Is There a Way To Weigh Loaded Rounds To Find Overloads?

D

driz

New member
Yea it sounds stupid and believe me I didn't make these but I have some Federal Hydrashock 40 ammo that is overloaded. It was practice ammo issued to me by US Customs back in the day when they used to give us ammo quarterly to practice between qualifications.
Somewhere along the way they got ahold of some overloads and I have a few. The trouble is that long ago I dumped all my 40 in an old 30 cal GI ammo can together, ouch. Over the years I stumbled across a few and you could tell. My 23 went up like a 44 mag and then another time it busted the extractor . I just got my gun back from Glock after a refurbishing and would like to keep from busting it again
So here I sit on 500 hydrashocks, (unfortunately they issued those for many many years) with no way to know which ones are the bad ones. I was wondering if it was possible to weigh the rounds using a powder scale and get enough variance to decide which ones are bad . Or am I stuck decapping and reloading all of them? Any great suggestions most welcome:confused:
 
The short answer is "no."

Because the normal variance of the case weight and the bullet weight will more than overshadow any variances in powder weight.
 
I too 'blew up' my M23 with hydrashocks. I found the extractor while policing up the brass. I think the early 40 Gocks had the chamber unsupported, and that had more to do with the blowups than the ammo. Never the less, I sent the gun back to Glock and the remaining 7 boxes of hydrashocks back to Federal. I thought they would send me a full case for my trouble, but they only sent me 7 boxes. I shot them up in my sig.
That said, a friend of mine has a barrel of Hornady ammo that is factory rejects. He weighs each one and sorts them by weight. He pulls the highest and lowest one, checks the charge, and decides which ones he can shoot. A digital postal scale should work.
 
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I was wondering if it was possible to weigh the rounds using a powder scale and get enough variance to decide which ones are bad
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Reloaders like living like that, they do not know the weight of the case, bullet and primer. When finished they do not know if a case has too much powder and the next one has no powder.

There is nothing entertaining about pulling the trigger and not know what is going to happen next. I sort cases by weight; I have cases, lots of cases.

I would suggest you pull the cases down and start over. You would have to know what powder was used to load the cases and you would have to know the weight of the case and bullet.

I purchased military surplus 38 Special reloads in 50 round boxes. I had 4 boxes; I shot 3 boxes and part of another before I found a warning. Seems the reloader loaded the 38 Special ammo a little hot. I shot the 38 Special ammo in a 3 screw Ruger Black Hawk. I do not believe the Black Hawk hurt the 38 Special ammo.

I collect old anything so I saved the partial box, I do not believe the reloads got close to +P. The manufacturer took out full page adds in magazines of the day.

F. Guffey
 
NO..cases and bullets can vary by a grain or two at extremes, and you already said that the powders may be different in composition, and charge weights may vary by up to five or more. Contact federal, tell them that you have suspicious ammo, and if there was a recall on the stuff, they will probably replace it rather than face liability for a blowout.
 
Normally, no. But if you had weighed all the components before loading, and kept variations to less than 1 grain, you could prolly weigh some to determine if there was powder present in the case, or no charge...

In other words, no, not for us everyday reloaders...
 
I like the idea of sending them to Federal, explaining some unknown portion were from the bad issued lot. If they don't want responsibility for you mixing them up, then you need to face pulling and working up your own load with them. I can think of a statistical method of reusing the powder, but it's going to be a lot of bother, including tracking the weights of the charges out of each round and the appearance of the powder to identify the type, which is risky. You'd be better off using fresh powder and working up an acceptable load.
 
You don't need to decap 'em. Just pull the bullets and reload.
Weighing 'em probably won't help anyway. You have no idea if the issue is the powder used or if there's just too much of whatever powder was used. And you have nothing to compare 'em too. The bullet makes no difference but the weight of the bullet does.
Given the source of the ammo, kind of doubt you have any legal recourse either. Sending 'em to Federal, might raise questions you may not want asked.
 
the ammo was free from your employer? dump the powder. You have no stake in it. It would be pretty foolish to try and set up loads with a powder that you can't identify. sure, pull the bullets and reuse them
 
I was wondering if it was possible to weigh the rounds using a powder scale and get enough variance to decide which ones are bad . Or am I stuck decapping and reloading all of them?
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Like everyone else said, NO!

And like others have said, you don't have to de-prime them. Just reload them with powder that you know is good and know you won't blow up any more of your pistols.
 
As many of you might know, I sort cases by headstamp, even for my 45 acp.

Some years ago I finished up a small batch of 500 and had a nagging suspicion that a round may not have been charged. The load was 4.0gr Bullseye with 200gr lswc, all IMI cases. I got the bright idea to weigh all of the finished rounds to try to find the "light one".

HA! the weights were all over the place, never did find it by weighing. So I put a big note in the bag along with the load info "Watch for Squib!!

As luck would have it, it was the third round in the third mag, :rolleyes: but I was ready for it, cleared the bbl and kept shooting, still keeping an eye out for others, but there was just the one.
 
No weighing process that I know of.
My advice: Never use powders that have the ability to double or triple charge its intended brass. My number #1 Rule when seated at my bench.
 
This can be done by weighing individual components, determining their averages, & comparing against the total weight of the loaded rounds.
Whether this can be done in your particular situation will be determined by the weights & variance of the individual components.
Are these all the same headstampP
 
Not for what your need.

I would keep an electronic scale on hand if nothing else for a confirmed large overload or under-load.

you can't tell in the miner area you are looking at with the most precision scale.
 
