[Shrinkmd]

So I finally spilled a bunch of primers all over the garage floor while reloading the other day. I found them all but one and then I tore the entire garage apart looking for it. After throwing out boxes, sweeping up live and dead cave crickets, spiders, and the little millipede worms which like to curl up and die, no joy. That last primer must be circling Pluto or something.

I swept, shop vacuumed, and moved everything I could. The garage looks great!

But seriously, do I have to worry much about finding that one primer accidentally someday? If the car runs over it (Murphy knows I swept and vacuumed the floor already)? I know that they don't go off on their own unless struck, but even though the garage is clean, and I'm pretty sure where it's not, I'm still mad that there's one on the loose.

Something to loose sleep over, or just laugh about when I finally find it some day?

[Noveldoc]

Don't worry. The dog will eat it.

;-)

Tom

[bullseye308]

Look in the grooves of your shoes. :)

[Encoreman]

Don't worry I think the same thing has happened to all who will admit it. I believe they sneak out the door and are never heard from again.

[WLE]

Chill out and have a beer you will loose more.

Bill

[lgbloader]

I found them all but one

Been there and done that and what you did after as well....

Sucks dont it?!!!!

I eventually found it but it would bother me to have a primer on the loose.

LGB.

LGB

[jr_roosa]

Yep, I'm going to step on one or two in my workshop some day.

Gonna need new shorts when that happens.

I don't think a primer can hurt a car tire much. Bike tire might have trouble. Might burn through a slipper sole. Probably not a sneaker. Smack one anvil-up with an old sneaker and see what it does. Post the results for us all to see!

-J.

[bullseye308]

You woulda known if you had sucked it up in the vacuum. :eek:

We all have lost one at one time or another. The sock monster ate them. He gets out of the dryer from time to time.

[P51D]

It paired up with a sock from the dryer :D And you're right; they're on their way to Pluto. :cool:

I've done exactly the same thing (spilled a bunch of primers) about five times now. Each time was a full pack, so I knew exactly how many I had to recover. And I've learned that Remingtons are the easiest for me to spill :fire:

I'm happy (and lucky) to report a 100% recovery rate, but it wasn't easy. Each time there was at least one hold-out primer, sometimes several, that refused to be found. I too swept the floor, moved boxes, cleaned up (so it wasn't a total waste of time). ;) And when I finally found the die hards, they were not on the floor. On their way to the floor, they managed to park on a horizontal surface above the floor. Once on a drill press table, once on a leg-brace of a table saw, and several times on the lower shelf of my reloading/tool bench. Each time I was utterly amazed at their resting places. :confused: They seemed to defy the laws of physics, but there they were.

My only advice is to look on similar flat surfaces above the floor, within a football field or two from where you dropped them. You'll find it! :cool:

But seriously, I would only be concerned if you have young kids around that area. I do have some young ones, so I couldn't rest until I found each lost primer. Good luck in your search!

P51D

[rfwobbly]

Don't worry. The dog will eat it.

...and his very next poot will blow out your windows.


Seriously, you will NOT find that single small primer until you are down on hands and knees looking for the large pistol primers you'll drop next week.

[Seedtick]

...and his very next poot will blow out your windows.

Seriously, you will NOT find that single small primer until you are down on hands and knees looking for the large pistol primers you'll drop next week.

:D

Be honest, a couple of years ago when primers were a buck and a half a hundert and you could get them at any quick-mart, you would'a only picked up the ones that were laying close together. Right? Then kicked the rest up under the bench?

:neener:

ST

[Bush Pilot]

The current Speer manual covers this exact thing. If you drive over the primer with your car you can expect an explosion that will take the car and garage out. I would get a flashlight and spend all night on your hands and knees looking, can't be too safe.

[angus6]

Don't worry. The dog will eat it.
That's not funny my bulldog loves to come an lay at my feet when I reload, I had a real fun time before I figured out why the SDB was spitting random primers :banghead:
Then there was the day I was sure she had swallowed a 9mm , found it a couple days later. Was waitting for SHMBO to find it cleaning the yard :eek:

[jard]

I've dropped them one at a time before, and if I didn't happen to see where I went I never bothered to look. Is it a real issue? What's the worst that could happen?

[jfh]

Well, the crater in the garage floor won't be bad enough to patch--but you've seen the pictures of tire-repair explosions on mining trucks haven't you? Usually beheads the repairman. OTOH, it it goes off in your waffle-tread shoes, it's only a few toes, not your head.

On a more serious note--I consider a popped primer to less significant than the wads of caps I used to pop off as a kid, using a hammer to get more noise....

Jim H.

[flynlr]

me hand-priming on couch = fun and games collecting 100 primers from deep within said couch,

still 9 missing after 2 years .

[Schleprok62]

I did this once also... was kinda funny in that I tore the room apart, ran the vaccuum cleaner, crawled around on my hands and knees with a flashlight... etc... finally gave up and went to bed... got up the next morning to go to work... put my socks on... and then my shoes... stand up take a step and OUCH!!! what the heck is in my shoe??? Well I'll be a ...

No, it did not go off, was like a rock in my shoe... but my shoes were on the other side of the room, on the other side of the bed!!!! (figure that one out physics majors)

P51D hit the nail on the head... they have a way of rewriting the laws of physics...

[RoostRider]

LOL... I thought this thread was going to be about finding primers... and then I figured you were looking so hard because they are so hard to get these days... lol.... I was thinking- "Seriously, this guy needs primers pretty bad"...

Don't worry too hard about it.... but you just gave me a great idea... should I get desperate enough, I should just move the reloading bench and recover all the lost primers.... (read- you will loose more... lol)

But don't kid yourself, a primer goes off with the kind of bang that can seriously injure you. I know because I was stupid enough, as a kid, to play around with some. I was ignorant enough to think of it as 'courage'.

