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Hi everybody, my mother has decided to pass along all of her 12 ga loading stuff to me. She used to shoot trap a few decades ago and had a pile of hulls, wads, primers, bags of shot, a 12# keg of 700X and a Texan reloader. I have to drive to Idaho to pick it up and tote it back to Arkansas.
What should I look for on the old hulls and wads to see if they are any good? They have been stored in a closet for about 40 years...
TIA
Heat and light damage plastic.
Stored in a closet, everything should be good. The old WW 12 CF Hulls are still used by Trap shooters.(If they can find them)
The wads may be brittle. Check them by bending and pulling the petals and see if they break.
The old Texan reloader are still in use and you can find parts of e-bay.
I still shoot some 40 year old stuff in Trap. if stored properly, it lasts a long time.
Good Luck.
If stored the way you state may be all OK, heat and light, humidity are the damaging items, try a primer, look and smell the powder, if sweet smelling, then OK, hulls are tough, see if primer pockets are loose, wads, see if still pliable, if brittle then no good.
I agree if still pliable shoot-em. I acquired a large box of similar hulls locally to me and have been shooting them for a couple years. Just check for cracks and splits
I'm currently (or will be when it warms up a little more) shooting Alcan 209's from the 70's. 700X from a black steel can in hulls from the same vintage. Only thing I've had to throw out over the years is wads. For what ever reason, they seem to be unusable before anything else. Doesn't matter how they are stored.
Open the bags of lead shot out side very carefully with the wind at your back. I've opened more than a few dusty bags of shot. Have a plastic bucket with a lid. If it's dusty, pour the shot in the bucket, a couple of good spritzes of WD-40 and swirl. May want to follow that with a half a teaspoon of powdered graphite to help flow through the press.
I use John Deere seed box lubricant. Left over from a prior life.
Look on fleabag, used to be there for cheap.
I also use the graphite as a filler with epoxy, both for color and if I want a cast-in-place lower strength bearing. Surprisingly good bearing material.
Bottle in the middle:
https://www.deere.ca/assets/images/c...ricant-new.jpg
I have old style AA hulls I was given 20 years ago and they have been loaded 11-12 times and they still work just fine. When the Crimp starts to split I load them one more time on the DL 266 Single stage and use them for 3 gun and practice ammo and leave them lay wherever they fall.
Randy
Thanks much for the input.
If you get dusty shot , try tumbling with some liquid floor wax, it coats it nicely and makes it go through the loader smoothly. I also went from shooting poorly to always shooting 100 straight(Ha Ha).
New wads are cheep if you need them. Brother and I were reloading older AA's a lot. Sometimes, they need to be resized if another gun shot them. I ran into the brass being too big more with my beretta a400 than he did with his CZ.
The old WW AA hulls are better than the new ones. If the wad petals break off if you bend them they are bad otherwise they’re good.
I have a 30 gallon trash can full of AA hulls that gotta be near 20 years old.. I still load em, but only once.. They would probably take a couple more loads, but I have so many and I shoot shotgun so infrequently anymore it just isn't worth my time.
The compression-formed AA's I'm using now are all of twenty, probably thirty years old, once fired, and I just keep working my way through them. There's no sign of cracking or brittleness so I'll keep on throwing them in the "twice fired" drum and continue to load them. Considering the useful life of these hulls, and the fact that I'm too cheap to throw anything away, I'll probably have enough to last the rest of my life.Quote:
Originally Posted by pa.frank