Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
Originally Posted By: engineerscott
Originally Posted By: ammolab
If you have never had a misfire from old or poorly stored ammo....... you have not been shooting enough to give me advice on ammo that I trust my life to!
I have had plenty of duds in my surplus ammo from WW2 and from ammo as recent as the 1970s-1980s. I just had a Federal HP 9x18mm round go PFFTTT and stick a bullet in the bore of my E German Makarov a few weeks ago. This IS MY carry ammo and the stuff is 2 or 3 years old.
Carry ammo..for sure CAR gun ammo should be rotated thru the gun in a year..two at the most.
One variable is storage conditions. Especially with mil surplus ammo. Some of that surplus stuff you're getting has been sitting in sheds/warehouses that have no temperature or humidity control for years on end (at best - some of it might have sat outside in ammo cans on pallets for an extended period of time). The other variable is country of origin. Old Soviet/Eastern Bloc ammo simply wasn't made to the same standards as Western ammo. I've had
new production 9x18 and 7.26x39 ammo from former Soviet Bloc countries that fizzled when fired. No ammo, even new, is guaranteed to go bang every time you pull the trigger. Good quality ammo has a very, very low failure rate. Lesser quality ammo, has a higher though usually quite low failure rate.
Good quality ammo that has been reasonably stored (no temperature extremes and low humidity) should last a very long time with little to no increase in failure rate. This assumes that you know the entire storage history of the ammo, which takes old production mil surplus ammo off the table (though even then, if I did extensive lot sample testing I might feel ok depending on the manufacture date and country of origin).
I store newly purchased self defense ammo (that isn't loaded in a magazine) in 50 cal ammo boxes with silica gel desiccant in an inside closet that stays in a 70F ~ 75F temperature range. I would have no issues relying on that ammo 20 years from now, however it is very unlikely that I will not have shot it up and rotated new stock in anyway.
Ammo loaded for a carry gun kept in a car is a different story. In our hot climate I wouldn't want it to get more than a couple of years old, but if you're shooting your weapon (which you should be doing anyway to maintain competency) that shouldn't be a problem.
I've shot thousands and thousands of rounds and had very few duds. Of the few that I did have a couple were new Russian production 7.62x39 that simply had no powder in them. The primer went bang and pushed the bullet halfway down the barrel (thank God I didn't fire the round behind it). I've seen no correlation between age and duds
provided that it was ammo that I reasonably suspected to have been stored properly.
How did you know the bullet didn't exit. You say it went bang.
I know it didn't exit because the bang was much softer than normal so I safed the weapon and looked down the barrel. No light at the end of the tunnel, the bullet was stuck about one third of the way down the barrel. That round only had a primer but no powder. Had a [censored] of a time getting that bullet out. Had I fired the round behind it which did have a full powder charge the rifle would have been fubar and I might have been picking pieces of metal out of my face, not that it could have made me look much worse
, but loosing an eye wouldn't be much fun.
Rounds with no powder do happen. They are vanishingly rare in western produced commercial ammo, but they are not unheard of in ammo produced in eastern Europe or former Soviet states. I had a buddy that had some Golden Tiger 7.26x39 that had two powderless rounds in a 1k shipment of ammo he bought about 2 years ago.
Definitely if you're shooting and you squeeze the trigger and it doesn't sound quite right you need to stop and check out the weapon for a stuck round or other malfunction before squeezing the trigger again.
