Fiocchi Large Rifle Primer

Fiocchi Large Rifle Primers

Large Rifle by Fiocchi. The staff at LuckyGunner.com contacted me (quite some time ago) whether I’d be interested in testing some huge Fiocchi rifle primers. They offered to give me a sleeve in exchange for my honest feedback, whether it be positive or negative. I affirmed that I would be delighted to, but I would need some time before I could put them to use. I promised to test them out with my pet load in my Remington 700 5R.
Finally, that moment arrived. Large Rifle by Fiocchi

The Fiocchi primers are sold in sleeves of 1,500 rather than the industry standard 1,000.

You get ten packs of 150 rather than 100. The packaging is compact and fairly handy.

The price of the Large Rifle primers at the time of this writing is $41/1,500, or 2.73 per primer, without counting shipping and HazMat costs. The CCI BR-2 Benchrest primers, on the other hand, cost $50/1000, or 5 apiece (not including tax), when bought locally. Large Rifle by Fiocchi

I made the decision to make everything as identical as possible in order to get ready for this test. I had some Black Hills brass that had originally been the 168-grain moly-coated match loads from the red box (fresh as opposed to remanufactured). This would be the third time this brass had been loaded; the first time was with 175 grain Sierra Match Kings. I chamfered the inside and outside of the case openings on all forty cases, decapped them, and then ran them through my tumbler to make sure they were spotless. After that, I resized them all using my RCBS small-base X-die. Large Rifle by Fiocchi

These had previously been fired through the 5R. They all already fit, if a bit snugly, into my case gauge, so I knew that. They fit well after fitting and have a very little amount of wiggle space at the case head end. I need to do this in order for my M25 gas gun’s reloads to feed. In addition to testing the Fiocchi primers, I also wanted to see how the accuracy of the 5R would differ from neck-sizing alone, which is what I usually do when reloading for my bolt guns. Large Rifle by Fiocchi

Using my Lee Auto-Prime, I hand-primed 20 cases with CCI BR-2 primers and 20 cases with Fiocchi Large Rifle NIK primers after decapping, cutting, chamfering, and resizing the brass. The Fiocchi primers are quite homogeneous in terms of size since they are all placed firmly and uniformly. I then threw forty identical 46.4 ( 0.05) grain loads of Alliant Reloder-15 powder (Caution: use load data you find on strange web sites at your own risk! ), and using my Dillon RL-450 press and an RCBS seating die, I seated forty Lapua 155 grain Scenar hollow-point boattail bullets to a cartridge overall length of 2.80″ (my technique with that particular device has been thoroughly revised since that post). Large Rifle by Fiocchi

(Note: The only item I received in exchange for this entire evaluation was 1,500 Fiocchi primers from ammoand-supply.com. I purchased everything else I mention in this post.)

Anyway, now that I had forty.308 rounds with only a primer difference, it was RANGE TIME! I traded in my Leupold scope for a Nightforce I purchased some time ago. I had to fiddle with it to obtain the proper eye relief, but I believe I’ve achieved it now. I sat down and fired the rifle’s final eight Black Hills 175 grain bullets at a distance of 100 yards, but I still had to check sure the sight was aimed correctly. This is that team:

The cold-bore shot is made at the low-center hole. Even with that, center-to-center, it is just a little bit over an inch, which is about what I’ve learned to anticipate from that ammunition.

CCI BR-2 Load
Average Velocity: 2876fps
Extreme Spread: 58.40fps
Standard Deviation: 16.52fps

Fiocchi Load
Average Velocity: 2917fps
Extreme Spread: 42.96fps
Standard Deviation: 14.83fps

Now, I’ve gotten this particular load under 10fps S_d using neck-sized Lapua cases, but those are still damned good numbers. Obviously, the Fiocchi is a hair-hotter than the BR-2, but it’s every bit, if not more consistent. Fiocchi Large Rifle