some urban areas, a change of administrations, and the resulting ammunition and components shortages.  People are buying guns and ammo in unprecedented numbers because they are afraid.  It’s being fueled by uninformed and malicious folks on the Internet.

Me?  I’m not worried.  We’ve been through this before.  The pendulum swings both ways, and it always returns to center.  It may take a while, but common sense always prevails.

Before all this shortage business began, primers sold for about $34 or $35 per thousand.  Gougers have kicked that up to around $100 per thousand, and even at that price, they are difficult to find.  Thanks, but I’ll take a pass.  I’ll wait it out.  It’s that pendulum thing I mentioned above.

I imagine it’s tough being in the ammo business these days.  For the most part, the folks who make ammo are the same folks who make reloading components, and with the unprecedented demand for ammo, their components are necessarily being consumed by their own factories.  I get that, too.

This video from the CEO of an ammo and components company popped up in my feed yesterday, and I think it’s a good one.  You might want to watch it.

I get it, Mr. Vanderbrink. The trolls who start rumors, spread rumors, and post stupid stuff on the Internet are as despicable as the gougers, and I give Vanderbrink a lot of credit for calling it like it is.  I’d call the trolls morons, but that would be an insult to morons everywhere.  You folks in the ammo business keep doing what you’re doing.  We’ll be here as loyal customers when the shortages end, as they always do.

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Star Primer Pickup Tubes: A Story Within A Story!

Like the title says, this is a story within a story.  It’s about using primer pickup tubes with my resurrected Star reloader, and how Lady Luck smiled on me yet again.

First, a bit of background.  There are a few approaches in the reloading world for transferring primers from the primer box into the reloader.  In our general series on reloading, I showed how to use the Lee primer tool, which is what I generally use when I’m loading on a single stage press like my RCBS Rockchucker.  Another approach is to use a primer pickup tube and a primer tray.   See, the deal is that you don’t want to touch the primers with your bare fingers.  You might get skin oils on the primer, and that could make the primer inert.  As explained earlier, in this game, you want all the primers to be “ert.”

The first step is to transfer primers from the box they come in into a primer tray, like you see below.

That green circular deal on the left in the photo above is the primer tray.  It consists of a base and a lid.  You take the lid off and drop the primers into the base, like you see below.

When you do that, though, invariably some of the primers will face up and some will face down.  We want them all facing down in the tray’s base, and we get that by jiggling the base.  There are little circumferential ridges molded into the base, and when you jiggle the tray, it makes all the primers face down (see below).

Get ready for more cleverness here, folks.  What we do next is put the lid back on the primer tray, invert it, and then remove the base from the lid.  That leaves us with the lid, and all the primers in it are facing up (see below).

At this point, we pick up the primers from the tray using a primer pickup tube like you see in the photo below.

The tube you see in the photo above is an RCBS primer pickup tube.  It’s a hollow tube with a spring catch on one end and a spring clip on the other.  What you do is take that tube and push it down (spring end down) on top of each primer.  That stacks the primers, one on top of the other, in the tube.  Then you invert it over the primer magazine on the Star reloader, remove the spring clip, and all the primers in the pickup tube drop into the Star’s primer magazine.

Star reloaders originally had a brass primer pickup tube, but that didn’t come with the one I have.  I’m not complaining; my Star reloader was free.  And I figured I’d just use an RCBS primer pickup tube, because I knew had three or four of those stashed away somewhere.  But I couldn’t find the things.  Then I remembered I had put a bunch of reloading odds and ends in a 50 cal ammo can somewhere, and I went through maybe 10 ammo cans before I found it. I used the RCBS primer pickup tube and I had to hold it carefully in alignment with the Star’s primer magazine when transferring the primers from the inverted tube, pulling the pin, and letting the primers fall into the Star brass primer magazine. It worked just fine. It wasn’t the original Star gear, but hey, you go to war with the Army you have.

After I did that, I went on to other things.  I thought I was doing pretty good, you know, finding those RCBS primer pickup tubes, but the box they were in kept playing over and over again in my mind.  Something was tickling the neurons, but I didn’t know what it was.  Then it hit me.  I remembered earlier in the day when I took the RCBS primer pickup tube out of the box.  I could see it clearly in my mind:

There were two other brass primer pickup tubes in that box.  In my eagerness to get the RCBS primer pickup tubes (the ones I was looking for), I reached right over the brass tubes.  Could it be?  I put that stuff away a decade ago, way before I ever had the Star.

I went back to that box immediately, and son of a gun, there were not one, but two Star original brass primer pickup tubes. Two! I think they came from Sue’s Dad before he passed away more than 10 years ago (he was a reloader, too), and I got a lot of his old bits and pieces. He never had a Star reloader that I ever saw, but he must have latched onto these two primer pickup tubes somewhere along his journey through life. How about that?

So, back to the story du jour…and more of the Star folks’ cleverness.  Star used a slightly different approach than did RCBS.  For starters, they made a cross cut in the pickup end of their primer pickup tubes to give the spring tension needed to hold the primers in the tube.

I started picking up a batch of primers from the primer tray lid with my newly-discovered Star primer pickup tube.

When you get that last one, you push it the rest of the way in with a probe (not your finger).  With apologies in advance for the inadequate photo depth-of-field, here’s what the last primer looks like in the Star tube.

Then you invert the tube, so all the primers are at the other end.  The spring clip keeps them from falling out.  There’s a flange on the end of the Star primer pickup tube.  It interfaces with the Star reloader’s primer magazine to keep the primer pickup tube aligned with the primer magazine tube.

Here’s the top end of the Star reloader’s primer magazine, with the primer follower in place.  I removed it and placed the primer pickup tube on top.

At this point, I then removed the spring clip, and all the primers that were in the primer pickup tube transferred (gravity feed!) into the primer magazine.

So there you have it. The Star is up and running, and I’ll post about cleaning up a few more details on this magnificent old machine in the next Star blog. Stay tuned!

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Read the rest of the Star reloader resurrection here!

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