BUYER BEWARE: Capital Cartridge & Russian ‘Murom’ primers

For reloaders, primers are an indispensable ingredient.  Given the scarcity of American-made primers after the great ammo crush of a couple of years ago, there’s a lot of companies offering imported products to try to fill the void at affordable prices.  However, not all of the imported products meet the standards American gun owners expect.

Enter Capital Cartridge in Houston.  They’re a company that specializes in, well, cartridge components.   Among the products they sell are Russian-made “Murom” primers.

A couple of our GSL family bought these Murom small pistol primers and here’s what they found:

I loaded 300 Small Pistol and had 3 to 4 misfires per 100 and 5 to 6 hang fire per 100.

When contacted by email on multiple occasions, Capital Cartridge didn’t respond.  Our guy finally got a phone number for the place and the woman who answered said their company was only the reseller and that in so many words “it’s not our problem.”  She did share an email for the Russian company that’s selling them.

What’s more, the primers are still listed, as of 12/12/23, on Capital Cartridge’s website.

And Capital Cartridge has the following disclaimer:

Warranty Disclaimer
This site and the materials and products on this site are provided “as is” and without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. To the fullest extent permissible pursuant to applicable law, www.CapitalCartridge.com disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. www.CapitalCartridge.com does not represent or warrant that the functions contained in the site will be uninterrupted or error-free, that the defects will be corrected, or that this site or the server that makes the site available are free of viruses or other harmful components. www.CapitalCartridge.com does not make any warrantees or representations regarding the use of the materials in this site in terms of their correctness, accuracy, adequacy, usefulness, timeliness, reliability or otherwise. Some states do not permit limitations or exclusions on warranties, so the above limitations may not apply to you.

I get that Capital Cartridge doesn’t want to eat a ton of money by refunding an order and taking back substandard product.

At the same time, if they keep selling known inferior product without making it clear to prospective customers that these are problematic, people need to know about that company’s indifference towards its customers so those customers can take their hard-earned money elsewhere for the rest of Capital Cartridge’s products.

Here’s the bright side of this story:  Primers like this, assuming (and that’s probably a big assumption at this point) they are truly non-corrosive, would offer a valuable training opportunity.  Loading up range ammo and practicing malfunction-clearing drills is something most folks don’t do much at all.  If these are malfunctioning at something approaching a 10% rate, that’s a lot of opportunities to condition oneself to safely handle hangfires and misfires.  From there, the shooter will have to perform the “tap, rack, bang” clearing drill.  And after a thousand times (or 15,000 in the case of these two GSL members) to the point of unconscious competence.

Story time:  I once intentionally asked a reloader to brew me up a case of 9mm at very low velocities.  This was back when 9mm reloads were going for about $6 per 50 so that should date me.  My intention was for them to cause my then 9mm Beretta to malfunction with regularity.  They did.  A little too well.  But by the time I ran those thousand rounds intermixed with other standard loads, I was good for clearing malfunctions for a long, long time.  Clearing them because as instinctual as fastening a seatbelt.