I recently bought a brick of the Sellier & Bellot primers as my stash of large rifle primers was getting low. I've used about 70 of the first tray and have had 2 duds out of the 70.
Both of the failures had good hard strikes by the rifles firing pins. In both times I did a second attempt after waiting for any hang fire. One rifle was a Marlin in 38-55 that has never had any issue with previous Federal or Winchester primers. Approximately 40 rounds of 38-55 were shot with the S&B primers and all except one worked correctly.
The same experience happened with a 32-40 load on a TC TCR87. I waited for a possible hang fire and then tried a second strike. I have never had any such issues with the Federal or Winchester primers and 29 rounds of the 32-40 loads all went bang.
It seems to me that 2 out of 70 primers failing is more than high. This would be more than an irritating experience if this happened while hunting.
Has anyone else seen or heard of similar problems with the S&B primers? So far, these 70 are my only experience I have had with S&B primers. I have 930 left to see if a failure rate remains only to two.
As a note, one of the interesting experiences that came out of the recent range time was comparing two 10 round loads that were the same brass/powder/bullet but used Federal primers in one 10 round load and S&B in the other 10. The Federal load was a 4" group while the S&B was a 1.5" group. This 32-40 barrel has been proven to be fussy but I never had such a wide difference with a given load between the Federal and Winchester primers.
Ken