What I would try but would not necessarily determine all the overloads is something like this. Weigh a number of rounds and see if some are excessively heavier than others, like maybe 12 to 15 grains or more, depending on what a standard load is for the .40. Disassemble those and weigh the powder to determine if they are overloads. Then weigh the cases to determine how much they contribute to the variation. If the weights seem in some way conclusive, the remaining overloads might be determined. Would mostly depend on excessive weight variations but not a definite conclusion.

I should have said weigh the powder charges to determine if some are excessively heavier than the others and work in the case weight variations. May or may not help to identify the other overloads.
 
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Problem is, an "overload" might not be caused by more powder but by different powder. The Internet Lore about special blended powder does not account for ammo companies buying powder on bid. There was an article about that in American Handgunner although the complaint was for more muzzle flash when the ammo vendor changed powders.
 
Any great suggestions most welcome
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There are no great suggestions on the Internet.

Again; I met with a much disciplined reloader at the range, he suggested I did not know how to load for my 1911 45 SCP, I told him his reloads would not work in my pistols, but there was that remote possibility.

We set up on the range with another reloader between us; the reloader could not pull the hammer back, he could not pull the trigger, he would not rotate his cylinder nor could he roll the cylinder out. He had no clue.

We explained to him he had a bullet stuck at the forcing cone between the barrel and cylinder. We stoppe4d what we were doing; we put our stuff up and began working to move his stuck bullet back into the cylinder and into the case. When finished we handed his Model 66 S&W back to him; at about that time he started loading his pistol again. We suggested that was a bad habit/ideal; we told him if he had one case without powder there was a good chance the next round could have twice the daily recommended dosage for his 357 Magnum. We offered to help[ him with his reloading, we offered to loan or give him equipment, we offered him all the ammo he could shoot and then we told him how dangerous it was for him to stand between us and shoot his reloads without knowing if the next round he fired would be his last.

We could not convince him with better methods and techniques he could weight his loaded ammo when deterring uniform powder drops. About the only information we could get out of him was he had his new Dillon RL550B for about a 5 days. And then he got mad and left the range; that was after we suggested we pack up out stuff and follow him home to help him with his reloading. We even offered to pick up our tools he did not have from home.

I thought he should get experience before he got carless. It is not easy to make something fool proof. I was told fools do not listen and or read.

F. Guffey
 
I did some reading on the Federal / Glock / kaboom issue and found out the relationship between Gock and those Federal Hydroshocks is sort of a marriage made in Hell. Glock with it's long shallow ramp which sacrafices a sizable piece of the chamber bottom in the process, Federal with that weak web section which further weakens everything. Add to it the 40 being such a high pressure round and it's easy to see why problems seem to follow Glock 40's around.
Unfortunately I have such a big stash 593 of the hydros that span neary 18 years and being heaped in a can there is no way to identify which ones are of what year. Supposedly Federal quietly went and started reinforcing the web sections when the issue came fully to light but there are no markings to show it.
With my batch it seems as though I have both overloads and the weak case issue going on. My first instance was just the extractor breaking. Customs sent the gun away to Glock and they did whatever to fix it. Then every now and again I would get a heavy recoil shot and the gun would raise up and roll like shooting a 44 mag. None of those blew a case or did any damage that I know of. Of course when shootng outside you seldom get to see the case. On the latest instance the other day I was watching my buddy shoot my glock and it did nothing special at all. Nothing but not chambering the next round as the baseless case was in the chamber. When I got it home I put a pick on it and the case though bulged a bit slid right out.
That's where I am right now. At least I have 1000 good 40's to play with and am going to have to figure out how to reach Federal and see if they will swap out that bad hydroshock. Others supposedly did it but that was back around 2005.
 
Imo, you have two sane options.trade them in to federal if they come through.

Buy a collect type bullet puller and hope that it works, or experiment with an inertial puller so your bullets aren't damaged. If you pull them, the powder must be destroyed. You don't have a clue what it is or have data for it. Powder is usually the second least expensive component.

After pulling them you may have over $100 in components, as you said, the stuff was free in the first place. Why take chances?

Greco, a chemical and explosives company is based here, and they run an explosives incinerator..millions of rounds of ammo are fed through it every year. If the military or police find caches of genuinely unknown ammo that can't be accounted for or proven safe, they are burned. The tons of recalled federal almost certainly wound up here. Caches of b
Powder, caps, any thing like this that poses a serious risk is banned from many landfills.

If I remember, that incinerator was a rotary gas fired kiln that is fired by natural gas. Offer things that they destroy are air bag detonators, military smoke and tear gas rounds, explosive waste from their own operations, many things.

The arsenal at picatinny has built an incinerator in the past that was formerly limited to only 5,000 annual pounds. I don't remember anything at all about the ireco incinerator other than it was bitterly opposed , and it had a reputation for sloppiness that may not have been deserved.. The entire staff were capable men. One of the only accidents that I know of happened when an exhausted crew followed a bad impulse. A casting assembly that formed pentolite primers lost functioning and the plastic froze in the pipes.

My first impulse would have been to disassemble the lines and replace them. They chose to clean them. A worker was using a hammer and chisel to open the pipes and there was a detonation.

The point is that even professionals with decades of experience make errors. A guy who blows up an entire building and kills his coworkers isn't in the same class as a reloader but I can put a sign on my room that "7,000+ days without an accident."
 
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