Belted Ammo ID

H

Hedley

New member
Just moved into a new place and found these links laying around. Anybody know what they came from? For comparison, I put a 7.62x39 and a .223 next to it. Is it dummy ammo? They've got red primers, and four illegible letters on the bottom of the casing. I think it says C 7 L C? They just seem too necked down and long to be real ammo.
img1496bb7.jpg
 
It's .308 military blank ammo for the M-60 machine gun.

LC is Lake City ammo plant in Utah.

The funny necking ensures proper feeding through the mechanism.
 
Hey thanks, that's kinda what I thought. So, the last thin part of the neck is where the bullet would go in a real .308?
 
Yep, exactly.

The constriction of the brass at that point serves two purposes -- first is to replace the bullet in profile for feeding, and the second is to provide the crimp so that the blank actually sounds something like a blank. It may also help with cycling the action, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
 
The other characters are the last two digits of the year of manufacture, probably [19]67 instead of C 7. The ammo is not actually .308 Winchester, but its military twin, 7.62 NATO.

BTW, those links are for use in the Browning machinegun, converted to 7.62 NATO, not the push through links for the M60 machine gun.

Jim
 
"...for use in the Browning machinegun..." It never ceases to amaze me that blank ammo can be so different from place to place and time to time. The CF used 1919 .30 Browning MGs in 7.62 NATO long after the M60 came along. Our 7.62 blanks had a crimped bullet replacement end.
Kind of amazes me that Jim can pick out the difference between links too. Pay attention to what he says. Thanks Jim.
 
Thanks. Those links go all the way around the case, so they couldn't be used in the M60, which requires a gap so the bolt can push the rounds through the links. The U.S. and other countries converted a whole lot of M1919A4 machineguns to 7.62 NATO after 1957. The horrible truth was that, while heavy as heck, they worked a lot better than the M60 and kept on ticking when the M60's quit.

Jim
 
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