doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Old style shotgun primers and brass hulls.

I picked about 55 brass and nickel plated 10 gauge shells to use for cowboy shooting. Keeping in mind these used either 57 primers or even older. When decapping them I found two different things I had never seen before.

A couple of the shells had the normal flash hole that you would expect from a boxer primed hull, but there was also two little holes on each side of the normal flash hole. Any idea why?

The second thing I found that some of the other hulls had a protrusion about 1/16" in diameter and a bit more than 1/8" long sticking into the hull from the primer, what kind of shotgun primer were these?

These are all either Winchester or UMC (Remington) hulls, so Berdan priming seems very unlikely.

Chantry,
I have some UMC ca. 1912 43 Spanish ammo and cases that are primed with 6.45mm Berdan primers so they were in use then. I can see the possibility that foreign governments could specify Berdan primers, though.
Mike

In the 1880 Union Metallic Cartridge Co. catalog they offered their brass shells for Berdan, Orcott, Sturtevant or Baffington primers. By the 1882 catalog the brass shells were offered for Wesson #2, Berdan, Orcott and Sturtevant primers. By 1884 the offerings expanded to include shells for UMC's No. 2 Primer. By 1887, the UMC Ho. 2 was the primer offered in most with the only option Sturtevant. By 1890, all the Union Metallic Cartridge Co.'s NPEs had the UMC No. 2 Primer.