Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Reloader 17 and storage effect on brass?

I had not shot my 6mm-250 for awhile so I pulled two partial boxes of ammo that I had loaded 10/14 and another box loaded on 3/15. Looking them over, I noticed that all the necks of the loaded rounds had a crack. When I held the bullet in one hand and the case in the other, and applied a slight side pressure, the brass fractured along multiple lines, not only along the original crack. The necks appears to have lost all malleability. The 10/14 box is 2x fired R-P .22-250 brass with Berger bullets. The 3/15 box is 1x fired WW 22-250 brass with TSX bullets. The two boxes of ammo only had RL-17 and CCI 200 primers in common. I've checked other stored ammo loaded around the same time frame with CCI primers but with a different powder. Those appear normal.

I've taken several empty brass cases from each 6mm-250 box, resized them and seated a bullet. The cases behaved normally.

The above observations seem consistent with a WAG that RL-17 out-gases something that makes brass under bullet tension brittle over time.

Wondering if what happened is an isolated case or has happened to any others.

Dunno what it would "out-gas." Exposure to ammonia gas will make brass brittle, but there isn't any ammonia in smokeless powder.

The only other cause of brittle brass I know of is mercuric primers. They only became a problem after the transition to smokeless powder, because the vast majority of the mercury ended up in the fouling of black powder. But that obviously isn't the cause either.

I have had this happen to a number of different cases (7MM Mashburn & 6.5 Rem) loaded with RL(22 & 25) powders. I have suspected that it is because the brass has been reloaded too many times without proper annealing and the brass cracks rather than stretching because it is slightly brittle.

It doesn't happen to all the cases so if it is gas evolution then it isn't consistent for all loaded rounds.

I don't intend to hijack this thread, I apologize, but here is another case-related mystery:

I don't know if this is related or not but it is a puzzle to me. I have a plastic storage container that has several boxes of 30-30 ammo, factory and reloads, that has always been stored indoors. I recently pulled out an old box of Federal ammo that had been once fired and reloaded back in 1999. I was going to shoot it up since it was one of the older boxes I had.

When I opened the box there was massive corrosion on many of the cases. As you can see, after I reloaded these cases I placed them back in the Federal factory plastic shell holders and put them back in the factory box.

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Here is the load:
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The slightest pressure on the side of the bullet snapped the case in two. There are fine cracks in the neck under those lines of corrosion.

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The strange thing, also, is that when I dumped out the powder, the entire inside of the case was covered in corrosion, from the head to the neck. It appeared that the cases had corroded from the inside out.


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This is what the base of the bullet looked like:

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I checked all of the other ammo that was in the plastic storage box, including some other reloads of the same age. This corroded lot was the only box of Federal cases. There was no corrosion present on any of the other ammo. Not even a speck. Other brands of cases loaded with the same load looked fine. The plastic cartridge holders didn't seem to be the cause.

As far as I know, these cases were not treated any differently when I reloaded them back in 1999. I don't tumble my cases or use any liquid cleaners. I don't understand how the corrosion started from the inside, if that is what happened. That is how it seems. The powder that I dumped out of the broken case looks perfectly normal.

Has anyone else had this sort of thing happen? Does anybody know what happened here? Is it just a bad lot of cases? Could it be some kind of reaction between the bullet matel and the brass? The worst of the corrosion is all around the base of the neck. This is a first for me in 50 years of reloading. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

I have had this happen with some reloaded 308 brass.
It was done back in the early 80's and most of the necks were split some.
Did a test with some brass that was annealed and some that were not and after 10 or so years took them out.
Sure enough the ones that were annealed were fine,the ones that were not had cracks.Not all had them but about half.

I just did a pre shooting inspection on some 6 yr old 300 wsm loaded w/re17. I want to make sure none of them had taken a "set" during the six-year storage so I hit them with the seating die and bumped them down .005 deeper. Hornady 165s moved like butter just like they were loaded today. Ttsx Barnes moved pretty ez...but with a little"pop" as they broke loose. Then I tried the nosler 168j competition 168 bullets and I was amazed I barely could get them to move...they were like cement.... I had very deep rings at the top of the bullet where the seating stem was pushing on it. One bullet I never did get to move I thought I was going to collapse the shoulder and I meant to throw it away but it got mixed in with some other shells and got fired. I would have expected this to show some crazy pressure signs and velocity but it was shot over the chronograph in a string of other shootings and it registered perfectly normal. And we had no split necks.

Just my WAG, did you use some kind of brass polishing compound when tumbling the brass? Maybe there was residual brass polish coating the inside of the cases that caused the corrosion.

I remember reading about de-coppering agents that are are added to some powders. Could these de-coppering agents have any effect on the copper that makes up the brass alloy?

The most commonly used decoppering agent these days is tin oxide, which definitely doesn't do anything like that. Neither does bismuth, the only realistic second choice since lead became an environmental no-no in powder.

