My 8mm mauser experience.

[AMraider]

To make a long story short I had a case failure with some 50's Yugo surplus ammo in my M48a Yugo mauser. No injuries due to always wearing safety glasses and the great design of the 98 Large Ring Action. I decided not to use the 50's Yugo anymore so I bought 5k of berdan primers and started using the powder and bullets reloaded into 70-90's Yugo brass with great success. Tried making the old primed brass inert by soaking in various oils,solvents etc for a few days but they would still go off. Then I just started loading and firing the old brass, but even an old worn out Turk rifle does not deserve that abuse so I looked into making some light loads with them and finally settled on using some cast bullets. Using some Alliant 2400 and some 170 grn .323 I headed off to the range. Great Fun! Mild report and very little recoil out of my 98/22 and some pretty decent groups at 50 yrds. Not so well at 100 but I kept experimenting with different charges. Then I read about Trail Boss so I went that route the groups were getting better with fewer grains than the 2400. Tried 11 grns Trail Boss behind the 170 grn bullets in my M48a and got the group pictured fired from a forearm rest @ 100yrds. Couldn't be happier and now I don't have to waste those old primed brass.

jeff

[3006guns]

A shame about that brass, but good that you put it to good use...VERY good use! What sort of failure did you have?

Trail Boss has become one of my favorite powders for rifle cartridges in the last two years. I fired two identical loads of TB and Unique in the same caliber and the TB had noticebly less recoil with cleaner burning. That doesn't make Unique any less of a powder....it just means that I have another option available.

The berdan problem still haunts us. I have several thousand 8x57 Turk and 7.65 Argentine that have beautiful brass but of course aren't "reloadable". I keep checking the major suppliers for berdan primers but they're always out of stock.

Someday............:bigsmyl2:

[HARRYMPOPE]

I also shoot 11-14g of TrailBoss in the 8 x 57.It is a nice cheap load to shoot.

HMP

[AMraider]

Here is a pic of the failure.

jeff

[frkelly74]

That definitely let the genie out of the bottle. Nasty!

I was using Herco, lots of carbon black. I am using Unique at present and having fun. Still a little dirty but I have it and it works well.

[izzyjoe]

that will make you pucker up. glad to hear worked up a good target load with trailboss. i have to get me some of that.

[adrians]

:happy dance: trailboss :happy dance:

[higgins]

I had one of the 50s Yugo split exactly like the 3d one in your photo - all the way to the primer pocket. No more shooting that lot of ammo for me, so I pulled the bullets, reduced the powder charge about 10%, and loaded everything back into a commercial 8x57 case. Since I got that ammo back when it was very cheap, even with a new primer I'm shooting 8mm for about 11-12 cents per round. When the case failed I knew immediately something serious had happened. Fragments from something broke the skin in a couple of places on my forehead. I was wearing prescription safety lenses so not harm was done to me. The bolt face was burned where the crack was, but not badly. Yes, the '98 action handles ruptured cases as well as it's reputed to. When it came to discarding the cases with live primers I found out the best way was to grip it near the base with visegrips and let the case stick through a gap or knothole in a bench and pop the primer with a small flat punch and hammer, wearing glasses and leather gloves. At first I fired the primers in the rifle, but after popping off about 50 of them found out that the corrosive primer residue went into the bolt lug recess and inside the bolt body since there was no pressure to seal the chamber. I considered saving the defective cases with live primers for possible future low pressure loads but decided against it since they may get loaded with full power (and corrosive) loads if they left my control.

[Donor8x56r]

I also shoot 11-14g of TrailBoss in the 8 x 57.It is a nice cheap load to shoot.

HMP

Strange.I tried exactly the same load in my M48A without any decent result at all.

To make matters worse cases where going dark very fast in the similar fashion to cases shot with BP.

I have a lot more luck with Red Dot,Green Dot and recently found old Winchester Super Target powder.

BTW-what sight setting did you use to get it right at 100 yrds?

[frkelly74]

Today I loaded up some of my Lee cast boolits with some Alcan 5 powder instead of my unique load. My usual standard of success is clay pigeons on the bank at 50 yd , but today I couldn't find any whole ones so I put up some pieces. I had no trouble hitting the pieces. I think these were a little faster than the unique loads. judging by the time lag between the boom and the smack.

[AMraider]

The case failure was the 11th round of the 1st pack of a 900 round case. It happened so fast that I had no time to react but I knew something bad happened when a tremendous blast of air hit just above my safety glasses. If I wore a toupee it would have ended up in the next county. After checking my fingers and arms and face for damage I looked at the rifle and It seemed no worse for wear. This happened several years ago and I have a nice flinch/click/bang shooting style 8-).
This same M48a is what I shot that group with and the sight is set at 500 meters. It is in like new condition. My M24/47, M24/52c and long barreled 98/22 do not like that load at 100 yards but they do pretty well at 50 yrds with it.

The Pic from top to bottom.
M25/52c
M24/47
M48a
SKS

jeff

[ElDorado]

I’m glad I saw this. I have about 300 rounds of 1954 Yugo. I haven’t had this problem, but I haven’t shot much of it, either. Thanks for the heads up.

[9.3X62AL]

The 8 x 57 Mauser JS has been a very fine cast boolit cartridge for me. Those Mauser-style barley-corn sights don't do my 56 year-old eyesight any favors, but I can keep the Lee 175 grain castings inside 2" at 100 yards/10 shots pretty reliably with 16.0 grains of 2400. Sight setting to hit point-of-aim/point of impact is 400 meters for 100 yards. Velocity is in the 1600-1650 FPS ballpark from my G98/40.