So I set my newly-minted 13-year-old to decapping .45 ACP brass with a Lee Loader yesterday. He was working along having a grand time (always good when he gets to whack things) when he says "Hey Dad... this one's got a smaller primer than the others."

So later on I go look and, sure enough, there is a handful of Blazer brass cases, .45 ACP, that appear to take small pistol primers. They have the single flash hole of boxer-primed brass, but the primer pocket is smaller than all the other ones I have.

Has anyone else seen these, and do you know why Blazer would have made them that way?

-AaronB

They only started doing this about TWENTY[20] years ago. Let's all try to keep up......

I almost never buy new .45 ACP ammo. I have a big bag of ACP brass and just reload as needed. Never encountered this issue before, which is really an indication of 1) how little shooting I do, and 2) how much brass I have.

-AaronB

These days, some places require lead free ammo which means a change in priming compounds as well. The makers of ammo used small pistol primers in all of their lead free ammo to simply production.

So, when you find 45 ACP cases with small primer pockets, it started life as lead free factory ammo. These cases are fine to reload, but you need to watch the used brass you buy or pick up and keep these cases seperate.

This would be a big problem for people that don't sort their brass carefully enough.

I'm a bit amazed by Hoomie's comment that they've been around 20 years. As much range brass as I scrounge from time to time, you'd think I'd have noticed before last summer. I processed about 650 rounds of range brass and found six during the priming stage, all of which got set on the anvil and kissed with a 4# hammer.

They were Blazer & Federal, BTW.

Gawd-awful stuff with a high dud rate. At any rate, the crap used large primers with a ginormous flash hole, which I considered eloquent testimony to Winchester's faith in their "clean" primers.

And I just noticed this issue a couple months ago and so far, as far as I know, I only have one 50 count box of them...all sized and belled and ready for a primer until I noticed they were SP pockets. I'm gonna save mine. Never know when a large primer shortage might render a .45 useless save for some small primer pockets. Definitely have them well segregated though:)

I've got several thousand SP cases I have culled out of the range brass picked up over the last several years, Blazer & Federal, maybe others. When SP primers get plentiful again I'll load them as one batch for "loss brass" use.