Thanks for your thoughts. I did not tumble the brass. I treated these cases the same as I treat all my rifle cases.
I use 0000 steel wool to clean the outside and clean the inside of the necks with the nylon brush and mica powder in the Midway case neck lube kit.

Out of hundreds of lots of rifle brass over decades this is the only lot that this has ever happened to. I have plenty of loaded rounds of various cartridges some dating back at least into the early 1980's and I haven't seen this before.

I will add that I have used very little Federal rifle brass over the years. In the common cartridges I mostly use Norma or Winchester, or more lately, Nosler. Then some Remington and very little Federal.

Nifty -

JUST for comparison... I've used Federal & Win brass MORE than any others over the years. I used Federal MORE in the past and gradually the majority became Win.

I've been stocked up on Win brass for several yrs, so I have avoided the yrs when people report problems with Win.

I only mention these facts for comparison.


Jerry

nifty-two-fifty;
Top of the morning to you sir, I trust this finds you well.

Thanks for sharing the photos of your case failures/strange happenings there.

It's the first time I've seen that since it happened to me many years back.

During the first Gulf War there was a big powder shortage up here across the medicine line and a few of us ended up ordering some canister type powders from a large distributor in Ontario.

Among other things I got in an 8lb container that was supposed to be the equivalent of H4350, but was marked VV N160. For all the world it looked, measured and chronographed so close to the RL 19 I had that I ended up using RL 19 data and it worked fabulously at first.

Maybe a year and a half after we'd bought it I was talking to the chap in Ontario again on the phone and mentioned how much I liked that powder. He said something I thought was odd at the time - that "some guy" had "some issues" with it and perhaps I should shoot it up sooner than later.

I recall thinking that was odd as I had and maybe still have some WWII surplus H4831.

Anyway I found out that the stuff had gone bad when a bullet jammed into the lands on a Ruger No. 1 while hunting mule deer. I did manage to get the buck, but saw that the bullets in my hunting loads had indeed moved forward.

After checking a few other loaded rounds - this was .300 Win Mag and I had a whole bunch of .308 Norma as well as 6.5x55 loaded with that powder - and found a couple of them looked off I went to the range.

Long story short I had a case blow in the No. 1 - 2nd shot - and then the first round out of the Ruger 77 in .308 Norma mag blew..... so I quit shooting for the day....

I went home, pulled all the cases that were loaded with that powder and found many broke off at the neck as yours have done. Some were broken in the container, but not that many.

Some of the powder looks normal, some looked caked and greenish.

The remainder of the powder in the 8lb caddy had turned a greenish color and the container was slightly warm to the touch....

Anyway I ended up chucking at least 250 cases that time, as well as the remainder of the powder.

I have no clue as to the chemical nature of that event and had never seen anything like it again until your post - so thanks kindly as at least now I know it wasn't a one time thing with my storage or something.

Thanks again, all the best to you folks this fall and good luck on your remaining hunts.

Dwayne

Dwayne,

Thank you, sir, for sharing your experience. It certainly looks like there was some reaction between the powder and the brass inside the case. The entire inside of the case was coated blue/green.

Similar to your experience, this happened with a VV powder; VV-140 in my case. Most likely the entirety of that lot of powder, a 1 lb. canister, was shot up long ago. I will check and see if I have any other old reloads that might contain that powder.

I have always had very good results with the VV powders with good consistency and very little lot-to-lot variation. I wonder what was going on here, to cause such a problem.

Also, as can be seen in the picture, the powder in these cases looked absolutely normal. I did scatter it in the garden, though, after I broke all the cases in two, with my bare hands...snap...snap...snap.

Dwayne,Nifty-250,

Back in the 80's Higginson Powder, was selling 7lb boxes of surplus 44 powder (imr 3031 equivalent) for $28.00.

I used it to load 7mm TCU, 30-30 and 6.5x55. Thousands of cast & jacketed bullet loads were loaded.

In the early 90's I was moving again, and discovered lbs of this powder now stored in surplus powder tins had turned rusty brown in colour and had become stuck together in clumps. When dumped in the fire pit it did not fully burn when ignited.

I foolishly did fire some previously loaded rounds. Luckily when fired they bullets did exit the barrel . However most of the powder did not burn.

Some 30-30 rounds could not be broken down, bullets were fused to the case. These cases were also very brittle and could be broken in pieces .

Flyer

Flyer01,

So it seems that if the powder breaks down it can cause brittle cases and fuse bullets, as you experienced. Thanks for sharing.

In my case all the powder from these bad cartridges looked perfect, as in the picture, with no greenish color, no clumping, and no fine "cinnamon" dust that is usually found with decomposing powder.

In 50 years of reloading I have only had one, 1-lb. can of powder go bad, back in the 1980's. It was an IMR metal can that was turning to cinnamon dust and smelled funny. I do store my powder carefully in a dry, indoor storage area so there are no severe temperature or humidity swings.

