Baldrick314 wrote:Has anyone had a primer fail to ignite before and if so any idea what could possibly be the cause?
Yes, several Remington 7 1/2's in a brand new Sako 85 .223R. I was lucky having another .223R rifle and most went off in that rifle so I investigated further and found the new bolt had a huge amount of grease and heavy oil inside around the firing pin. Cleaned out and coated with a lite gun oil. Problem never happened again.
Did you try and fire the cartridge a second time, sometimes they will fire unless the primer mix has been cracked and/or anvil squashed.
The most common reason a primer fails is that it hasn't been seated fully in the pocket. This could be that the pocket wasn't fully cleaned and some junk stopped it from sitting on the bottom of the primer pocket. Very unlikely to be a manufacturing fault but perhaps the anvil became damaged from some other means.
Contamination is unlikely as the primer substrate is covered with a foil seal to protect it against contamination.
If it was happening more than once I would suspect the firing pin strike being lite and clean the internals of the bolt / firing pin or that something is a miss with the primer seating routine. Hand primer tools are very handy in that you can feel much better the primer being seated fully home.
I don't use a press to seat primers but if one does it is very easy to squash a primer, especially the primer anvil and that will stop it from functioning correctly. If the primer cup surface looks marked or slightly flattened I would suspect it has been damaged in the seating process and the method needs correcting.