have been playing around with these tracers projectiles that i have loaded.when you see them bounce off a bank or tree etc etc is this the actual whole projectile ricocheting or the phosphorous coming out of the as end?

Those are the bullets bouncing .Tracers CAN start fires !!!

are you saying that i shouldn't be using them

Understand that they can start fires .Do not fire into woods or other flammable areas. Use only proper backstop that will prevent ricochets and will not burn.

it's true, they can start fires pretty easily. It's best to fire into an un packed dirt backstop, only shoot them on a rainy day.

I used to work in a Middle East war zone one time, and bush fires started by tracers were very common in the summertime. Some old unexploded artillery shells with phosphoric load also tended to go off every now and then due to the heat and cause fires as well. A friend of mine also managed to start a bushfire on a shooting range here in Finland with .308 NATO tracers on a hot summer day.

Shooting tracers is a good way to learn to understand how bullets really can ricochet to ANY direction. A very learning experience was to fire 100 machine gun tracers into a hillside full of various sized rocks at night. It was quite beautiful actually, but slightly uncomfortable too, to see them ricochet even towards you.

Tracers need to be treated with even more respect than normal ammo, that's for sure.

Sometimes it is the whole bullet, sometimes just the phosphorus.

I have started several fires shooting tracers on our range when the grass was and dry.

Managed to put all of them out with out the Fire Dept.

It is really fun to shoot tracers out of an M 14 at dusk at a rock on the side of a mountain about 1200 yards away.

Really neat to have several "on the way" at the same time.

I started a helluva fire with a trcer once, took me a while to put it out, woops...

stationed in twenty nine palms california we used to start fires all the time with our m16s and the 25mm main guns. The coolest light show with tracers is wathing a 25mm gatling gun go off at night.