Greetings! I need a little advice.

I just spent about 3 hours sorting through tumbled range brass that I picked up a few weeks ago from when my club had a steel shoot. Today's objective was to separate the once fired brass from the reloaded brass. All told, I was able to scavenge just over 700 rounds of 9mm Luger, plus 40 S&W, 357 Sig, and 45 ACP. The reloaded brass will be loaded for my upcoming "lost brass" matches, and the once fired saved for practice. My questions revolve around the once fired brass.

About 99% of the once fired brass is commercial ... no NATO marks are present. Headlamps include: Remington, Winchester, GBL, S&B, CBC, PMC, Herters, and some Aguila. What is prompting this inquiry, is that the case heads look odd, suggesting that the primers have been crimped, or the primers were "sealed" with some form of primer lacquer, this includes both the Remington and Winchester cases.

Is anyone here aware of commercial ammo having crimped primers?

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Yes .
All mfgr's using Lead - Free Primers will be crimped in place .
Winchester and Federal NT are two that I'm aware of .
My standard operating procedure is to treat all 9mm Luger as crimped and remove the crimp and use a cutting tool and primer pocket uniforming tool on all of them . Once done they get a separate storage box marked un-crimped .

It seems like most 9mm Luger cases have crimped in primers and regardless of headstamp, they may or may not be crimped .
Visual inspection is about the only way to tell .
Gary

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S&B tend to have tight primer pockets so treating them as crimped won't hurt. Don't know about "most 9 mm" being crimped. May be brand (and any military contracts-if required, crimping them all probably cost effective) dependent. Check the mouth of the primer pocket, if you see a radius, probably not crimped. PMC used to have very square primer pocket mouths, no crimp. Treating them as crimped and at least putting a radius on the edge will make things a lot easier, especially after a few reloads.

Added after reading next post: CBC also has tight pockets, but quality brass.

Lacquer/primer sealant is used to minimize possibly humidity issues. It's largely a carryover from long ago military requirements and looser tolerances than common today.

Besides throwing out all crimped brass I also throw out all head stamped brass of CBC, S&B, Aguila. Too many jams with this brass in my Dillon 650.

I've noticed some of the Winchester brass is crimped. The Federal NT brass is kept seperate. All the other headstamps go into my misc. bucket. (CBC, Aguila, S&B, etc)

The only crimped 9mm brass I've run across is Nato brass. CBC, Herters, S&B have extremely tight primer pockets, those I trash.

If any of you new to reloading would like to save the brass with "tight " pockets a little tool called a Primer Pocket Uniformer will make all the pockets the correct diameter and depth and it's easy to do .
I come from an era when you tried to save every case you could scrounge ....even tried to convert Berdan primed cases to use Boxer primers ... now that's a lot of work you don't want to do !
Gary

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About 30 years ago I received a batch of once-fired US GI 9mm brass, about 2500 rounds I think. All was WCC (Winchester) headstamp, 1986 date, and nickel plated. All had crimped-in primers. I needed 9mm brass at the time so I went to work.

Set up my primer pocket reamer in the drill press, gave each deprimed case a quick application to cut the edges of the crimp away, then ran them through the Lyman primer pocket swaging tool set up in my press. Carbide sizer die, flare, seat new primers, charge, seat bullets, taper crimp. My standard practice load is a 125 TC cast lead .356 diameter.

I don't recall having to discard a single case, and 30 years later that same brass remains in use after about a dozen reloading cycles. My Browning Hi Power and S&W pistols digest it without problems, and a Kahr K9 had no difficulties. A friend's 9mm Colt has some troubles, I think due to a much tighter chamber (nothing but factory with jacketed bullets runs through that pistol).

I have dealt with crimped primers in 9mm, .38 Special, .45 ACP, .30 Carbine, 7.62 NATO, and .30-06 over the years. All GI surplus stuff, all good brass, just a couple of extra steps to deal with (one time).

Nickled military brass? That's interesting.

Yes, unusual to see.

I'm with the throw away group. 9mm is so plentiful that it's a fools errand to screw around with crimped cases.

I haven’t done any reloading (yet), but always interested in the conversations. Can someone post a picture of “crimped” vs “uncrimped” so I can see what you guys are talking about?

DuckDuckGo is your friend...

A picture is worth a thousand words !
More crimps than you can shake a primer at .
Good Post Steve912
Gary

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Thank you for the picture. Yes, google (or any search engine - I use startpage since I’m usually paranoid) is your friend. But in this case, i believe posting a picture with the discussion leads to better conversations and context around what is being discussed. As someone new to firearms ( a recent convert) pictures do help.

Thanks for the image

For those who are not familiar with the topic of crimped primers, this is a feature that is usually found in military contract ammunition. The purpose is to prevent the primer from backing out of the primer pocket and potentially disabling the weapon, something that can happen with fully automatic weapons in general and weapons firing from the open bolt position in particular (which includes many machineguns and submachine guns).

Dealing with crimped primer pockets is actually much easier than most seem to believe. There are reaming tools that will cut the crimp away and provide a neatly radiused primer pocket or subsequent use. There are also swaging tools that will simply reform the metal into a neatly radiused primer pocket by reshaping the brass.

For years I used only a pocket knife to cut the crimp ring out of US military surplus brass. I later added the reaming tools (both sizes) and the primer pocket swaging dies, which provide a much better result.

However the crimp is removed the process is very quick and easy to do, usually requiring only a few seconds per case. I have thousands of US GI surplus brass dating back to the 1950's that remains in use today, calibers include .30-06, .308, .38 Special, 9mm, and .45ACP.

Nickel Federal 5.56 have proven to be more trouble than they're worth.

Commercial 9mm and .38 Special brass has been so plentiful that I don't usually fool with them.

Brass 5.56 and 7.62 cases usually aren't too bad.

I use an RCBS bench mount swager.

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