Shelf life on loaded ammo

T

Tlewis81

New member
Is the powder gonna be bad if u load up a lot and store it ? Or better to load it up as u go....more concerned with rifle ammo since i got a great deal on 8lb of powder
 
I just fired some rounds that I loaded back in the mid seventies and they were fine. Shot without a problem and still very accurate.
 
^^^^ Exactly

I even have shotgun shell from the Mid-70's that are still fine.

Especially if the round or shells are stored in a temperature controlled environment like your home.

If you are going to only live another hundred years, you should be good to go with the loads you roll this weekend.
 
I agree with all that.

Two years ago I shot 2 deer, a hog and a turkey with ammo that I loaded in 1976. One shot one kill on each of them.

I normally don't keep it that long but was invited last minute and ran across that stuff when digging through the stash and decided to use it. Glad I did.
 
Generally speaking, as long as your store your ammo in good conditions (indoors, relatively constant humidity and temperature, not exposed to any chemicals that could degrade the ammo, etc.) it should last a long time.

That being said, it's not uncommon for powder to go bad either. Odds are not all that high that it will, but there are documented cases where everything was done right in terms of making and storing the ammo, but the powder simply began to degrade and went bad.

There are a couple of posters on here that are much more knowledgeable, and one or two it seems that think you should shoot everything you load within a 5 or 6 month window so that your ammo doesn't go bad. I personally think that is a bit excessive as I'm like the others - I've shot ammo that was 30+ years old without any detrimental effects on my equipment or myself and without any noticeable issues with the ammo.
 
In 1993 I bought a crate of 1982 manufactured (by Sellier & Bellot) 308 147 grain FMJ ammo to haul off to Gunsite for a class because it was Berdan primed and cheap and I wouldn't have to worry about recovering the brass after an exercise. About one in ten barely cleared the muzzle. Others seemed to shoot OK. Accuracy was abominable. Fortunately, I'd also shipped a bunch of handloaded match ammo to use when it counted most, and with that, was able to wind the shoot-off at the end of class.

After shipping the remains of the lot home, I pulled them down. Many were poorly sealed and I good wiggle the bullets. The stick powder looked fine in some and in others looked oily and stuck together and wouldn't pour out of the cases. Presumably it was a double-base powder that had lost some of its nitroglycerin to the surface as the nitrocellulose broke down.

Read the current thread on powder storage for more information.
 
I have shot some 30-30 ammo from the 80s with no problem. The price was incredible, I cannot remember the exact price, but I think if I saw some for that price I would buy all the store had. I have also fired some surplus 7.62x54r from the 1960s/1970s, and I've seen guys shoot ammo from the 1950s, sometimes with hang fires, but that is normally because of the crappy ammo quality.
 
Shot some .243's recently that I had loaded in the mid seventy's, (last century) that shot good and were more accurate than I can hold.



Have a blessed day,

Leon
 
As the consensuses seems to be; nomrally stored reloads will last decades. The oldest reloads I have are some .44 Magnums w/Unique loaded in '96. Still shooters. If the components, primers and powder are not corrosive, they should last as long as the brass cases...

Mostly, my reloads rarely get over a year old or the max. is usually no more than two, but I occasionally ferget some reloads...:rolleyes:
 
Shelf life on any loaded ammo depends entirely on how it's stored. Cool and dry with constant temperature and humidity levels being best.
Only primers can be corrosive. Powder is not.
 
I do not load that far ahead. I have pulled down 450 belted cases in 7mm Remington Mag and 257 Weatherby during the last year. I did not load the ammo. A wild guess would indicate 10% of the 450 rounds would not fire because of caked powder and corrosion between the bullet and case neck.

Before I shoot any ammo I shake the case to determine if the powder is loose. In the big inning I shot cheap 8mm57 ammo. Too many of the cases had a condition called delay fire meaning some it it did not fire after hitting the primer for as long as 10 seconds. I find nothing entertaining about chambering a round and pulling the trigger without knowing what is about to happen.

F. Guffey
 
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45YearsShooting said:
People are still shooting WWII ammo. I heard that some civil war muskets that were found loaded still fired.
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Black powder is a whole different animal. It can, indeed, last indefinitely if properly stored. Smokeless can't, though.

I know of someone who has fired late 1920's M1 Ball successfully. I also know of someone who burst a Garand firing military ammo made between WWII and Korea. Once the ammo gets very old, it's a crap-shoot. The biggest wild card is temperature variation in storage. A fair amount is known about deterioration at fixed temperatures, but if the storage temperature varies a good deal, that accelerates breakdown.

So, when you buy surplus ammo, do you know how it has been stored; always?

Board member Slamfire has accumulated a lot of information on this topic. He has documentation of Navy tests in which ball powder broke down by destroying its deterrents, first and foremost, resulting in powder with a faster burn rate. If he sees this thread, I'm sure he can contribute to it.

I own a lot of surplus ammo I bought long ago, in addition to that bad lot described in my last post. Some Portuguese 7.62 and some old M118. Both seem to shoot very "hot" compared to other ammunition, so I've started pulling them down and replacing the powder rather than shoot the original loads. It just isn't worth it.

Incidentally, I communicated with S&B long ago about that lot I described in my previous post to try to get more information about it based on its lot number. But they said all records from the "iron curtain days" were warehoused in paper form and not accessible, so they had no way to find out what the deal with it was. They told me that back then they were ordered to make whatever a customer asked for if the quantity was large enough, so it could have been anything. These turned out to have corrosive primers, something that S&B never even catalogued.
 
I shot about 100 rounds of 45acp loaded in 1918. This was about 10 years ago. No failures. I still have about 300 rounds still in original boxes.
 
^^^^^ An't that true. I only started reloading 12 years ago, ask this again in 30 years from now when I am 102, I will then be able to answer you, MAYBE!!

LOL, stay safe.
Jim
 
I just fired some rounds that I loaded back in the mid seventies and they were fine. Shot without a problem and still very accurate.
Click to expand...

Yep, me too. I have 44 mag loaded in 1973 and they shoot just like they did over 40 years ago.
 
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