Flyer01 & Nifty250;
Thanks for the reply and for sharing your experience.

Flyer, yes it was powder from Higginson in my case too, but the weird thing is it went sorta greenish, grey - not the cinnamon red that bad powder usually goes.

I've had one can of IMR4064, one of IMR4895 and one of IMR4831 do that over the years - the 4064 and 4831 were bought new I think, were in the metal cans, but were kept for a good number of years.

Oh, interestingly I've still got some of the Winchester canister powder and for sure some of the Nobel - 44? maybe?? from that purchase way back when.

While I wasn't keen on throwing out that much powder for sure, what really hurt was the 6.5x55 brass and the resized .338 Win Mag that I'd made into .308 Norma as the Swede stuff was harder to come by 20 years back and the Norma had been sized and blown out to fit my rifle.

Lastly I had some bullets fuse to the case necks too - as I said I think I pulled maybe 200 - 250 rounds and only saved most of the bullets.

Thanks again for sharing your experiences gentlemen, it's nice to know I wasn't the only reloader who that happened to - if that makes any sense.

All the best to both of you this fall and good luck on your remaining hunts.

Dwayne

Some further observations beyond the OP.

The two partial boxes of ammo had 5 and 6 loaded rounds remaining respectively. All of the loaded rounds exhibited extremely brittle brass that easily fractured when side pressure was applied to the bullets. Imagine egg shell brittle . The 15 and 14 empty cases had been loaded with RL-17 and had been shot. The brass within each box had been reloaded the same number of times.

To test if the split necks of the loaded rounds were the results of generally overworked brass, 10 cases from each box were resized an additional time. None of the necks split. To further the testing, the cases were reloaded with RL-17 and either Berger or TSX bullets seated.

These loaded rounds were then fired. None of the necks split. Moreover, the ammo behaved normally exhibiting expected FPS and POI precision.

These results continue to suggest that the brittle brass necks was due to being loaded with and stored with at least one lot of RL-17.

It is notable that the powder, recovered from the stored ammo, had none of the detectable indications of decay. No color change, dust or unusual odor were apparent. Moreover, neither the interior of the brass cases or copper of the bullet bases in direct contact with the powder had visual indication of corrosion.

carbon12;
Good morning to you sir, thanks for the bit of extra information, I find the topic very intriguing to say the least.

As you mentioned, the cases that failed when this happened to me were indeed "egg shell brittle" - some even were cracked and had tipped over in the MTM 50 round case, stored bullets upward.

I find it really very interesting that in your instance and a couple others that the powder didn't look degraded in any way. It's been so long ago for me now that I'm questioning my memory, but I want to say most of them in my case had caked powder that was obviously degraded.

Lastly again the remaining 5½ or so pounds of powder in the plastic caddy in my case was slightly warm to the touch - making me think that whatever reaction had taken place was at least moderately exothermic.

Weird though isn't it, as a whole bunch of other powder stored in the same cool, dry place has been fine since the end of the second World War?

Thanks again sir, all the best to you this fall and good luck on your remaining hunts.

Dwayne

I just saw this thread. I don't know what would cause that horrible green corrosion in the 30-30 rounds- that was crazy but I am confident that it is NOT the plastic sleeves. I have dozens and dozens of the Federal boxes left from shooting Gold Medal Match 308 loads at work. I re-use them for most reloading of 308 family cases and even 6.5-284. I have literally dozens of boxes of loaded ammo stored in them as old as 20 years with NO corrosion.

There was obviously something going on INSIDE your cases, not outside.

As for the split cases. I bought 10 boxes of brand new white-box W-W 338 brass that I used to load 30-338. A year later I noticed that EVERY single round had a split neck. It was simply defective brass. All the rounds loaded with other brands of brass were fine. It was just this one lot of W-W brass.

I lightly wipe my bullets with wax before seating them to give me uniform seating pressure and keep them for cold welding. It has proven to work.

I also posted this problem on the reloading forum:

http://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/11507280/1,

DENTON provided the answer with this extremely informative link about deteriorating powder from the CMP forum:

http://forums.thecmp.org/showthread.php?t=157820,

There are some real scare stories about old powder in that link.
Even though my powder was not showing visible signs of breakdown, it was out-gassing compounds that created nitric acid within the case.

The nitric acid ate right through the brass case, and also made the cases extremely brittle. Remember the cases snapped right in two in my fingers. If I had tried to shoot even the best looking cartridge in this lot the case would have come apart with possibly very serious results.

I have learned from Denton's link that even with cool dry storage I will not assume that powder or ammo will last for decades. My bad lot is 17 years old. Some lots of powder deteriorate much faster than others under the same conditions.

I will now be more diligent in using up older powder and ammo. I used to think that old ammo would just go flat or peter out in time. The opposite is just as likely to happen causing old ammo to create very excessive and dangerous pressure. It may not happen often, but it only takes once.

Thank you all for your ideas, and helping educate me further.