MarkCO said:
Every canister of Lil Gun I have had is a little oily and clumps.
Watch out for that stuff. Just clumpy doesn't necessarily mean anything, as powder sitting with enough weight to press the grains hard against each other can make loosely bound clumps. Hodgdon tells me shaking the powder should break those right up. It's the combination of clumpy with oily that is not a good sign and if the clumps stick together with some determination, that powder's got issues. I called Hodgdon to double-check, and they say they've never seen Li'l Gun look oily. They immediately asked what the powder storage conditions were. Of course, none of us know what happened to it between the factory and ourselves, so there's no way to give a comprehensive reply. We only know we've tried to follow the rules.
The oily, clumpy powder I had experience with was in loaded 308 ammo made on contract by S&B in 1982. Upon pulling the bullet, that ammo's powder had to be removed from the case with toothpicks. Tapping the case did not move it. When most of it was out, I found the remaining bits stuck to the brass, too. A decade later (I kept some of the stuff out of curiosity), a number of the cases had corrosion spots that turned out to go all the way through to the inside.
That ammo was made in the Iron Curtain days, and I've been told Iron Curtain powders are untrustworthy. S&B told me all their records from those days are on paper in a warehouse and that they don't have a practical way to search them, so they couldn't say what I had. At the time I got that ammo (1992), about every 20th round in the bunch sounded different and a couple of them wouldn't function my M1A. About a month after shooting it, despite normal cleaning, the bore was coated in fine rust. I still don't know if that was because of corrosive primers (it was sold as non-corrosive) or because nitric or nitrous acid radicals in the powder caused it. I've been told S&B didn't catalog any corrosive primers from at least the 1970s. On the other hand, S&B said they also custom-loaded to client specifications if the order quantity was large enough, though I don't know why someone would order corrosive primers. But just in case the acid explanation is right (nitric acid fumes from a few drops in a watch glass was how the old steam cabinets for rust bluing started uniformly fine surface rust resembling what I had in the M1A barrel), I would clean anything you shoot that stuff in pretty well. Maybe with a boiling water rinse.
