No Ammo, No Primers, No Problem!
BY PGF
1 year, 11 months ago
Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3. Apparently, there are more parts coming but we got tired of waiting for one-page installments, what’s linked is what’s published so far.
Excerpt from part 1:
This article is intended for people who—like me—are “hedging their bets” when it comes to firearms. I have stocked up on a few good firearms, along with magazines, ammunition, and reloading components, but I know I can’t have considered every possible future event…
I began looking at making ammunition as a backup plan and soon found that every component needed for loading a muzzleloading rifle, pistol or shotgun (powder, bullets, caps, lubricant etc.) could be made at home with little trouble, without much in the way of “exotic” ingredients. Further, many cartridges can similarly be “fed” almost indefinitely with black powder, recharged primers, home-cast bullets, homemade lubricant, and other, fairly simple components.
This article may also benefit someone with limited resources, or who is faced with increasing laws and regulations which make it more difficult—and more expensive—to stock up on ammunition. I’m not suggesting homemade ammo for self-defense or for other times when lives are on the line. Rather, it can be used for practice, for plinking, for hunting, and for pest elimination, or as a backup plan for darker times, when shelves are empty again and no resupply is in sight.
This article will cover current sources for reloading components, as well as my experiments recharging fired primers and converting a modern shotgun to use primers and homemade muzzleloading cartridges, as a way of getting started in black powder inexpensively. We’ll look at the (low-cost) tools needed and the process and show how you can—for very little money—add a skill to your “toolbox,” just in case you cannot obtain new primers, powder, or ammo.
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On November 25, 2022 at 4:30 pm, Marshall said:
MEWE has a Primer Reloading Group that is teaching people all around the world to reload fired primers. It goes quite a bit deeper than the use of kid’s caps as shown in this tutorial and includes some feasible non-corrosive primer compounds. Videos are available showing how to do all the critical operations. The results have been quite impressive with some folks getting close to 100% reliability from their homemade primers. Several members have created custom tooling to quickly make primers in bulk (i.e. 100 at a time). Not only that, the cost/primer is often much less than the current sky-high prices you have to pay for commercial primers, if you can find any for sale.
Marshall