Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Mausers and Military Rifles military 30-06 ammo

How can I tell if 30-06 military ammo has corrosive primers.
Thanks
Drags

Do the cases have a date on them, such as TW 54?

They do not.
Thanks
Joe

What exactly IS the headstamp?

It is all in the headstamp, if there is not a two number date your on your own

Thank you, I pulled up the pdf file and checked out my loaded virgin mil surp . It's all non corrosive.
I'll bet I have 300-400 SL42-43 HEAD STAMPED CASES. That I have used for years and never had problems with. Of course they have been cleaned and inspected many times. I have allways liked gi brass but then I loved mom and apple pie too. Mb

The OP still hasn't divulged exactly what his headstamps say. There's a really good chance the stuff may not even be U.S. milsurp ammo. Half the countries in the world manufactured .30-06 military ammo at one time or another, and when you step outside the arena of U.S.-made ammo the possibilities between corrosive and non-corrosive are mind boggling.

Like Bob, I treasure my stash of old U.S. GI brass. In the main it's darned good stuff. Of the multiple thousands of pieces of '06 brass on hand I rate my FA (Frankford Arsenal) and LC (Lake City) Match brass from the late 50's through 70's as being on par with the pile of more recent Lapua '06 brass I have, and the "regular" GI brass is as robust as anything made in the private sector. I'm also still working with a metric sh*t-ton of pre-war FA GI brass that refuses to die. (Hint: annealing is your friend.) Heck, I even have some FA brass from the WWI era that's still functional, although that stuff is relegated to low velocity reduced loads anymore. (Note: be wary of that 100+ year old stuff, there's good stuff that's entirely viable and crappy stuff that'll come apart at the seams - just the same precautions that shooters in the early 1920's had to take. A lot of WWI brass/ammo was made by contractors who didn't have their sh*t together and the gov't didn't much care because there was a war on and we needed every cartridge we could lay our hands on.)

Edit: there's no risk in re-using old U.S. milsurp brass that was initially corrosive primed. The chlorate primers (primarily the old FA-70 primer which was used from the early 30's to the early 50's) only adversely effected barrel steel if cleaning wasn't performed right after firing, they didn't effect the cartridge brass at all. That primer was retained in service long after most other ammo makers shifted to non-corrosive priming because it was a wonderfully stable and consistent primer - capable of delivering the goods despite extremes in storage conditions and battlefield conditions. The only U.S. GI brass to absolutely avoid re-using is the truly ancient mercuric primed stuff. Those primers attacked the integrity of the brass as well as the rifle bores, but thankfully went out of use right after the turn of the 20th century so it's largely a moot point these days.

Pull a bullet, dump the powder. Fire the deprimed round "into" a polished piece of steel. Set the steel aside for a while, if it rusts at the location of the "primer blast" it's corrosive.