Having acquired a new rifle in .357 Magnum (see the previous post) my next step is to develop a selection of accurate loads for it. That meant finding some new or fired brass. .357 brass is almost always in short supply, and given the shortage of any and all reloading components, I found myself paying a ridiculous amount of money for 200 pieces of dirty range brass- more than I last paid for new Starline! But for now, that was the only brass I could find, so I bit the bullet and bought it.
I de-primed the lot and tossed it in my vibrating tumbler filled with corncob media and a few drops of brass polish. A few hours later I had a batch of new-looking shiny brass. I primed 100 pieces and started setting up my press and adjusting the dies. Before I did, though, I looked at the unprimed brass and noticed that about 80% of them had a piece of tumbling media stuck in the flash hole- something I should have expected, and something I would have thought of if I'd been reloading more regularly.
Visual inspection revealed that roughly 70-80% of the primed shells had a piece of media stuck in the flash hole. In the rest, I could clearly see the red color of the foil in the primer. Those I set aside. I put my Lee universal depriming die (a very handy tool to keep on hand) in the press and gently pressed out the primers and media from the remaining pieces.
What to do with the pressed out primers? There's a huge shortage, which is a strong motivation to reuse them, and judging from what I read in forums a lot of guys do this. But I read some comments from an engineer at CCI who maintained that this is a very dangerous practice. Pressing out the primer may have shifted the anvil so that it's pressing on the primer disk, making the primer more sensitive. It may have cracked the pellet. In short, it's just not worth taking a chance. The best thing to do is deactivate them.
You may have heard or read that WD-40 or oil will kill primers. It won't. I found a a number of shooters who actually soaked primers in WD-40 or oil for a week, loaded them in cases, and attempted to fire them. Even after several weeks, once the primers were allowed to dry most of them either fizzled or went off with a bang. Some guys dispose of primers by tossing them in the campfire or burning them in a coffee can with kerosene or some other flammable liquid; this is also a huge mistake. There's a lot of energy in primers. When they explode outside of a gun, the two halves will depart one another at extremely high speed, more than enough to penetrate skin, possibly injuring, even blinding someone.
Oil, water, and kerosene will not kill a primer. What will work, according to this paper from Caltech, is a solution of sodium carbonate (Na2CO3), also known as ordinary washing soda, Make a solution of washing soda in hot water, and pour this into a container with the primers to be discarded. Overnight soaking should be sufficient.
You can find sodium carbonate at the grocery store- a common brand is 20 Mule Team Washing Soda. Note that this is NOT the same as Borax! That's sodium borate, a completely different product that won't work in this application. Spic 'n' Span will also work as it's largely sodium carbonate.
There's one other safe way to destroy a primer: Put it in a cartridge case and fire it in a gun. But it's not that simple. You have to use a case with an enlarged flash hole, or the primer will be pushed backwards out of the primer pocket, possibly jamming the gun. How come this doesn't happen when you fire a regular cartridge? The chamber pressure resulting from firing a loaded cartridge pushes the case rearward, keeping the primer in its pocket. It's only when you fire a primer in an empty case that you get this problem. Something to keep in mind if you ever feel like making wax bullet loads.
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