When milsurp ammo goes bad.........

[WallyM3]

Saturating it with WD-40. ?

[willvabch]

Garbage disposal

[madsenshooter]

Send it to me to throw in the sulpher creek.

[Frank46]

I had about 800 rounds of British 303. It did not enjoy a good life in storage. Neck splits were common. Pulled the remaining bullets, burned off the powder a little at a time and scrapped the cases. Somewhere around here is a box with about 700 or so 303 bullets. Frank

[birddog1148]

I have a bandoleer of WW1 30-06 ammo I have had stored in the closet at my parents house for the last 25 years or so. Came out of an estate and I bought all the old Military stuff. Going to have to post some pics, but now I am wondering what I should do with it, some of the necks are cracked and corroded. Have just kind of held onto it because of it's age until now.

[Matt_G]

What is the best way to get rid of degraded power besides burning?

Spread it on your lawn.
Great fertilizer...

[dale2242]

Larry, I dismantled some 7.65 Arg milsurp ammo with exactly the same issues.
I pulled the apart with an impact bullet puller.
and the necks of the cases broke off at the top of the shoulder.
The corrosion had eaten into the base of some of the bullets very badly.
Nasty looking stuff.....dale

[Artful]

I had a sealed spam can of 7.62x54r that was junk when opened - nothing salvageable.
I now when buying spam cans open them within limits of complaint/warranty replacement for comm. surplus
I have much more faith in western surplus.

[TNsailorman]

Hence the warning on powder: "store in a cool, dry climate." I had some old WW II 30-06 ammo that had corrosion around the outside of the primers. I pulled the rounds down and checked the components. Powder smelled ok, bullets and cases showed no corrosion anywhere but on the outside edges of and inside primer cup itself. I cleaned the primer pockets with diluted a vinegar and water solution. I reamed the primer crimp out. I re-primed the cases with a Federal large rifle primer. I reloaded the rounds using the same components and took them to the range to fire. They shot and grouped just fine with no signs of pressure. The ammo came out of a can of surplus LC ammo I had bought back in the 60's. There were only a few rounds in the can that were showed this corrosion. They were is sealed boxes inside the case, not loose or on clips. I have seen fired cases from corrosive lots of 30-06 that showed the same corrosion inside the necks that Larry showed in his picture. These were cases that had been fired at the local range and left on the ground, which I picked up and went thru the same cleaning process I had used on the primer pocket corrosion. They are still going strong after several reloading. I don't know the chemistry involved but Pirate69's opinion might be spot on. I doubt if very many ammunition warehouses were air conditioned or humidity controlled, especially in the third world countries. my .02 anyway, james

[TNsailorman]

follow up: None of the ammo I mentioned looked anywhere near as bad as the pictures birddog shows. That is nasty looking stuff. james

[454PB]

I've been "pouring powder" for 45 years now, and have also disassembled many rounds of old ammunition. In all that time, the only powders I've ever seen deteriorate and/or cause corrosion like this are "IMR" or extruded. I've never seen it with ball powders.

I had a can of IMR 4064 that sat around unopened for 20 or more years, and when I broke the factory seal, it was full of red dust. The metal can was rusty inside and the smell was acrid enough to take my breath away.

[SlamFire1]

Gunpowder has a shelf life. This is a high energy compound that is breaking down, from day one, to a low energy compound. Our gunpowders are either nitrocellulose or nitrocellulose & nitroglycerine. The nitroglycerine is there basically for the energy boast. Because nitroglycerine attacks the double bonds on nitrocellulose the lifetime of double based powders is less than half that of single based. Stabilizers are mixed with the nitrocellulose/nitroglycerine as a sacrificial compound: stabilizers soak up the nitric acid gas that is created when nitrocellulose deteriorates. When the stabilizer gets low , gunpowder is extremely unstable and unsafe. In quantity it will auto combust and the burn rate is irregular. Burn rate instability has and will blow up firearms.

A good rule of thumb is that single base powders will last 45 years and double based 20 years. Like all rules of thumb this is wrong more often than it is right.

This thread has really excellent pictures:

Has anyone else had Vihtavuori N140 corrode in loaded ammo?

http://www.falfiles.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3745264

Notice that the gunpowder is only around 25 years old and yet people are experiencing nasty corrosion due to nitric acid gas release from the gunpowder. It was not that long ago that 20 years was considered the shelf life of gunpowder.

Army Ordnance Magazine, May 1931, Safety Hazards, Picatinny Arsenal

Smokeless powder constitutes one of the greatest hazards from a storage standpoint, due to the fact that is subject to deterioration and at the best cannot be expected to have a life greater than about twenty years

The worst enemy of gunpowder is heat. The lifetime of gunpowder is reduced exponentially with increases in temperature. This chart came from a UN manual on ammunition inspection. Section 7.3 is well worth reading

Surveillance and in-service proof - the United Nations
http://www.un.org/disarmament/convar...Proof(V.1).pdf



Exposure to water is bad, even though water is a polar covalent molecule, it acts ionic. All ionic compounds break gunpowder down faster. I think that may be a reason why gunpowder now comes in plastic cans, the tin cans released rust into the powder and that accelerated powder breakdown. Water is in air, so it is best to keep gunpowder cans sealed.


