Does Ammo Go "Bad"?

[911pcars]

Hmm. Bullets as investment material?

How about spent casings?

Sherwood

[legion]

That's called "cashing in".

[varmint]

i routinely shoot WW2 vintage .303

as long as it's been kept dry, it's fine.

[LakeCleElum]

I had a friend that didn't store his ammo properly. His garage was a mess. He had lot of stuff sitting on his wood stove and one day added a box of shotgun shells.

Months later, he lit a fire, not even bothering to clear the stuff stored there. When all hell broke loose, he grabbed a rake, dove under his truck and spent several minutes trying to the knock the box off the stove......

[svandamme]

we still occasionally have a farmer blown up from WW1 shells , that got plowed up from the mud.
Those weren't stored properly at all...

So yeah, i concur, if stored properly they won't go bad until long after you are wormbait.

[m21sniper]

Originally Posted by jyl

Could the story be referring to some artillery munitions?

No, not any arty either. Even the common 155mm and 105mm arty shells were a much later design. Same for airforce gravity bombs. The last WWII bomb that the USAF used was the Mk117 750lber i think.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I thought it was the "Fat Boy".

And wasn't it AAF back then?

[m21sniper]

What i mean is the last bomb of WWII era that was used post war by the USAF was the Mk117. They were used extensively during the Vietnam war by F-105's, and were also the primary armament of the B-52D.

They've long since been replaced by the Mk.8X series.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Didn't mean to get the OT thread even more OT. Just a story that I heard but with little or no background or supporting data. So I was skeptical from the get-go.

However a quick Google search did turn up at least one interesting article:

WW2 Ammunition Finds New Life In War On Terrorism

Sounds like they're modding an existing cache of 40mm Bofors for training purposes?

[m21sniper]

I totally forgot about 40mm. The Navy used tons of em, the famous "pom pom" guns. In the last 30 years the only branch that really uses 40mm is the USAF in their AC-130 gunships.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

You're forgiven. If I wasn't so damned lazy I would've hunted down the info before my first post instead of just relating a story I'd heard.

The obvious conclusion is that, at the time of that article's writing, there were still 350k WWII vintage rounds floating around.

Which means we STILL haven't burned through all the WWII stuff.

Moral of the story: ammo, when properly stored, can last a LONG time.

[VINMAN]

Heres a few rounds of 30-06 ammo I picked off the shipwreck of a WWI battleship off the coast of Long Island. It has been underwater since 1912. The majority of it is still bone dry. You can shake it and hear the powder inside. Some of the rounds had gotten wet. a buudy of mine took a few of the dry rounds ( I have a *****load), cleaned them up and stuck them in some crappy rifle he had. Two of the 5 rounds he tried, amazingly fired.