Last year I also stocked a little bit more on components like everyone else. I didn't go crazy and buy primers by the 50,000 as some did, but I did up the inventory a bit.

I am a comptetitive shooter and had a good supply of those components on hand anyhow, thsnkfully. I had 15,000 primers, which may sound like a lot, but it is pretty easy to go through them in a season or two.

What I did do differently was prepare a lot of cases for my hunting rounds and stock pile a corresponding number of primers, bullets, and powder for each.

I did this because of the rumour or fact of "cold welding". What I am talking about is the bullet nearly bonding with the case after long term storage. Now I have shot very old military ammo and most of it went boom and I had no other associated issues, but how many times have you heard of old reloads blowing a gun up? These can't all be contributed to overloading???? Perhaps this was the so called cold welding? I know military ammo has specific storage conditions and also some is sealed with various sealers ranging from tar to lacquer.

Another related issue is old factory rounds firing just fine but splitting the neck on the initial firing of the factory load. This is what is attributed to "cold welding". I read somewhere that it was probably caused by the neck being under tension for years.

I would appreciate any insights here.

Only case I've heard of is From Hatcher, where tin plated bullets bonded to the case, raising pressures to the point, where they were unsafe to shoot.
Grizz

Unless you're planning on having ammo buried in the woods along with a couple of AK47s, I wouldn' worry about it.
I've shot USA ammo that was 20 years old that had been properly stored. Of course that stuff had the primers sealed and the bullet ashalted in. And it went boom. I've shot my own reloads that were sloppily stored that was better than 10 years old. They not only went boom, they went to the same spot they did when new.
IMO, a lot of the stuff you read is the result of conjecture and/or a slow news day.
I've read the post about necks splitting whilst sitting on a shelf and such but I have never had anything like that happen to any of my reloads.

The only instance of factory ammo splitting necks was a friend had a few boxes of green, red, and white box Remington-Peters(?) or it may haver been Remington Express 300 H&H ammo, from the 50's or early 60's. Every one of those split the neck on firing in a plenty serviceable pre 64 Win 70. I don't know if it was a bad lot of brass or was it the hardening of brass tightly crimping a bullet over the years.

I have 40 rounds of my hunting rounds loaded and 100 ready to load someday but put away. Those cases I am using will last a longtime and see no sense in letting it go stale all loaded up. I have unopened powder, primers ands bullets for each.

I still shoot 8mm WW11 loads and they still go Boom . Accuracy ? , well that's a matter of opinion .

As those rounds were made several years prior too my Birth , I can't attest to their original accuracy !.

For the most part out of a couple of my K 98's they picture in 3-4" @ 100 Meters occasionally there's

some fliers !.

A couple of weeks back I was shooting some 180 gr. .30-06 that I loaded (with IMR-4350 & CCI primers) in 1982. Accuracy and velocity were exactly the same as the day I loaded them. They've been stored in a milsurp ammo box, which is quite well sealed.

On the other hand, I have had a situation where some old Remington Bronze Point factory loads bonded to the brass and the pressure went through the roof. Two of the first three blew their primers. I couldn't even pull the bullets from the remainder until I ran them through the seater and push them down a bit to break them loose. They appeared to have originally been sealed with some sort of green lacquer.

Bottom line, I'd be more concerned about factory loads than the stuff I loaded myself.

Keep them in a dark, dry place that will not get overly hot and don't worry a/b them.

I've had 35 Remington cases split after firing out of my 336 pre-crossbolt. They were factory 200 grain core-lokts. They were new in 1977.

Some "old timers" I know have been storing their reloads for long term in good surplus ammo cans. They say a squirt of ether before closing the lid rids the can of oxygen, and water vapor.
I have never tried it but "sounds good".
Of course you must keep the temp "cool" and fairly steady.

muck

I date most of the boxs I put reloads in I know I have shot some 30 plus years old with out trouble.

I have several thousand rounds of ammo of 4 different types from the early 40's and they all work fine and so far all have fired.

I have access to a gentleman who is an energetics expert. I asked him about smokeless powder lifetime. The whole topic is a subset of “Insensitive Munitions”. A term you can Google and find bits and pieces in the public domain.

Smokeless propellants are used in more applications that just cartridges. Rocket motors, explosive warheads, these all use smokeless propellants.

He told me that powder starts deteriorating the day it leaves the powder mill. The rate of deterioration of double based powders is governed by the Arrhenius equation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation. The hotter it is, the faster it goes. Single based powders apparently deteriorate in a linear fashion.

What the expert told me was that double base powders are made of nitroglycerine (NG) and nitrocellulose (NC). The NG wants to wick its way, through capillary action, into the NC. Forming a lower energy state compound. In the process of combination nitric acid gas is released. As nature wants to go to a lower energy state, this reaction is inevitable. There are preventive stabilizers in the powder which eat up the nitric acid. The stabilizers get consumed over time.

Exposing powder to high temperatures for extended periods of time is bad. Heat accelerates the reduction-oxidation process.

Cool dry storage conditions, he actually said “artic”, are about the best for long term storage of powder.

The expert said that Navy powders are initially tested at 10 years. They put a litmus paper in contact with the powder. If the paper changes color, nitric gas is present.

If the paper shows a problem, they then chemically test the powder for the amount of stabilizer in the powder. If that drops below 20% original, than the powder is scrapped. You have to have the original powder records to know how much stabilizer was in the powder when it was made.

