robruger

My LGS talks about green primers and your ammo will not be good after 1yr . If this is so who will refund my money if ammo sat in store for 9mo. will my primers I buy to reload with be green and go bad looking for answers Thanks robruger

terry_p

I'm guessing you are referring to nontoxic primers and I have not heard anything about reduced life. In 45 ACP I don't like them because they are SPP vrs normal LPP's that the 45 takes. I pick them up at the range I toss them, some save them and sort.

Iowegan

robrugerrobruger, Sounds like someone fed you a line .... lead free primer mix has been used in all US made 22 rimfire cartridges for at least 50 years and there's no problem with shelf life. Currently, only a few companies use "green" nontoxic primers and they are only available in the small pistol size. The only ammo I've seen with non-toxic small pistol primers that normally have large pistol primers are 45 ACPs.

Before WWII, all primers had mercury fulminate priming compound. Besides being very toxic, mercury would accumulate in the bore and cause severe pitting. The US Army came up with a new compound using lead instead of mercury that solved the bore pitting issues. Soon after, all US ammo manufacturers used lead based priming compound and still do. Back then, there were very few indoor ranges so lead vapor was not a big deal. Today, there are many more indoor ranges ... most won't let you shoot lead bullets and some limit you to ammo with non-toxic primers.

If you reload, there are some issues with cases that were loaded with non-toxic primers (Winchester WinClean or Federal NT). For openers, non-toxic primers are just a few thousandths smaller than conventional primers. As such, the primer pockets are very tight when you try to prime the cases with conventional primers. You can run the cases through a primer pocket swager die like the ones made for swaging military cases. The second and most important issue is the flash holes are larger in non-toxic primed cases. The standard flash hole for all conventional primers is 5/64" whereas non-toxic cases have a 3/32" flash hole. If you load these non-toxic cases on the warm side, it is not unusual for primers to rupture or at a minimum, they will crater and give you the impression the load was over pressure. Further, when you are reloading 45 ACPs and run into a non-toxic case with a small primer, it sure does screw up the process when you try to seat a large primer in a small hole.

Like terry_p, I toss 45 ACP cases that use small primers, just so I won't run into a priming issue. I do have a ton of 40 S&W Federal NT cases and I have reloaded a few boxes of them just to see the results. They work just fine but had to be run through my RCBS swaging die first (you only need to do this on once fired brass). After being fired with a modest load, the dents in the primers almost disappear. I would never use these cases for full power loads 40 S&W loads.

If you don't reload ... it makes no difference and don't worry about shelf life.

laidlerj

I hesitate to contradict Iowegan, but fulminate of mercury primers were discontinued by the US Army in 1898 when they switched to potassium chlorate primers. While mercury fulminate primers may have been used for a bit longer in commercial ammunition, potassium chlorate was pretty much universal by WW I.

Mercury fulminate was a big problem for reloading because the residue after firing contains metallic mercury, which amalgamates with the brass, making it brittle. Potassium chlorate eliminated that problem, but left a corrosive residue of potassium chloride (like putting salt in your barrel).

Lead styphnate (and later, lead azide) primers pretty much replaced potassium chlorate in commercial ammunition by the 1920's, but the US military arms didn't switch until the 1950's, after extensive testing for stability and reliability.

The new "green" primers use diazodinitrophenol (DDNP), which doesn't contain lead. One of the problems with DDNP is that it isn't as sensitive to impact as lead-containing primer compounds. That, and it's more expensive. On the plus side, it's more energetic (hotter) than the lead-containing primer compounds, so you need less of it.

The stability issue is, from a chemical standpoint, a non-issue. While DDNP is desensitized by water, so are the other primer compounds; it's heat stability seems to be about the same, although I notice that the US Army is hedging its bets by using DDNP primers only in practice ammunition.

I can't help wondering if the reason ammunition with the new "green" primers uses small primer sizes is that they don't need a large primer to ignite the powder with DDNP.


Jim

Iowegan

laidlerj, Not being a chemist, I will defer to your reference for mercuric primers. My question is .... for many years, US mil-surp WWII vintage and foreign made ammo has been advertised as having mercuric primers. Are you saying this is not true? I have some 30-'06 ammo that was made in Greece in the 50's and the package clearly stated it was loaded with mercuric primers????? I'm confused (as normal).

robruger

I understand that the US Military takes all their ammo every 6mo and shoot it or blow it up to get it out of stock is this true?

laidlerj

Iowegan,

I can't say for certain that Greece didn't use fulminate of mercury in their primers, but the whole issue about "corrosive ammunition" was that it used potassium chlorate (or perchlorate), which left potassium chloride (the stuff in "low sodium" salt substitute) in the barrel - which subsequently led to impressively fast corrosion, just like leaving your rifle out in the sea spray.

The reason mercury fulminate primers were abandoned is that they rapidly lost their potency in storage. This wasn't such a big deal when trying to ignite black powder, but smokeless powder is much more difficult to ignite, so mercury primers and smokeless powder led to ammunition that was unreliable after a year or more in storage.

Still, mercury fulminate is easier and cheaper to make than lead styphnate or lead azide (or DDNP), so some countries may have gambled - especially during WW II, when ammunition was being fired as fast as it could be made - on mercury primers. All I know for certain is that the US armed forces switched to using exclusively potassium chlorate/perchlorate primers after 1898.

Jim

Iowegan

laidlerj, Thanks for the excellent responce and for correcting my mistake. Aside from your post, I did some research and found you were 100% correct.

Ale-8(1)

Learn somethin' every day here.

Thanks for the education.

laidlerj

Thank you, Iowegan, for all the great information you provide.

Jim

laidlerj

I dunno about that, Robruger - when I was in the Army, I got boxes of ammo that had date stamps that were ten or more years old.

Jim

Yurko

But of course you know that they can't print anything that's not true on the internet, right?

Ale-8(1)

Surprisingly enough, one of the "slick" gun magazines' latest issue has an article in which the author warns that "lead-free primers will deteriorate in just a few years".

I have e-mailed them for clarification. We'll see . . .

MZ5

Here's a link to a paper from DoD comparing lead-free primers to lead styphnate:
http://wstiac.alionscience.com/pdf/WQV11N2.pdf

Here's a very brief synopsis, along with the same link:
Accurate Shooter dot com daily bulletin synopsis

While I know that ATK produces DDNP-primed handgun ammunition at the CCI facility in Lewiston, I do not know whether there is widespread use of DDNP primers in rifle ammo or not. The DoD's report doesn't seem to recommend DDNP as a particularly great primer choice at present for rifle ammunition.

stargeezer

Same thing in our ammo bunker. The bigger the caliber, the older it might be. 50 cal dated in the 60's and 70's was not unusual. **(this was in the mid 80's and I was not 101st Airborne any longer.)** - We DID still occassionaly get C Rats dated 60 something...........