I had an interesting discovery in a box of my old reloads recently. I posted this in another thread and didn't get any ideas so I will try it here.

This 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 cartridge 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. The powder appears normal.

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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.

I still have some of the same lot of R-P 150 gr. Core-Lokt bullets on my shelf, and they look fine.

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.

nifty-two-fifty

Posted a WAG on your other post.

Any chance you had something salty on your fingers when reloading these or putting them in the ammo boxes? Eating chips or crackers, etc while working? Salt will corrode brass pretty badly.

Seems like if it was salt on the fingers the corrosion would be working from the outside. This looks like it started on the inside.

Prwlr,

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.


Yondering,

Salt? Possibly. But I normally never eat or drink in my loading room and I usually wash my hands before starting loading. And I always wash my hands when I am done loading, just as a precaution due to lead exposure. Cheap health insurance, even if it isn't needed.

If something like salt exposure could have done this, it seems like I would have seen it before sometime over the years. And it does seem like the corrosion started on the inside of the case.

Just supposing that I did do something weird with this lot of cases all those years ago, it seems like someone in the Campfire universe would have also seen this happen before.

It would be nice to solve this mystery.

My guess is that since you didn't tumble clean the cases, there was old powder and primer residue in there and over time it attacked the brass case. I'm not a chemist but I know that when the powder and primer combust, they create other compounds. Whatever came out of it must have been fairly corrosive. Maybe they were trying a new priming compound or found some old corrosive primers in the warehouse and wanted to use them up. ;-)

The color of the corrosion and the extreme brittleness of the brass looks like ammonia damage to me.
That's what propane tank valves look like that have been re-purposed to hold anhydrous ammonia for meth cooks after they steal it from a farmers ammonia pigs.

Why it is concentrated around the shoulder/neck is a puzzlement, for sure!

You have an enemies back then that had access to Brasso and your ammo?

Ed

No Brasso or any other ammonia compounds that I know of.
And the cases seem to have been eaten from the inside out.

If one had access to a chemists, they could do an analysis and determine the composition of the residue. Don't have any sitting around our neighborhood though.

Not too mysterious....

Here's the link.



Apparently your powder has deteriorated. That yields corrosive compounds that destroy the brass.

Good info in that link, thanks Denton.

Denton,

Thank you for that LINK. It is extremely educational and I recommend it to all shooters and reloaders.

The idea that powder and ammunition will last indefinitely in a good storage environment is absolutely false.

Deterioration of powder, no matter how slow begins on day one. A takeaway from that link is that the experts consider all powder over about 20 years old to be suspect. Federal declares a safe shelf life of ten years for their ammunition. If one assumes that Federal is being very conservative and you double their shelf life figure you still wind up at 20 years.

According to the link the military keeps samples of the powder used in all their ammo and artillery shells and monitors it for years as to the rate of deterioration. When they estimate a lot of powder has three years of safe life left they put out a notice that the ammo with that powder has to be used up or destroyed by the three-year end date.

Extreme heat is shown to deteriorate powder very quickly. I wonder if this has been a problem for our military in the extreme heat of the Middle East?

I had heard that when the Marines or Army puts on a "mad minute" demonstration that much of the ammo used is old and needs be used up. I have heard this explanation when someone questioned whether the "mad minute" exercise was a big waste of taxpayer money.

Here is a civilian "mad minute" video. Multiply this effect several times over for some of the military demonstrations. These are used as morale boosters for the troops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuSbT4T3o4g,

I am sure that I have some powder in my inventory that is at or over the 20-year point. I also have factory and reloaded cartridges that are that old or older. I will now make it a point to inspect and use up that old ammo and powder instead of thinking it will last forever.

Denton, thank you again for that educational link. I now know that it was nitric acid caused by deterioration of the powder that ruined my cases, even though the powder still looked normal. Given more time there would have been visible changes to the powder. As explained in the link, the problem is made worse by moisture or heat.

All the more reason to store ammo and powder in cool, dry conditions.

Thanks for clearing that up denton.

Had two boxes of Winchester .220 Swift ammo in yellow boxes that developed the same symptoms. Got them when Old Western Scrounger had a yard sale of old stock items. Looked fine when I bought them but a couple of years later the cases were full of holes. They had been stored in a metal building and had undoubtedly been subjected to excessive heat. Glad I didn't shoot any.

Great posts here. Thanks to all,

Just a guess:

The deterioration probably begins when a granule of powder comes in contact with a droplet of liquid water, particularly in a confined space like a cartridge case. (If you use your breath to blow crud out of a case, you will deposit droplets of saliva.) The granule then begins to decompose into various compounds which probably include more water. That makes the process self-propagating.

I have powder that dates back to about 1950 that seems to be good and still shoots well. It has been kept indoors, and the air here in Utah is usually pretty dry.

Thanks Denton.

Thanks Denton...good information !

denton;
Good evening sir and thanks for the educational link - as usual your post was helpful for me.