I ended up digging a primer out of my thumb 3-4 days later with a forceps and a lot of screaming in the basement bathroom when no one was home... because I didn't have the 'courage' to tell my dad how stupid I was so he could bring me to the hospital (and wring my neck... and make the reloading stuff "off limits" for me).... it buried itself to the bone in the meatiest part of my thumb with ease... decades later a noticeable scar still resides on my thumb to let me know...

If that had been my eye... you get the idea....

I don't reload in my garage... I have always used a basement area.... I am 'relatively confident' a primer won't typically go off from being stepped on over concrete (I've accidentally done it a few times)...

A car tire? I have no idea (suspect not).... but I don't think it would be strong enough to do anything more than perhaps harm a tire even if it did....

The thing is probably somewhere in a crack....

[Noveldoc]

My dog does eat stuff like this. Have to beat her to it.

To date she has not broken wind and shot the cat.

Tom

[Friendly, Don't Fire!]

Well, the crater in the garage floor won't be bad enough to patch--but you've seen the pictures of tire-repair explosions on mining trucks haven't you? Usually beheads the repairman. OTOH, it it goes off in your waffle-tread shoes, it's only a few toes, not your head.

On a more serious note--I consider a popped primer to less significant than the wads of caps I used to pop off as a kid, using a hammer to get more noise....

Jim H.
We did that too, with a sledgehammer!
New rolls of five caps in a white rectangular cardboard box and we would pound it. We would buy boxes and boxes of roll caps and pound an entire box (5 rolls) at once!

At times, you could actually feel the sledgehammer bounce right back up from the explosion!
Then we wondered why our ears are ringing.

[Shrinkmd]

That is true about the horizontal place on the way down, as the last one I found was actually on a cardboard box under the bench, which you would never be able to intentionally land one on if you were trying to!

This gave me some ideas, there are one or two other spots I didn't check, but now I will. I keep a box of disposable gloves on the bench, and it has an opening in it. Did one fly in there? Also, the garbage can was open, and not that far away, so perhaps the last one is already gone.

It is a good excuse to really clean up the garage or wherever. I will check one or two places more. The other good news is I finally found my Hornady primer flip tray in the box I was throwing out from the classic starter's kit. I guess I never looked that carefully at the styrofoam and missed that white plastic tray tucked in there.

So besides for temporarily misplacing a primer, I found something I needed and really cleaned up nicely.

Maybe a big tray or something overhanging the edge of the bench, so if you spill them they will land there? But they like to bounce and fly under their own mysterious power...

[Walkalong]

I found my lost one a couple days ago. Didn't even know I had dropped it until the math did not add up. :confused:

I think lost things sometimes go into a time warp for a while and then show back up later. It's back home now though, and all is well. :)

[rfwobbly]

It could also have been abducted by aliens.

[Walkalong]

That too is possible. I am just glad they brought the little sucker back. :D

[627PCFan]

The best solution is to start up the lawnmower to blow the floor off ;)

[qajaq59]

Look in the grooves of your shoes. Don't laugh too much.... I used to load outside on the patio. One day I dropped one and I didn't want some kid to pick it up and get hurt, so I looked and looked. It WAS stuck on the bottom of my sneaker!!!

[Deavis]

You woulda known if you had sucked it up in the vacuum

You like that nice little pop they make after all that noise getting sucked up?

[glockmon]

Primer Goblins. Just like Brass Goblins at the range.

[FROGO207]

I am gettin' an education here and now I tell ya.:evil: The easiest way to find it is to drop a hammer, Anvil or such on the floor accidentally and "BOOM" primer found,:neener: Next time get some of them sticky type mouse catchers, about 25, and put them around the floor. That'll get em.:D

[rhinoh]

Flood the garage a couple of inches deep with water...that should deactivate it:neener:

[KAB55]

Don't worry, it's probably hiding in the corner behind the spilled powder that always seems to be present. I've lost more primers through spillage over the years than I care to think about with the shortage today, never had a problem, never had one go off. Like one of the previous posters said, have a cold one and don't worry about it.

[AF_Reloader]

I have to agree with the advocates of spilling more primers to find the original.

Lost a CCI LR? Spill some W209 shotgun primers, and I guarantee you'll find the CCI. But not the last W209.

[JimKirk]

Timely but funny too! I have a large wooden drawer under my reloading bench where I store my primer(the stash is getting low), I alway dump my primers in the tray over the drawer so that if I spill any they are coralled in the drawer. Well last Tuesday I went to dump some SRP into the tray and spilled a few. Now I found all but one just like you and like you I hunted and hunted some more. I finally took everything out of that drawer and no primer. After going back over almost everything in the drawer again, I had about given up and noticed a CCI 22 LR slip top box(with some empty 357 cases) with the top slide about an 1/4" open. Wouldn't you know there was that missing SRP! Now I am a sticker for loading in even amounts so I load in 20's, 50's or 100's so that odd primer would have thrown my even numbers out of wack, not to speak about that they cost me $5.47 / 100 ...it was the only ones I have found. CCI BR SRP!

Jimmy K

[dave45cal7]

Shrinkmd: You could have a crane dangle a 5,000 volt electro-magnet over your garage then just look up!!! I just hope that primer didn't roll under a 5 gallon can of gas!! All in all I'd be happy only misseing one. Youshould have been here when 85 primers in the tube of my Dillon 650xl all went off, I had some work to do on my ceiling drywall, But I leaned a good lesson, Thank God for safety glasses!! Load Safe, Have fun, Dave.