Small rifle and pistol primers difference?

[Nickel City Dude]

I have a brick of Winchester small rifle primers and I know that the dimensions are the same as pistol primers but is there any other difference between them?  Are they hotter than the pistol primers or what?  I would like to use them in my 357 cowboy loads.

[Garrison Joe, SASS #60708]

They will work in your load.  Where they might not work is in guns with light hammer falls.   The rifle primer usually needs more of a strike.  And Winchesters are harder anyway than Federals.  So, two possible strikes against them working well in YOUR guns.

 

Since you already have the prirmers, load 20 or so and test them!

 

good luck, GJ

[The Original Lumpy Gritz]

Srp is the same as sp mag in hardness of the cup.

Just be sure your hammer is sprung 'rite'.

They are identical in size.

OLG 

[Roscoe Regulator]

Trade them with an AR owner who reloads.

[Snake-eye, SASS#45097]

I've used CCI and REM SRP in my Rugers and '73. Worked well and the primer dent on the fired cases looked identical to Fed SPP. The guns have lightened hammer springs, but not too light. I understand that they are equivalent to magnum primers in terms of energy.

[Warden Callaway]

There is a multitude of YouTube videos on primer substitution.  Here is one that shows actually pressure and velocity testing.

 

[Nickel City Dude]

Warden

Thanks for posting the video.  I am confident that loading my 357's with the rifle primers will not be a problem.  Yahoo there goes another 1000 shots.

[Warden Callaway]

A few years back, fellow shooter bought a bunch of Federal small rifle primers by mistake.  They were not reliable in their tuned to death Ruger and Uberti 73s.  They brought them to a match and offered them at $25/k.  I bought 1k to use in my Marlin 32-20 rifles that all have flat hammer springs.   They worked fine.  I was going to buy more but they found someone that swapped them for small pistol even up.

[Buckshot Bear]

I was always under the impression that small rifle primers are hotter than small pistol primers.

[Colorado Coffinmaker]

The scientific measure of any primer is Brisance.  The Brisance of primers is the distance of flame travel.  Some primers exhibit slightly longer (distance) flame travel.  Were we to set a test of Brisance with high speed cameras, the difference in Brisance is very slight.  Not enough difference to worry about.

 

The only problem, as mentioned, may be the resistance of the primer cup.  Bit heavier spring maybe.

[stef75]

I saw one very long thread on another forum years ago which ended with someone quoting CCI techs saying the CCI 550 magnum pistol primer and CCI400 small rifle primer are the same primer. Same thickness, height and brisance.