Making primers

I collected primers, put them in a jar with hot water and soap and shook the shit out of them till the water turned dark. Then rinsed them off with hot water and did a citric acid wash in the ultrasonic cleaner for 40 minutes. It made the water nice and dark.
Did this to attempt to reduce the amount of water soluble lead and lead dust I'll be exposed to.
They'll get taken apart and cleaned more.

 

Got the shellac today, from the hardware store.
Need to find or buy an empty tool box to put all my primer reloading components, precursors, primers in various stages of being refreshed. I don't think I will be collecting a large stock of home made reprimed primers, if anything I'll store them as primed brass if I don't load them right away.
The way the primers assemble seating them in brass as part of the primer making process will combine and/or skip 2 or 3 steps.

 

I have started modifying weapons to deliver stronger primer hits.
I took about half an inch off my 1911 firing pin retainer spring. Its firing pin always hit kind of soft imo.
The semi autol sten firing system has been modified kind of extensively to deliver strong primer hits.

 

This is the cook book you want.
Everything from advanced primer making all the way down to primer making for complete retards. I believe most (but not all) crayon eaters could pull off at least a few of these.

If you have never heard of nitric acid before today, don't attempt the more advanced recipes.

 

"Non-corrosive" primer mixes that contain Antimony sulfide maybe extra desirable. Hercules powder co patented it for use as a rust inhibitor in non corrosive smokeless primers in 1938.
Rust is the second biggest danger to a gun, followed by politicians.

Also wet loading chlorate primers (the corrosive ones) in addition to making the primers harder to accidentally set off, it makes the mix more sensitive to the firing pin hit once dry. Win, win, win.

 

I got a very nice little package from skylighter dot com. The potassium chlorate seems to really like to clump up.
A drip of alcohol, water and shellac should setup a nice hard clump of primer mix.

 

I'm thinking it will take a boatload of patience to fool with the small ones...

 

Yeah I'm going to try and use primer strips to hold the little bastards.
Maybe I can line them up in the strip and beat out the firing pin dimples and for loading them.

 

Just checking, blown yourself up yet?

 

I'm planing for it to go off unintentionally. So I'll mix up about 2 grams at a time, divide it into at least 2 separate piles as soon as I'm done mixing it, use the piles up before making more.
The US military only used a primer material like this from before WW1 into the 1950s.
The military didn't swith to inert till wet, or a desensitized wet paste priming until the evidence was absolutely overwhelming that the new chemistries were superior in every way single way to the chlorate and antimony sulfide mixes they had been using.

 

I will try this using the H48 mix, but with the number of primers I have, this will be a small batch of around 100.

I have went through and studied or watched every video put out by ArdvarkReloading On recharging primers.

‘When this madness ends, will every one here go out and buy a good size reserve so that you don’t have to do this again.

 

You only want to mix up enough shit to make about 60 or 70 large primers and about 90 to 100 small primers. Set a gram of that stuff off you and you wont want more than a gram in a pile at any given time.

I will likely continue to make primers after all this is over.

 

Reloading for bench rest accuracy consumes too much time as it is. I just want to try this for a last resort survival skill. Most people would drop a major deuce if they saw my primer/propellant stashes.

 

I might mix up a gram or 2 this weekend and make a few primers and set them in 8x57 brass and light the rest off to see how dangerous it is.

 

Checked out this guy ?
https://www.aardvarkreloading.com/r...mall Arms Cartridges - Albert and Oelberg.pdf

 

I saved that one too. I think they're all dry mixes as most of them use red phosphorus.
Red phosphorus and water is a no go.
The home made pyrodex is kind of interesting.

 

Because of red phosphorus being the main ingredient to manufacture meth, you simply cannot order this from any chemical supply or Amazon.
The inactive ingredient to pseudoephedrine is red phosphorus.

 

One of the primer mixes that's very interesting is FA-70 mix. The US military used FA-70 mix from about WW1 through the 1950s. So you know it works and it has a good shelf life.
It's like H-42 mix (potassium chlorate, antimony sulfide and sulfur) except you replace the sulfur with lead thiocyanate.
You actually can just buy lead thiocyanate but it's expensive I found reagent grade which is over kill for like $300 a pound or $70 for 100g. The problem with sulfur in H-42 and H-48 is it off gasses hydrogen sulfide which will eat away at your powder and will do other bad things.
If you want lead thiocyanate you have to make it. Looking at paths to lead thiocyanate synthesis I liked the potassium thiocyanate route the best. But ammonium thiocyanate works too.
Turns out ammonium thiocyanate is used in film development and therefore is easy to get and is cheap. $20 gets 100 grams.
100g of ammonium thiocyanate should make around a pound of lead thiocyanate with the proper amount of the other feed stock. That other feed stock you also need good old lead acetate, mmmmm..... you can make that with Roman level technology almost for free, or buy it, as it's fairly cheap.
It's not the reaction I wanted but it's the reaction I could get.

Hell 100 grams of lead thiocyanate will make about 400 grams of FA-70. 1 gram of FA-70 will make about 45 to 50 small primers, around 30 large primers and around a dozen or so 209 primers. So buying 100 or 200 grams of lead thiocyanate should last a while.

1 mole weight of lead acetate is about 325.
1 mole weight of ammonium thiocyanate is about 76.
So if I want to make a little lead thiocyanate take 7.6 grams of the cheap ammonium thiocyanate and about 32.5 grams of sweet sweet lead acetate. Combine and get about 26.5 grams of lead thiocyanate that drops out of solution and 13.6 grams of ammonium acetate which just evaporates.