Federal says their ammunition has a ten year shelf life:
Federal Ammunition :

http://www.federalpremium.com/company/faq.aspx

What is the shelf life of ammo and storage?

Store reloading components and ammunition in a cool, dry place, protected from direct exposure to sunlight. If stored properly there is a 10-year shelf life on loaded ammunition.

There is very little information on the internet about gunpowder aging and causing pressure problems because all that was ever needed to be known was determined well before WW2. However ball powders did come out at the end of WW2 and I was able to find this data showing that gunpowder at the end of its lifetime will pressure spike. Heat is used to accelerate the age of gunpowder, so what you are seeing is in fact because of “age”, not heat, but it took heat to age the powder quickly. The IMR is a single based and the WC is a double based ball powder.

INVESTIGATION OF THE BALLISTIC AND CHEMICAL STABILITY OF 7.62MM AMMUNITION LOADED WITH BALL AND IMR PROPELLANT

Frankfort Arsenal 1962

3. Effects of Accelerated Storage Propellant and Primer Performance

To determine the effect of accelerated isothermal storage upon propellant and primer performance, sixty cartridges from each of lots E (WC 846) and G (R 1475) were removed from 150F storage after 26 and 42 weeks, respectively. The bullets were then removed from half the cartridges of each lot and from an equal number of each lot previously stored at 70F. The propellants were then interchanged, the bullets re-inserted, and the cases recrimped. Thus, four variations of stored components were obtained with each lot.

Chamber pressures yielded by ammunition incorporating these four variations were as follows. These values represent averages of 20 firings.

You can google “surplus ammunition Kaboom” or the equivalent and find a surprising number of reports of firearms that have blown up with old military ammunition. Now I am going to tell you the terrible truth about surplus ammunition. The stuff was surplused because it was at the end of its service life and the Army that owned it, determined that it was unsafe to store and unsafe to shoot. Some Ammunition Specialist went through that lot and found evidence that the gunpowder had deteriorated and the stuff was sold to eager Americans who do not know about the risks of old ammunition.



This section came from the Dec 2003 U.S Army Propellant Management Guide:

Stabilizers are chemical ingredients added to propellant at time of manufacture to
decrease the rate of propellant degradation and reduce the probability of auto ignition during its expected useful life.

As nitrocellulose-based propellants decompose, they release nitrogen oxides. If the nitrogen oxides are left free to react in the propellant, they can react with the nitrate ester, causing further decomposition and additional release of nitrogen oxides. The reaction between the nitrate ester and the nitrogen oxides is exothermic (i.e., the reaction produces heat). Heat increases the rate of propellant decomposition. More importantly, the exothermic nature of the reaction creates a problem if sufficient heat is generated to initiate combustion. Chemical additives, referred to as stabilizers, are added to propellant formulations to react with free nitrogen oxides to prevent their attack on the nitrate esters in the propellant. The stabilizers are scavengers that act rather like sponges, and once they become “saturated” they are no longer able to remove nitrogen oxides from the propellant. Self-heating of the propellant can occur unabated at the “saturation” point without the ameliorating effect of the stabilizer. Once begun, the self-heating may become sufficient to cause auto ignition.


There are only a few compounds used as stabilizers, and as the Propellant Management Guide tells us, stabilizers are consumed with age.

This is a good reference on stabilizers,

ROLE OF DIPHENYLAMINE AS A STABILIZER IN PROPELLANTS;ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY OF IPHENYLAMINE IN PROPELLANTS

Nitrocellulose-base propellants are essentially unstable materials that decompose on aging with the evolution of oxides of nitrogen. The decomposition is autocatalytic and can lead to failure of the ammunition or disastrous explosions.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/783499.pdf

They are using heat to age the powder and as the powder ages, the stabilizer content decreases.




The bitter smell and red color (probably nitric acid gas) we see and smell in very old gunpowder is a consequence of not enough stabilizer left to sop up all of the NOx. As NOx escapes it reacts with water to produce nitric acid gas. That nitric acid gas corrodes brass, bullets, weakens brass, is evidenced by cracked case necks, eats up the ammunition containers; nitric acid gas is nasty stuff. I am certain that a cloud of red fuming nitric acid gas is as toxic as any of the chemicals used in WW1 for chemical warfare.

Our Armed Services have stockpile surveillance programs (but each Service does theirs a little differently) and one of the easiest things to show that gunpowder is at the end of its service life is that red fuming nitric acid gas. Of course there are a lot of tests, if you want to see all the different tests the military uses look at Mils Std 286 Propellants, Solid: Sampling, Examination and Testing to be found at https://assist.daps.dla.mil/quicksearch/.

One common test for gunpowder age is placing the suspect powder in an oven at 65 C (150 F) until it fumes. If the sample fumes within 30 days the lot in the field is either chemically tested for the percentage of stabilizer or it is simply scrapped.

