Recognising Obvious Pressure Signs

HANDLOADERS should be able to recognise signs of excessive chamber pressure. Unfortunately this seems to pose a difficulty or else they simply choose to ignore some obvious danger signs.

The other day a guy who was a shooter and handloader came up and showed me a fired case with a flattened primer. He asked me if I thought the pressure level had been too high. It was obvious that he was afraid that his reload had produced pressures that were excessively high. Although I had no way to estimate the exact amount of pressure, I could tell him that the brass case showed no sign of high pressure and the reason for the flattened primer was most likely the result of his setting the case shoulder back when he resized it, or that he'd struck a soft lot of primers.

A few days later, another guy came around complaining that a loose primer had jammed his rifle's action, and made the bolt hard to lift, when he finally got the bolt open, the primer rolled out onto the magazine follower. It only took one look at the case he'd just fired to realise it was obvious that this chap didn't have a clue that he was getting excessively high pressures.

What he called a "loose primer" was the result of pressure