Wednesday, November 28, 2012

A bit more about working with Berdan primed cases

Was looking at the Swiss Rifles forum(which has a whole section on reloading) and ran across a link to this at Surplusrifle.com on the subject, which includes the hydraulic depriming tool the guy built.

I've tried the hydraulic method(makes me very glad I picked up that RCBS berdan depriming tool when I ran across it).  But, while messy, it does work.

In connected news, I found a few brass 7.62x54r cases which have the 'nny' headstamp(PRVI manufacture, I think), deprimed, and tried one with a berdan primer; it went in with very little pressure, so little that I would not fire it as there's no way the thing seated tightly enough to prevent gas leakage.  Though 'flood' might be a better word in this case.  Might work in cases of some other manufacture, if I run across some I'll see.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"PRVI manufacture, I think"

Correct, apparently that's Cyrillic for PPU...

Keith said...

There was a very cool hydraulic berdan de-capper made in Britain in the 80s called the "wamadet"

it was claimed to be able to decap up to 600 cases an hour

It looked a bit like one of the old push grease guns. I can't remember the name of the maker, to find the patent.

He also used to make a portable reloading press ready attached to a plywood base board