Old ammo leaking????

[abunaitoo]

I get old ammo from time to time. Most of the time there just old.
Once in a while I get some that is corroded. Noticed that only handloads corrode.
They seem to be corroding from the inside out.
I just got a bunch that seem to be leaking somekind of liquid.
No real smell to the liquid.
Could it be Nitroglycreine????

[Frank46]

I had some 30-06 from WWI that corroded from the inside out. And some 45/70 origional cartridges even older that did not corrode. What type of cartridges are we talking about?. Frank

[ARKANSAS PACKRAT]

I had a can of powder go bad in storage, the can rusted down from the inside so completely I could not say what powder it was. It was setting between 2 other cans, different powder, and they were fine, no internal rust.
At the same time I found some 22-250 loaded rounds that had green corrosion around the case mouth and several case necks were split. I broke them down, the bullets stuck in the case, appeared to be corroded fast. The case necks also seemed brittle. The powder in the cases was clumped together. 10 or so loaded rounds in the same box were OK, I guess they were loaded with a different lot of powder, perhaps a new can that eventually went bad.
My only experience with bad powder in 40 years of loading ammo.
Nick

[nicholst55]

I get old ammo from time to time. Most of the time there just old.
Once in a while I get some that is corroded. Noticed that only handloads corrode.
They seem to be corroding from the inside out.
I just got a bunch that seem to be leaking somekind of liquid.
No real smell to the liquid.
Could it be Nitroglycreine????

Not only handloads corrode, trust me on that. I acquired some very old (1920s or '30s) commercial 7X57mm Mauser ammo that was corroding from the inside out. I also had some early '50s vintage 7.62X54R ammo that was corroding and oozing some type of liquid. I broke all of it down for the projectiles and scrapped the brass.

No idea what the liquid is, but I'm sure someone here can tell us.

[Larry Gibson]

I've had lots of milsurp corrode from the inside out. Mostly is leakage around bullet and sometimes around the primer. Powder has gone bad and most often the primers have gone bad also. I pull the bullets, soak in GI bore cleaner or #9, and vibrate to clean. They are still useable that way. The brass and powder are disposed of. I recently did a batch of 1918 DWM 7x57s that way.

Larry Gibson

[Bad Water Bill]

A couple years ago we had a very interesting discussion about Korean 30/06 powder going bad and turning into a solid green plug at the neck of the brass.

The brass was marked KA 72.

If anybody has any of this in their stash I would suggest breaking it down for safety sake.

[MtGun44]

I think you would know if the liquid were nitroglycerine by the absence of a house when
you came home one day. ;-) My guess is that something is hygroscopic (some sort of
a salt in the powder or breakdown products) and drawing water out of the air and forming
a corrosive salt mixture of some sort.

Bill

[451 Pete]

I came across some information pertaining to the thermal decomposition of powder last winter in a book on ballistics. I will try and explain what I think I know but go easy on me, I am not a chemist.

There are two basic types of smokeless powder. Single base ( nitrocellulose ) powders are made up of guncotton ( cotton or wood pulp ... hydrocarbons from plant fiber ) which is then treated with nitric and sulfuric acid's. The second type of powder's are double base powder's. Double based powders are made from nitrocellulose and 10% - 40% nitroglycerin.

Thermal decomposition takes place as a powder deteriorates from its age. First you should know that the early powders did not have the stabilizers of the powders produced today. And second, todays double based powders contain a lesser percentage of nitroglycerin than the earlier powder's did.

Cellulose by itself is a very stable material but with the addition of the nitric acid things change. Heat is generated by a chemical reaction in the powder of the nitric radicals in the material being in contact with nitric acid as the powder breaks down. When the air is humid the break down process is accelerated and more nitric acid is produced. Some other by products of this chemical break down process is an additional amount of nitric acid and the formation of water. The break down process can produce temperatures of up to 375 degrees or the ignition temperature of the powder. ( In my opinion this is a very good reason to dispose of old smokeless powder if it starts to smell acidic. )

I believe that the liquid you are seeing is the nitric acid combined with water, both being liquid's formed in the decomposition process. This would also explain why your cases are corroding from the inside out.

Hope this helps ... Pete :coffeecom

[Mk42gunner]

I have never seen ammuntion leak liquids; not to say it couldn't happen, but I would be questioning if my coffee was made with water or something else.

Pete,

The dim recesses of my mind are trying to say there is, or was, a triple based powder also. If I am remembering GM 'A' School right, the other ingredient was nitro guanidine, made from bat guano don't you know, (lipstick used to have guano in it too {eighth grade earth science}).

The things that stick in a young man's mind.

Robert

[felix]

Nitroguanidine still exists, though made industrially not from bird do-do, but from merging sulfur and nitro compounds with urea by using a very specialized and somewhat private trade process. The formulated compound is added to double base powder to make the double base powder cooler and slower burning, while at the same time adding an after burner effect to make up for the otherwise resulting lower pressure. Nitroguanidine does not easily ignite, but will explode when its ignition conditions are reached such as the product of time and heat together, and occurs much like that used when annealing brass. This hard ignition property of the powder is why the surplus stuff we get is quite stable in small relative cases; just not enough heat and time to be applied to the nitroguanidine component to make it go full steam. Also this is why when we get to the point of ignition, the load can go through the roof. We regulate the load by the amount of the powder used. Luckily the granules of the powder we get are large and take up a lot of cartridge space. This permits easy regulation. ... felix

[MtGun44]

Th enow closed Sunflower Ordinance Plantt in Eudora, KS west of KC was the guanadine
factory and made powder for 16" naval rifles for WW2. I have flown over it for many years,
they are slowly cleaning up the old facilities.

Bill

[Bad Water Bill]

They closed the Joliet arsenal. Contamination all over the place.

Welcome to Abraham Lincoln National cemetery.

[xfoxofshogo]

had some old flares the alum-in case one for the big flare guns you lock a barrel on or lock in to the side of a hell chopper they where liking some clear stuff
i had a really hard time getting some one to take them off my hands
short of going to the boom squad lol