I have old ammo; I do not shoot it but if I did I would check the powder to make sure it has not turned to clods
I got involved in an inheritance of a 30/40 Krag. The rifle came with 4 boxes of ammo. To start with I did not get one ounce of truth about the rifle or the ammo.
the ammo could have wrecked the rifle, the ammo had one of two problems. The powder was caked ahead of the primer or behind the bullet. What does that mean: I did not recommend opening the bolt after pulling the trigger without waiting at least 5 minutes. And then there was the caked powder behind the bullet; The caked powder would have rendered the one lug Krag scrap.
I find nothing entertaining about shooting old ammo.
I have shot 8mm57 Turkish ammo, I consider Turkish very strange stuff. I pulled the bullets on 100 cases and I dumped the powder. After dumping the powder I formed the 8mm57 cases to 7mm57 cases and then loaded them with my powder and bullets. I shot 40 of them, all the necks split, I waited and waited and then without warning the other 60 cases developed split neck while stored in a drawer with the rest of my 7mm57 cases/ammo.
And I wondered
, too much bullet hold
or too much neck tension
.
And then there were case body splits, the splits looked like they were hit with
shaped charges. I did consider the possibility the gas got trapped between the case body and case chamber. When this happened the case was too brittle to bend, thus? the case split.
At $2.40 cents for 70 rounds the 8mm57 ammo was not a bargain. And then there were the bullets, the bullets were streak-ers. meaning the bullets would align with the magnetic force lines created by a magnetic.
At the same price the Romanian ammo had the rifle friendly bullets and the speed of the bullets never got up to the speed created by the Turkish bullets.
F. Guffey