Bottom Gun said:
I don't really know if one size will be more valuable than other sizes but I think the small rifle primers are most versatile since they can be used in pistol loads as well.
You know, I have used Small Rifle primers in handgun loads in a pinch before, and it never bit me in the butt until just recently.
I loaded some .38 ammo about 3 years ago during the pandemic shortage and didn't have a lot of pistol primers. I wanted to save those for 9mm, since they would be likely to end up in striker-fired guns, which have a more difficult time pounding on the harder rifle primers sufficiently to set them off than hammer-fired guns do. 2 weeks ago I finally pulled some of that stash out of my stockpile to test fire a little Charter Arms Off Duty 5-shot snubbie I had acquired. About 40% failed to go bang!! At first, I thought there was something wrong with the gun. But when I took the same rounds that failed to fire and put them in my S&W 686, about 80% of the failed rounds now went bang, but despite hammer hits from 2 different revolvers, I was now with a failure rate of about 5%. I took those that just refused to go off with either revolver and then tried them in an old beat up Pietta 1873 SAA replica in .357 that I don't shoot much because it has a history of sometimes piercing primers because it's pin is just a hair too prominent. Sure enough,...NOW they all went off just fine. But to make sure that wasn't merely because this was the 3rd strike of a hammer on the primers, I got a bunch of fresh untried rounds from the batch on tried them through the SAA. Yep, 100% ignition. No misfires. I fed the ammo from the same batch into my Marlin CST carbine, and same result; 100% reliability.
So yes,...small rifle primers CAN be used in pistol ammo,...provided you only use the ammo in guns you have tested will work with hard primers.
And yes,...I tested the little Charter Arms snubbie with other ammo with pistol primers, and there were no failures.