In the post in the other area of the forum I related how something similar had happened to me with a bulk canister powder marketed as H4350 equivalent but marked VV N160.

Until nifty's thread I'd never heard of it happening to anyone else and as you can imagine always wondered if it was something I'd done wrong or what exactly had transpired.

Thanks again sir and all the best to you folks this fall.

Dwayne

I have seen several of these corroded case events here on the fire and on other forums. Each time it was with VV powder. Now I'm starting to wonder if they are not taking the time to remove the residual nitric acid from manufacturing. The link above shows a jug of VV gassing off.

I use a lot of VV140 in my M1 and M14 loads, so now I will keep a close tabs on these loads. Luckily they are shot up within a month or two of being loaded.

nifty-
Based on the replies to date, have you (or others) any thoughts on why only the Federal cases corroded?

Were any of your reloading procedures different for the Federal cases than for the other brass reloaded at the same time with procedures that were at least similar?

Thanks.
--Bob

Bob,
No, it is still a mystery. I thought about those Federal cases and wondered if I had any more of them. A couple of days ago I searched through a carton of once-fired factory cases still in their original boxes.

Sure enough, I found another box of empty Federal 30-30 cases from the very same lot bought at the same time, that I had never gotten around to reloading.

I opened the box to inspect the cases, anticipating some corrosion. There was none at all. The cases appeared as clean and normal as if they had been fired this week.

So, the mystery remains. The same Federal cases, never reloaded look normal. The remaining old 150 gr. R-P bullets on my shelf look normal. The same lot of powder in the Win. 250 Sav. cases that were loaded at the same time in 1999 looked fine when I pulled a bullet, and fired normally at the range.

If something unique happened to these cases when I loaded them, I can't imagine what it would have been. In the hundreds of lots of cases I have loaded in my career beginning 50 years ago this is the only lot of cases that has ever done anything like this.

Denton suggested that maybe there was moisture or condensation in the cases when I loaded them. That seems like the likeliest cause, but I don't know how it would have happened. They were loaded in the summer when the temperatures are warm and our climate is very dry.

Denton wondered if I was blowing into the cases to remove dust or something before pouring in the powder and seating the bullet. I don't recall ever doing that, and it is not my habit, but perhaps I did. I don't have a better explanation at this time. Thanks for asking.

Nifty,
Do you have any other loads that were done with the same lot of powder? Might be interesting to pull those down and see what they look like inside.
I have lots of powder that is well over 20 years old and a fair amount of loaded ammo too. Makes me wonder if I should pull down a sample of each and check for any signs of deterioration.

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I read something like this on another forum about those v powders ( I can't spell it or pronounce it ) being corrosive after awhile in storage!

A couple weeks ago my daughter was shooting some Remington 243 that I bought before I started reloading, dated 1985. We got three duds out of 12 fired. There was a little spot of corrosion at the edge of the primer and the bullet. I have been trying to figure out how they got like this stored in the house. Maybe we will pull the bullets on the rest.

What to do with the other similar aged ammo?

Might you have touched them after handling corrosive gun cleaning kit?

nifty-
You've presented a fine mystery with your description.

It's almost certainly a problem of powder reacting in some way with the brass, as Denton pointed out. The real puzzle is that the same reaction did not occur with your 250 Savage loads made from the same lot of VV-140.

Internet firearms forums point to VV-140 and VV-150 as being involved in several similar episodes of corrosion of reloads. It seems more frequent than it should be if the corrosion were associated randomly with various powders. The effect may be confined to various lots of the particular powders.

Here's a link to a thread in the falfiles.com forum, with clear photos:
[b][color:#000099]Has anyone else had Vihtavuori N140 corrode in loaded ammo?[/color][/b].
Google finds other web reports of corrosion from the same powders.

What seems odd to me is that, in both your case and the ones reported on that thread, the powder granules from the corroded cases do not appear different than usual.

Just out of curiosity, does the green stuff dissolve in water? Although it's been a long time since my General Chem course, I think Copper Nitrates are water soluble. (Copper sulfates are also water soluble, but there are not many sulfur-containing compounds in smokeless powder, I think.)

If the green stuff does not dissolve in water, it might be a copper carbonate. CO2 is probably one of the breakdown products of smokeless powder, and is responsible for the green patina on copper roofing, the Statue of Liberty, etc.

Curious.
--Bob

Were the reloaded cartridges stored with the bullet pointing up, cases on side, or bullet pointing down?

Ray,
The boxes were stacked so the cases were laying on their sides.

Bob,
I threw the cases away. I didn't try to dissolve any of the green, so can't answer your question as to water solubility.

Kingston,
The corrosion damage occurred from the inside out. I don't think the cases were exposed to any corrosive cleaners, especially not the inside of the cases.

Blacktailer,
I did find a box of 250 Savage cases loaded at the same time with the same lot of VV-140 powder. The pulled powder looked perfect. There was no corrosion in the case. They shot normally through the chronograph at the range.

Thanks, everybody, for your ideas.

In case y'all missed this.