Sellier & Bellot Rifle Primers

Some Americans think we invented everything and are the only people on earth who know how to make quality products.

- John Barsness

American shooters have the same general tendencies. While we buy some foreign-made products, they usually must be made in countries with reputations for technological excellence, such as optics produced in Germany – or optics sold by U.S.-based companies, even if made in Asia.

While Americans are inventive and do make some good stuff, the rest of the industrialized world also knows a thing or two. During the recent period of extremely high demand for ammunition and handloading components, some doubtful Americans bought foreign-made ammunition and components and discovered they actually worked. Often these purchases were made in desperation, because items they’d depended on for decades simply disappeared, but sometimes the price was too good to ignore.

In late 2015 I bought some Sellier & Bellot primers for the second reason. Graf & Sons is a Missouri company (www.grafs.com) that sells all sorts of shooting stuff. Its website listed both small rifle and large rifle primers, and at such an attractive price, a “brick” of 1,000 each could be shipped to my home in Montana for about the same price as the lowest-priced primers in local stores, despite the added shipping costs, including the mandatory hazardous-materials fee required for primers or powder. If they worked out, I planned to order a bunch more, because one “hazmat” fee applies to an entire shipment, not each item.

Sellier & Bellot was established in 1825 in Prague, in what was then the Austrian province of Bohemia, by two Frenchmen named Louis Sellier and Jean Bellot, who started by making musket caps. It claims to be the oldest company in the world to “continuously supply ammunition products.” Today many American shooters know Sellier & Bellot’s name because of their handgun and rifle ammunition, since the company produces more than a billion rounds annually.