Berdan to Boxer primer conversion for steel & brass ammo cases - Reloading 7.62x54r Large Rifle

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