Frankford ArsenalFrankford Arsenal, Platinum Series Precision Scale with Case

The Frankford Arsenal VibraPrime is an inexpensive and very simple tool for filling primer tubes. It might require a little flash trimming to get all the parts to fit properly - in particular, the part of the primer tray that goes into the handle may need smoothing. Otherwise everything seems to fit well. The motorized part is the grip, and it has a pretty generic pistol grip shape that’s easy to hold and control. The grip doesn’t weigh very much - you can tell the difference when you install the battery. The motor itself simply spins an eccentric weight, which causes the whole thing to vibrate. This is what causes the primers to flow to the tube. It’s not really loud, so you can hear the primers slide into the tube. This is my second purchase of this tool. The first one was I don’t know how many years old, and I simply dropped it once too often… But I bought a new one because I really like this device.

I pretty much anticipated when I ordered this that it would not work out of the box. I was not disappointed. It did not fit together, and would not work. After studying it for about five minutes, it became obvious that the clear plastic housing that holds the primers was not able to be inserted far enough into the blue plastic "gun". By shaving a small amount of plastic off the clear tab that inserts into the blue handle, the problem was solved. Then I was able to insert the catch tube, and make it work. After having loaded primer tubes by hand, one primer at a time, this is a very welcome upgrade, and I highly recommend it to anyone willing to just spend a few minutes adjusting it to make it work. For that reason, I gave four stars. It would have to worked perfectly right out of the box to get five. It is very fast, and the price had come down to a reasonable range. It does the job quite well, and I see no reason to spend twice as much on the other name brand similar item. It does seem rather flimsy, certainly not industrial quality, but I have no doubt I will get years of use out of it.

Excellent Smithers, excellent. When I looked into this I was prepared for a bit of tinkering, I had watched some tube videos on the product and most had tinkered to get it to work. Mine worked perfect right out of the box for both small and large primers. I didn’t really have an issue with manually picking up primers with the Dillon pick up tubes. A little time cosuming and tedious but no an issue, my main issue was throwing me off my rhythm. With the 650 progressive press you get into a rhythm, I’m not a fast reloader as I like to visually check things but I do get into a nice rhythm. Then I would have to stop and load primers, now it’s much, much quicker. The instructions state to link the existing primer load tube to the Vibra Prime tube using a bit of plastic tubbing to transfer the primers, then transfer to the press. However my press came with spare ends for the primer tubes, these fit perfectly on the Vibra Prime tubes and load the primers directly into the press. Works flawlessly and loads primers in about 10 seconds, a lot quicker than I can do manually picking each one up. Highly recommend

this saves a lot of time compared to individually loading each primer into the tube. we you do 2k rounds in each session you either need an automated primer loader (15k for a fully loaded MARK 7® REVOLUTION) or one of these. Since I have only been shooting a few year I tried this first. It is a great product. you have to be very careful the angle you hold it at. too little angle and it wont feed. too much angle and the primers may get stuck in the outlet or even worse flip over as they exit. For the price it is really worth it. you will just need some practice and pay a lot of attention to the orientation of each primer as it is dispensed.

Based on the on other reviews, and the fact that the materials and assembly quality of this are both cheap and not the highest standard respectively, I would assume it's almost like a hit or miss right out of the box. So if you have your expectations properly set, that you might need to make some minor adjustments or even go through a little learning curve about how exactly make it work, in terms of which angle you should hold it, or whether or not you will use the accompanying tube or your reloader tube, etc - With your mindset in the right place, you won't be too frustrated and this will actually save you time when loading your primer tubes. So the cons are: - It's cheap materials and construction - which leads to inconsistent experience between buyers; - It's extremely over priced - Really, this should cost 10 bucks, if that much; - It will likely require some learning curve to make it work 100% for you; - Its tray sucks as a flipping tray; The Pros - It does work after the aforementioned learning curve is complete; - It does save you time, and you can use your loader tubes instead which will save you even more time; - It worked for me with different types of primers (Federal & Winchester)

Sounds like a good deal, but notice how many of the other reviewers are offering workarounds or "fixes" for it's poor performance. Even that doesn't make it work reliably. Let me explain. When I first bought it, it worked fairly well for CCI primers, which are plated and pretty slippery. Every tray of primers, though, at least one would jam in the hole that feeds the tube, and you have to stop the whole process and unjam the primer before you can continue. Sometimes you can't get it loose and have to remove the tube and push it out from the bottom (the Dillon primer tube follower stick works well for this), then replace the tube before you can continue. Not too bad, I thought. When I switched to Win or Rem primers, everything went south. The jams became frequent, and I never could finish a single tray without at least several jams. I began to notice another problem, that it vibrates so hard that it flips primers upside down AND still feeds them, meaning that there's at least one bad round per tube of primers (upside down primer). If you notice the upside down primer going down the tube (they move pretty fast) you have to empty the entire tube and start again. I've tried everything the previous reviewers suggested, and a few additional things. Nothing fixes it. And we shouldn't have to be "fixing" somebody else's product, for which we paid good money. I bought it because I thought it would easily outrun the standard pickup tube routine, but I did a test run today and found that the pickup tubes take about 1.7 minutes per tray and the Frankford takes up to 5 minutes because of all the fooling around. I did want to believe, but actual experience with it makes me believe that I wasted the money and the time. I can't recommend it. I'm happy to go back to pickup tubes, which are easy and reliable.

More trouble than it's worth. First, the ridges in the primer flipper tray are to small and leave more than a few cup up, anvil down. Out of 1000 small pistol primers, 16-20 of every 100 had to be finger turned. Then, it's just somewhat okay for dropping small primers into the transfer tube. Many become bound up at the rod drop hole and require extra effort to force them to drop. Out of a 1000 I had 3 that inverted and fell upside-down. I timed the rod fill time for 100 small pistol primers once they had been correctly oriented in the Vibra-Prime tray using the Vibra-Prime and another 100 using a RCBS tray and a Dillon manual pick up tube. Manually picking them up was 10 seconds faster and a lot less aggravating. Now for large primers. NO GO. I tried both Federal and Remmington primers. Both brands got stuck or tilted at the rod drop hole and I gave up after 5 minutes for each brand with less than 10 of each falling into the transfer tube. It's now a question of the drop hole being to small. I can slide a primer across the hole (with the cover off) and it will drop through. With the motor vibrating the primer tilts as it begins to fall and wedges in the drop hole.

Okay I agree it seems a bit not flimsy really but let’s say on the cheap plastic side. With that said I have owned one of these for years. I took care not to toss it around or drop on the floor and all these years later its still works like a champ. I refuse to spend $300 to $400 on a Dillon although I use all Dillon presses for the most part. This $50 investment has saved me a bunch of time and I really like using it when I have to load up a bunch of tubes. It’s actually a thrill to watch all those primers drop into the tube so fast. I recommend it because I use it and it just works. I normally run 2000 round throu in a session with few exceptions.