I have a big box full of AA red hulls. Do they go bad?

I have a lifetime supply of once fired AA hulls in 12, 20, 28 ga and .410 from the '80s and '90s when I seriously competed in Trap and Skeet shoots. Ive kept them in plastic bags in the crawl space under my house. I just brought out a bag last week, and they still load as well as they did 30 years ago.

Same as buffybr thousands of once fired AA's from the same time period still going strong

The AA compression formed hulls are true brass headed unlike most hulls today which are brass washed steel headed. Brass over time and with reworking (resizing) can become harder to the point of cracking however I found when reloading thousands of rounds of AA hulled cartridges for clay target and game shooting, the case mouths wore out before any issue with head cracking materialized.

I've just recently purchased some 20G Winchester AA HS hulls which are true brass headed (low brass) however the brass seems very hard and I am having to run the empty hulls through my resizing/final crimp station on my Lyman Easy Loader as a separate operation before loading up and crimping. If I attempt to crimp and size at the same time the 'hard' ejection of the loaded round causes a deeper crimp than wanted.
Have even tried some sizing lube on the brass heads but this did not make a lot of difference.

These newer three piece straight walled HS hulls from Winchester are 'high strength' so maybe they have achieved this with harder brass which is a pain to resize compared with the old style AA compression formed hulls.

You are fortunate to have a good supply of the old style Winchester hulls, they do last almost forever.

I’ve reloaded some of my grandfathers shells dating from the ‘50’s.

My experience for what it’s worth is as they get older, you get a higher cull rate, and they fail sooner than they would new.

I remember getting 10-15 reloads out of a AA CF hull. Now, the same pile may only work 8-9 times.

You can certainly reload them, but they do age.

I'm reloading some AA hulls that I scrounged in the 60's yet.
They still hold up just fine.
They have been stored over the years in basements, cool temps so I think that helps them out.

I have handled hulls from Garage Sale and other sources at gunshow, flea market, etc that I suspect were stored in attic or maybe other high heat locations.
Some of them the plastic is very brittle. Some to the point of not even being reloadable as they were. They just break and crack being so fragile.
The type of plastic in the hull I imagine varys fom one mfg to the other so some would be weaker to the heat than others. But plastic as a rule doesn't stand up too well to heat.

Plastic wads are the same issue.
They can look good, but handle some of them and see if they are still pliable.
See if you can bend the petels back and they reset w/o cracking.
They can also be brittle, crack & crumble easily if long term storage has been in the wrong place and temp.

They never go bad; they have found them in the Pyramids and they are still good.

It all depends on how they were stored.

Heat, and especially sun, is the worst enemy.

I have several cases of AA 12-gauge factory loaded ammunition. They are about 20 years old and have been stored in my basement, just about ideal cool dry conditions, the entire time. Last week I got some out to shoot. About half of the shells in each box are split to varying amounts at the crimp, see photo. Many of the ones that look normal split when fired. Two different cases were the same. The last previous time I had fired some of these shells was about 10 years ago and they were fine at that time. I have other shells, not AA, that are 40 or more years old and are like new. Has anybody experienced this or have an idea what happened?

Those Winchester Super-Lite shells were not on the market too long. They were introduced with a new pink wad, the WAA12SL, which is still used today for 1oz shot loads. Apparently with 1 1/8oz loads about a third of the shot column was out of the wad.

Maybe high wad pressure was required to get a satisfactory crimp using these wads and this has lead to the case mouths splitting over a period of time due to pressure from the unsupported exposed shot column.

Perhaps this is why Winchester suddenly ceased producing this load.

I have a few early plastic shotshells of various makes that are probably around 40 years old now and they are still in perfect condition. Those Winchesters are weird.

eagle27,

Thanks for the reply. I think you may have nailed it. As it turns out , not all of my AA shells are Super-Lite. A few cases are labled "Light Target Load." I looked a sample of these and they appear to be okay.

IMHO
If you are loading for "club" skeet or sporting clays I think you are over thinking the process using a WAA12SL Wad or Claybuster @ 1200fps load them until they don't look good then load them one more time, you should get 3, 4, 5 reloads from them then throw them away.....
I don't know about the rest of the shooting world but if I miss a target it's not because I have an ugly reload

I have garbage cans full of 12,16, and 20 gauge AA Compression Formed hulls. Some are old. They all load well and I get 8 to 10 or more loads from a true AA CF hull.

I love them and don't load anything else.

quote:

Originally posted by Alec Torres:
I have garbage cans full of 12,16, and 20 gauge AA Compression Formed hulls. Some are old. They all load well and I get 8 to 10 or more loads from a true AA CF hull.

I love them and don't load anything else.

Damn lucky you. I exclusively used 12ga handloads with AA CF hulls for years of clay target and hunting and like you got really good life from them. These hulls still come up for sale on our national auction site quite often but with steel shot now required for water fowl hunting I just don't get to handload 12ga anymore. Now retired I may take up clay target shooting again so will dig out the AA CF hulls I do still have and acquire some more. I love loading these, so easy to produce a beautiful cartridge that feeds without fail in semi-autos.