reloading .45 acp large primer preferred over small primer?

[Joe88XJ]

Hello....it would appear that most people who reload .45 acp want large primer brass, I am curious...is there a benefit of the large primer over the small or is it just personal preference?

Thanks in advance!
Joe

[beex215]

looks personal. i like using small primer 45's as i can just buy small primers to fit all my pistol. why do i need large ones that only fit my 45? i dont and they all go bang anyway.

[cephas]

The preference most people have is that all the primer pockets they're loading for at the time be the same size. Frustrating when loading to try and jam a LP into a small primer pocket, especially for those who use auto presses. LP was the standard in the .45 for decades. For shooters todays small primed .45's were designed as a less toxic load for indoor ranges. Some target shooters claim to like them better. 95% of the .45apc brass I scrounge at outdoor ranges, in the boonies, are still LP.

[daschnoz]

I wonder how much of the change was driven by the run on components after the 2008 election. Just about everything was impossible to get.

Think of the almost non-existent box of 380ACP - Ammo mfgrs. run 380ACP on the same equipment that makes 9mm. 9mm was flying off the shelf, so they never made the tooling switch to run 380ACP.

I have a feeling that the same principle applied to LP primers - they never made the tooling switch. Folks still wanted 45ACP, but LP primers were getting harder to come by, so ammo mfgrs. started making 45ACP with SP primers.

It's just a hunch, but it does seem to make sense to me. I could also be 100% wrong.

Personally, I haven't noticed that much of a performance difference. I load on a progressive, but I resize/decap on the single stage, so I sort them into different boxes at that time.