gary reeder
many years ago a good friend and gun writer Dick Williams
Thursday, April 16, 2020, 21:42

did an article on the Freedom Arms and got a large batch of 454 Casull ammo along with the gun or guns he did the article on. After doing the article he stashed the brass away in his garage.

Recently Dick's wife asked him kindly to "clean this pigs sty up!!!"So he started bring truck loads of ammo and fired brass to me and I sold it on our Saturday Sale. Going thru the piles and piles of ammo and brass I noticed something strange. He had several boxes of fired 454 brass with the NAA (North American Arms) head stamp. Looking closer I noticed something else. The brass had the large primer pocket. Clutching them to my bosom I ran back into our back room yelling "Mine Mine Mine!!!".

I know that good friend Bob Baker, of Freedom Arms is a much smarter ballistics guru that I am and went with the small rifle primer in their 454 cases. Now I have no idea where NAA came up with the large primer pocket brass but for my own personal use I sure am happy with it. One of these days I am going to ask Bob but that hasn't happened yet. I have wanted large primer pocket brass forever, as sometimes if one of our custom 454 revolvers has a nice light action job it won't set a small rifle primer off. So this would solve my problem. I had 4 or 5 boxes of the large primer pocket brass so i set 2 boxes of it back for our test firing at the shop and the other 2 boxes for my personal use in my 410 GNR and 429 GNR ammo. I will admit to being a hoarder of this brass but now I can slick up my own personal guns with a light hammer fall and not worry about getting a misfire. For those that have the small primer pocket brass, switch to the small magnum pistol primers and it will normally solve any misfire problems you might have with our custom guns other than a high primer.

And if I sounded like John Taffin would have any of the 475 Ruger brass, chalk that up to my rambling post. John was and is the only top rated gun writer I know.