About 5 years ago I began doing some loading for a friend of mine.
He was shooting a 223 Remington and the price of factory ammo was getting to him.
We bought him some dies and components and for two years or so I loaded for him.
He then traded his Rifle off for some exercise equipment and his dies went along on the trade.
I kept his powder (one pound at a time) in my powder locker in my loading room.
This loading room is part of my house and therefore is at a constant 69 degrees and the loading room is dark 95% of the time and the locker is dark 99.9% of them time.
My mistake I think was I kept my friends powder in the original Hodgdon plastic can with metal lid which was then inserted in a large sealable NEW sandwich bag type thing!
The bag had a place to write on and my friends name was entered there.
This latest (and now ruined!) "can" of H 322 powder had been in this bag for 2 years at least!
Well last night I was in the powder locker and was searching for some H 4895 powder when I looked at the can of powder my friend had left. There it was IN the sandwich bag all sealed up nice with the most horrid redish brown corrosion imagineable all around the metal screw cap/lid!
I was dumbfounded!
I took it out of the locker and opened the sandwich bag and corrosion fell out on the floor. I tried to unscrew the metal cap and it literally disintegrated in my hands.
It would not unscrew and the threaded part of the lid was completely disintegrated and the top of the lid would not hand pry loose from the plastic containers lid mouth!
I literally could NOT believe this had happened!
I checked all the rest of the containers in that locker (about 30 of them) and NONE had any signs of corrosion or corroding on them!
I took the corroded can out and placed it in the garbage.
For the life of me I can not figure what would cause this situation - I know the BIG sealable sandwich bag was new and un-used as I took it from the VarmintWifes stash of these. It came out of the factory carton of these things.
The ONLY things I can think of is the "lid" of the powder container reacted somehow to the plastic sandwich bag causing this complete corrosion?
Or, maybe some pwoder fumes contained by the sandwich bag reacted with the lid and caused it to corrode - badly?
Anyway lesson learned - do not store friends left-over powder can in a sealed sandwich bag!
Yikes at the price of powder these days I feel some pain.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy
