AmmoManAaron
Master
Back in the 80s that was the easier and cheaper option than making boxer brass 7.62x39 out of expensive Norma 6.5x54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer or Norma 6.5x52 Carcano. Even into the 90s after boxer 7.62x39 brass became a thing, there was a company in Montana that advertised in Shotgun News about their service - you send them your fired steel or brass cased berdan 7.62x39 and for a fairly small fee they would send them back to you properly cleaned, sized, primed and ready for you to load.
Berdan primers were more available to reloaders in the past. Western Gun Service and Old Western Scrounger are two companies that come to mind. Together these two firms kept a variety of berdan primers (Norma, Hirtenberger, and RWS - multiple sizes too!) available to the American shooting public from the 1950s through at least the early 1990s. They may not have been in every gun shop, but they were readily available through direct mail order. Sometime in the 1990s, the significantly increasing expense of RWS products combined with dwindling demand caused Old Western Scrounger to discontinue the RWS product line (RWS berdan primers are still available on the European market to this day). After the mid 90s, El Dorado Cartridge Company occasionally imported batches of Murom .217" Nato-spec (KV-762N) berdan primers and marketed them under the PMC brand - this was moderately successful in the waning days of mail order/early days internet gun stuff. After El Dorado Cartridge Company folded, there was a long dry spell of 10+ years. Sometime in the 2000s, Wolf began importing Murom boxer primers and were successful on the market. That success combined with niche demand for berdan primers resulted in Tula (which had separated from Wolf in the meantime) adding the Murom KV-24N and KV-762N berdan primers to the product line that they were importing into the USA. When they hit the market, I immediately bought 5,000 of each type. A couple of years later, and Obama's Russian sanctions killed the Murom primer party and that was that...for the most part...somehow a firm in Arkansas, managed to get a variety of Murom primers imported long after the sanctions ban. They were/are using them in loading ammunition here in USA, but they also had some listed for sale on their website. https://fedarm.com/product-category/ammunition-components/primers/ Whatever they listed for sale sold out quick since some products were already out of stock by the time I found them a couple of years ago. Fortunately, I did manage to get 5,000 of the KV-27N berdan primer before those sold out too. Among other things, these KV-27N primers fit my original UMC .43 Spanish berdan primed cases! As you can probably imagine, .43 Spanish cases aren't cheap, so the opportunity to utilize my significant number of berdan primed cases was a welcome turn of events. I have a few hundred of the correct RWS berdan primers as well, but these were not nearly enough for all of the assorted berdan cases I have on hand that take that primer size. With the current ammo and reloading component shortage projected to last quite some time, I expect interest in berdan reloading to come up a bit more often. If a primer, even a berdan primer, becomes available, then I expect someone will buy it and load it.
