Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Primer Question for JB

John, how wet do primers have to be before they are ruined? A friend's shop flooded and some got very wet. I recall seem to recall you have written on the subject before.

I bought some "once fired" brass that had a few primed cases in the lot. I wet tumbled them in a pin media/dawn dish soap tumbler for 2 hours.

I let them sit overnight still wet in some of the cases and move to aneal them on my anealeeze machine.

I was talking on the phone and the rig was dropping hot cases every few seconds when the first one went off and launched the case across the room......then another.

There were 3 primed cases and all 3 popped the primers.

I told my buddy about this and he returned with a story about trying to inert primers with wd40. He soaked some cases for days and then fired them. He had what he described as 90% fire. These were very old military primers.

Son of the Gael,

Most of today's rifle primers are so well-sealed that they'll survive a water soaking.

Thank you, sir.

I have some CCI large rifle primers from the 70's, maybe earlier, that have signs of fairly heavy water damage on the packaging. I've used a couple hundred for "plinking" loads without a single misfire. Yet.

When I was much younger and maybe dumber I bought some small pistol primers that were in at least as bad of shape. They all went off as I recall, even those that maybe shouldn't have!

There was a discussion on another forum about water and oil killing primers and opinions were all over the place. It seemed like a little test was in order, so I dumped 10 rifle primers in a glass of water, promptly towelled them off and loaded them in empty cases. Took them out in the garage and got 10 clicks and no bangs. Could they have been dried out and worked? Don't know, didn't occur to me to care.

FWIW primers that got a spritz with WD 40 and spray case lube didn't fair any better.

Range session yesterday working up 338 win mag loads 250 partition,CCI 250 mag primers, two duds in ten rounds.
This was a first for me, 1970 vintage, stored in air tight container, chucked another 50. I have another 100 with same lot number getting ready to check .