The Army scraps by clock time. Double based powders are scrapped at 20 years, single based 45 years.

A few years ago TALON released tons of demilled military powders. That stuff was at the end of its service life. Half of my surplus 4895 powders went bad. One keg turned red and was outgassing and it was poured out on the lawn. About 8 pounds did not turn red, but went bad in the case.

First indications that I had a problem were that I had a lot of split case necks on fired cartridges. Then case necks started to crack on unfired ammunition. When I pulled bullets, I smelt nothing, in the case or in the bottle, but I found green corrosion on the bottom of bullets. I believe that nitric acid was weakening the work hardened areas of the case, and causing corrosion on the bottom of the bullets.

Incidentally, the powder shot exceptionally well in cases that did not have case neck cracks. I shot some exceptional scores with the stuff at 600 yards with 168 Match bullets. I had "funny" retorts on some rounds. The expert said as the surface of gun powder changes, burn rates are affected.

If the powder changes color, it is bad. It is grossly bad. It was bad a long time before the color changed. And it is time to pour it out. That is when you typically see red rust in a metal powder can (acid gas eating the can up) and red powder.

I was told that when enough nitric acid is released, the powder will spontaneously combust. The expert diagramed the chemical reaction and hot spots can develop as energy is released. As the Military is extremely scandal sensitive, they won’t tell anyone that big bunkers have blown up, but they have. Ammunition depots go Kaboom all the time due to old ammunition spontaneously combusting. You can Google this and find incident reports in the literature. But you won’t find mention of some of the American ammunition incidents that this expert investigated. We Googled one incident he wrote a report on and found nothing in the public domain.

Government Rule #2: Minimize Scandal.

Water is bad for smokeless gun powders as it damages the powder surface and wicks NG to the surface. Even through age is reducing the total energy content of the powder , wicking NG to the surface will increase the initial burn rate of the propellant, which has lead to pressure spikes.

Contact with rust is bad for powders. As I understand contact with iron oxide increases the rate of the reduction-oxidation reaction.

The Navy used to store cannon powder in pools but the powder was to be recycled. I guess the water absorbed the nitric acid and kept everything cool, preventing heat build up. But the expert told me that the dry lifetime of powder is rapidly reduced after exposure to water.

Hey Slam, Very nice and interesting report.

quote:

Originally posted by airgun1:
The only instance of factory ammo splitting necks was a friend had a few boxes of green, red, and white box Remington-Peters(?) or it may haver been Remington Express 300 H&H ammo, from the 50's or early 60's. Every one of those split the neck on firing ...

I walked through an old hardware store in the late `70s and found some dust covered really old 22Hornets which were Remington. The original sticker was on them and I got both(2) boxes.

They began splitting as they were fired. Called Remington and gave them the Lot#s. The fellow I was talking to told me to send them to his attention. A few weeks passed and 4 new boxes had been sent to me.
-----

Only other Factory Ammo problem I've had was with some Remington 300Sav cartridges. They literally would not pattern on an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper at 100yds. Handloads with an Original Lee Loader put 3" groups on the Targets with 150gr Soild Base Noslers and the Lee recommended IMR-4320. Properly built Loads with RCBS Dies, the same bullets and IMR-4064 were right at 1.5".

Move forward 20+ years and I refound the old Remington Factory 300Sav ammo. Decided to "Pull the Bullets" to use for Fire Forming, and trash the remainder of the Cartridges. What I discovered was they had been made with Set-Up Bullets. All kinds of wierd shapes and weights. No wonder they wouldn't group for spit. Obviously someone was under the gun to keep Scrap Costs low and Production high, so they used them. Pitiful!

Last summer, a friend found some .220 Swifts that he loaded around 1980, then forgot about. Powder was IMR 4064, bullets were Speer 52 gr HPs and Hornaday 50 gr SX.

Although 30 years old, the loads shot well inside 1", and those shot over my chrono varied by no more than 8 fps. There was no special storage conditions; they were kept in a basement with no humidity control, while stored in the 20-round cardboard boxes that the brass was packaged in.

From that limited experience, I suspect that handloads can have a fairly long shelf life.

Excellent info here! I am digging it.

With all this talk about powder, what about primers? I am assuming that powder will deteriorate faster than primer, so that is the weakest link in the equation, and thus the focus of our concern?

quote:

Originally posted by Not_Infringed:
With all this talk about powder, what about primers? I am assuming that powder will deteriorate faster than primer, so that is the weakest link in the equation, and thus the focus of our concern?

Three things concern me:
1. Heat. Living in the Southeastern USA, and having traveled a good bit when I was working, getting the house too hot was a concern. Never had an air conditioner problem while away though, so it did not become a real issue.

I have a buddy who does his reloading in a separate building and does not keep it temperature controlled. So far, it has not created any noticable problems, but he Hunts fairly close.

2. Ammonia and it's vapors. If you have Windex with Ammonia, or " ANY " Ammonia containing cleaner in the house - get rid of it. The vapors causes Pin Holes in the Brass Cases as well as Flexable Bronze Gas Lines going to stoves.

3. Complete idiots(like teenScum) getting anywhere near the Reloading Room. You control this at the Door coming into the house. But preferably at the Gate entering your property.

Best of luck to you.

Powder, primers, and assembled rounds will last a longtime unless exposed to too much heat or too many extremes. I have my components on hand and ready to assemble...someday.

My main concern was the cold welding issue, fact, fiction, Plausible, Busted, etc!