By Duane Thomas
There are little tricks you learn, as you become an experienced handloader, to make the process go faster and more smoothly. One of them concerns how you pick up primers out of your primer flip tray.
A primer has two sides, a smooth, solid, shiny side, and the side containing the anvil, the part through which flame pours when the priming compound ignites. All the primers need to go into the primer pickup tube shiny-side-first. A prime flip tray gets all the primers sitting the same way, shiny-side-up so they can go into the pickup tube. How this works to start, you lay the flip tray over a “flat” of primers, then flip it over and remove the flat, leaving the primer behind, lying on the tray. Invariably most of the primers in the flat will have been shiny-side-up, a few anvil-side-up, so post-flip now what you see, sitting on the tray, is most primers anvil-side-up, a few shiny-side-up.
The primer flip tray has a series of concentric rings built into its floor. The idea is, you shake the tray side-to-side, around-and-around, this causes the sharp edges of the primers sitting anvil-side-down to catch on the rings, which flips them anvil-side-up. Once all the primers are anvil-side-up, you place the top of the flip over them, flip everything over again, remove the cover, all the primers will be shiny-side-up. Now you can use your primer pickup tube on all of them, one after the other until you’re done.
That’s the theory anyway. Thing is, shaking the primer tray side-to-side, around-and-around until all the primers flip anvil-side-up is time-consuming and boring. Instead, as soon as I’ve removed the primer flat and I see most primers anvil-side-up, a few shiny-side-up, I just use my primer pickup tube to capture those shiny-side-up primers right off the bat. Once all that’s left are primers anvil-side-up, then all I have to do it place the cover over the remaining primers, flip the tray over, and go to town on the remaining primers which are now all shiny-side-up. This is a great little labor-saving trick that allows me to skip that whole, pesky “moving the flip tray around to get all the primers facing the same way” portion of the procedure and makes the entire process faster and easier.
