Vintage 9mm ammo

S

spacecoast

New member
I found 50 rounds of 1949-era 9mm, I'm wondering if anyone has more details on either of these. Two boxes of 25, similar in size but different headstamps. One box has dividers and the other doesn't. The box on the left is made by Fabrique Nationale with a "FN 49" headstamp. The box on the right unfortunately has no label, the headstamp appears to be "11 49" and a star. There also appears to be some kind of black sealant around the primers.

I'm planning to shoot these unless for some reason they might have some special value to someone.

Darn Photobucket is rotating the 2nd image 180 degrees and the third 90 degrees.

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I trust Oxyless is the FN trademark for noncorrosive primers.

Who knows what the other stuff is. I would wet clean as for corrosive.
 
There is plenty of risk firing old ammunition. The pressure goes up as the gunpowder deteriorates. Given that a reasonable lifetime for single based powders is 45 years and double based is 20 years, your ammunition is very old.

This is something that is very well known which is why militaries discard old ammunition. It is unsafe to store and unsafe to shoot.

Heat accelerates the deterioration of gunpowder, so for accelerated propellant tests, they heat the gunpowder. As this test shows, combustion pressures will rise after aging.

INVESTIGATION OF THE BALLISTIC AND CHEMICAL STABILITY OF 7.62MM AMMUNITION LOADED WITH BALL AND IMR PROPELLANT

Frankfort Arsenal 1962

3. Effects of Accelerated Storage Propellant and Primer Performance

To determine the effect of accelerated isothermal storage upon propellant and primer performance, sixty cartridges from each of lots E (WC 846) and G (R 1475) were removed from 150F storage after 26 and 42 weeks, respectively. The bullets were then removed from half the cartridges of each lot and from an equal number of each lot previously stored at 70F. The propellants were then interchanged, the bullets re-inserted, and the cases recrimped. Thus, four variations of stored components were obtained with each lot.

Chamber pressures yielded by ammunition incorporating these four variations were as follows. These values represent averages of 20 firings.

Pressurevariationsduetostoragetempertures-1.jpg


Personally, I would not risk damage to any autopistol I own by shooting a box of 65 year old cheap surplus ammunition.
 
Pshaw........that ammo is plenty safe to shoot and not that old in the general scheme of things. Plenty of us are shooting significantly older ammo with absolutely no danger.
Your 11 * 49 * ammo is Yugoslav surplus, and it will have corrosive primers. Shoot happily, clean appropriately.
 
Your 11 * 49 * ammo is Yugoslav surplus, and it will have corrosive primers.
Click to expand...

Thanks jonnyc for the info on the Yugoslav 9mm, I will likely shoot it in my P95 or my Hi-Point rifle, both of which are built very strongly.

How many points on the star? 5 or 6?
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Mike, it appears to be a 5-pointed star.
 
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Then jonny is correct. Yugoslavian surplus. Tons of it came into the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
 
That kind of surplus ammo was available back in the early nineties for about the same cost as reloading.
There were stacks of it at gun shows.
Wotta' deal.
But some of it was kinda' warm - smg ammo, maybe.
 
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