WARNING
Only you are responsible for your own safety. This is a proof of concept video, not an
instructional video. You are advised not to attempt this.
Hey everyone.
Lately I've been exploring reloading berdan primed steel cases.
I think this is a pretty interesting topic because of the high price of boxer
primed brass right now and the really wide availability of
what's typically discarded berdan cases. Sometimes they're steel,
sometimes they're brass, I found they're usually steel.
This is a little bit more time consuming than standard reloading but after you do
the conversion you can reload them just like normal
I've reloaded steel cases numerous times without issue.
In a previous video
I made a simple modification to the large rifle boxer primers to fit them
into these steel
7.62x39 berdan cases.
I thought it was interesting because no special tools were needed to accomplish
this.
Today's a little different I'm going to show you how I converted the 7.62x54r
berdan cases
into large rifle boxer cases.
So evidently there's numerous sizes of berdan primers
the 7.62x54r's have a really huge primer pocket,
way too large for a standard large rifle primer.
So after trial and error the technique that I finally settled on was creating a
a copper bushing from standard
quarter-inch copper tubing.
You can pick this up at any hardware store, I went and bought one foot of it for this
and it cost a little over a dollar.
Besides your standard reloading gear you're also going to need a drill
and something to cut the copper tubing
as well as
a primer pocket swager.
This is the RCBS
swager.
It was pretty reasonable, about thirty dollars and it's designed to remove the
primer pocket crimp found on some brass.
We're going to be using it to form the copper bushings.
To get started I'm going to remove the berdan primers
from the steel cases using the hydraulic depriming method.
I have a more detailed video about this you can watch
for clarification.
Ok, we'll need to cut our copper tubing into short pieces. I found this was easy to do
with a dremel tool and a cutting disc.
You can see I've used
a deburring tool before making each cut
but I've done this previously without deburring and it worked ok.
Here I'm removing the berdan anvils and creating a new central flash hole.
Removing this anvil makes room for the boxer primer which contains its own integrated anvil.
Be careful not to drill all the way through the base
you want a reasonable size flash hole.
Now at our press we're going to put the primer pocket swaging mandrel in
and the case stripper on top of it.
You can see how that works.
Up here we're got our RCBS primer pocket swaging die.
We're going to place our small piece of copper tubing on the lubricated mandrel
with the rough side down
we're going to get it started
by placing a solid object
blocking the top of the press
simply raising it up
and pressing.
I've found this is an important process because it starts the copper tubing on
the mandrel
whereas if you start it in the case it pushes to the bottom of the primer
pocket
and fills the bottom
whereas when you start it on the mandrel halfway
it seems to evenly fill out better in the case.
Finally we will go ahead and get our case started,
get everything lined up and simply press it.
And there's our large rifle boxer primer pocket.
We simply need to clean up the excess copper that's been squished out of it
during the swaging process.
Now we're going to remove the excess copper from our cases.
Now that we've removed the excess copper
one more trip through the primer pocket swager will clean things up real nicely.
Now we just go ahead and full-length resize like normal.
Now we prime with the standard large rifle primer.
Now at this point we've got our live ammo
you can continuously reload like you would standard boxer brass.
Here we've got our four rounds of 7.62x54r
loaded up with 180 grain cast bullets.
Loading reloaded ammo into the Mosin Nagant.
Previously fired from a Romanian PSL 54c Semi Auto
Bullet Casting is a great hobby to compliment reloading.
If you found this video useful or interesting then you might want to check out my channel
and consider joining me on facebook
for discussions, feedback, and suggestions. Thank you for watching! watching