This is from a 1969 Symposium:




This is from a 1970 Symposium:



Each service has its own peculiarities, a Navy expert told me they keep master samples in test tubes. In the test tube is a methyl violet paper, if the paper changes color, they track down the powder lot and test to see how much stabilizer is left. If the amount is less than or equal to 20%, the lot is scrapped. I think this is called the Methly Violet test, or Talliani test in Mil Std 286.

The Army must do something similar because page 5-11 of the 2003 Army Logistics Propellant Management Guide provides the protocols for their Stockpile Propellant Program. The trigger for investigation is: "When Master Sample Stability Failure Occurs". The Navy and Army are consistent in that they scrap powders and propellants when the stabilizer is decreased from 100% to 20%.

If you don’t have a chemistry lab to check the percent of stabilizer all you have are the gross indications of seeing fuming nitric acid and smelling a horrible bitter smell. The smell will knock your socks off. If you see or smell fuming nitric acid the powder went bad long ago. The stuff is absolutely unsafe to shoot and unsafe to store.

Why some powder goes bad quickly and other lasts longer, heck if I know. The strangeness of this can be found in this thread at Post 61. This is Unclenick’s experience and it is worth looking at the picture:


http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=539440&highlight=old+gunpowder&pa ge=3


Of particular interest to me was the link to the thread on N140. In the early 1990's, my dad got a 1/4 lb free sample container of N140 at Camp Perry, and gave half of it to me. That's about 20 rounds worth in .308; not enough to do serious load development with. I put it in a plastic bottle with a plated and painted steel cap with cardboard seal disc. I left it at the back of a high shelf in the basement where it was out of sight and soon out of mind. Some time later I bought a full pound of N140 to experiment with, but that original 1/4 lb continued to sit.

I finally re-encountered the bottle during some cleaning out activity. It looked like this:


The powder in it was not powder any longer. The grains were all stuck together. That was the result of the lid seal failing and letting humidity in. The acid fumes corroded the lid out. Rinse water put over it poured out yellow. At that point I cut the container open and buried the wet mass under the compost heap to let nature take its course.

Interestingly, the remaining 1/8 lb still at my father's place (also untouched)



Regardless of expectations that gunpowder and surplus ammunition will last forever, gunpowder does not get better with age, heat ages powder fast, and old gunpowder will blow up your firearm. There are irrational types out there, deniers, who don’t believe that ammunition deteriorates, that the pressure increases, and can blow up guns. You encounter deniers on all sorts of topics, such as those who don’t believe that single heat treat Springfield have brittle receivers. They will always create arguments that the blowups were due to “bore obstructions”, "over loads", anything but the most plausible cause: old deteriorated gunpowder. However anyone with a $100,000 dollar machine gun should seriously consider for themselves the risks of shooting cheap surplus military ammunition. Machine gunners shoot orders of magnitude more ammunition than most people, so as they are burning through a pallet of surplus ammunition, they are more likely to find that statistically improbable bad round. A machine gunner bud of mine told me he had “blown the top cover twice” with 50’s Yugo 8mm. After I told him about pressures and old ammunition, he said it all made sense. If however, that cheap surplus ammunition had wrecked the registered part of the machine gun, his machine gun would have been a total loss. The BATF is not your friend in this matter as the policy of the Federal Government is to reduce the number of machine guns in the hands of the public. You blow yours up, guess what, that is considered a good thing, and you have to find another to replace the one you destroyed.

[barnetmill]

I had something like the OP case to happen to me with 30-06 reloads based on WWII GI cases and 3031 powder. The powder was routinely stored up in my uncle's attic in Meeteetse, WY in about 1961 when I reloaded them. Reloaded rounds were stored for 6 yrs in the late 70's and early 80's in my brother;s attic somewhere else and about 1985 I was shooting them at a rifle range in Lafayette, LA. They were shooting very well in a 1917 Enfield and I noticed some smoke coming out of the breech. Foolish me I fired another one and had a partial case separation. I took out the round and noticed corrosion. I wanted to look at the powder and stuck the bullet of a loaded round in the muzzle to work the bullet loose. The case broke in half. What had happen apparently was that the nitrate (N03) had dissociated from the powder and attacked the brass case. Nitric acid dissolves copper. That brass had become extremely fragile. A lot of good lessons learn that day.

[tygar]

Since I have discovered dessicant, I have always put the small packs in any opened powder & larger packs in ammo cans.

Don't know how effective it is but havn't seen any problems.

[WallyM3]

Tygar, what dessicant do you use?

The last batch I got melted at the recommended regeneration temp.

[tygar]

I just use all the little packs I get in various items & change them about every year. No big plan, just thought it a good idea.

[WallyM3]

That's a pretty good plan, actually. Thanks.

[barnetmill]

Rice is a very good natural desiccant and is easily purchased as needed for very little.

[WallyM3]

(duh..oh!) Rice is one of the ingredients that I use in my brass tumblers.

[barnetmill]

(duh..oh!) Rice is one of the ingredients that I use in my brass tumblers.

Often used to keep salt from lumping during hot southern summers.