Gracias.
Tahunua001,
I was not meaning to suggest you need encyclopedic knowledge of reloading with my comment about identifying the powders. The reason I suggested the difference in powders would jump out at you is just that those numbers included some of the most commonly used powders, so I expect most rifle reloaders will have used them at one time or another. You probably have, too, but if you aren't living with the stuff at home and reloading regularly, I can see how they might not register.
I have a good friend who isn't particularly interested in reloading books or technical details, either. He's also not interested in shooting bugholes. He just wants to shoot in volume and not pay the cost of commercial ammo. He doesn't enjoy reloading and doesn't want to spend a lot of time doing it, so he got the most expensive, fastest presses he could find for his chamberings (Dillon 1050s), and just buys whatever bullets, powder and primers that will produce working, plinking accuracy level loads, sets up the powder measure and cranks out a 1000 rounds a week with a couple of hours of effort (including case cleaning, primer tube filling, and boxing finished rounds). (I wish I were on his budget.)
As to civilian and military powders, the military is the prime mover in powder manufacturing as military supplies during war are more critical to keep up than civilian supplies. Military budgets pay for the research and development of most powders here and abroad. Even though the civilian market is huge, most commercial powder types were developed for military purposes first.
While many of the military and commercial powder types are also sold to handloaders, they are not the same grade. As Sport45 said, ammunition makers and the military buy bulk grade powder, then use pressure test guns to determine correct charge weights, knowing they won't be the same for each lot of the same powder type. Civilian powders for handloading are what are called canister grade. Canister grade goes through extra processing steps to control its burn rate so load manual charge weights will remain valid. That extra processing makes it too expensive for military or commercial manufacturers to use, but they don't need it because they have pressure test equipment rather than load recipes to rely on.
The main problem with surplus powder is that it isn't necessarily good powder. The military uses a sample of over half a ton to qualify a rifle powder for purchase. If it doesn't produce ammo that meets their velocity, peak pressure, gas port pressure, temperature range and barrel wear requirements all simultaneously, it is rejected. The manufacturer is then stuck with the rest of the lot, and gets rid of it as surplus.
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Originally Posted by Reynolds357
I am sure it was mixed by the people who recovered it and not mixed in the military ammo. It scared me at first.
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Yep. Stick and spherical powder processes are different. The U. S. Military powders are made by companies currently owned by General Dynamics. The stick powders are made at their Valleyfield, Canada plant, while the spherical powders are made at the St. Marks, Florida plant. Their nitrocellulose (primary component for both) is
made at Radford, Virginia.
No doubt you had pull-down powder recovered from unrelated lots of ammunition. The U. S. Military used to use IMR 4895 in both .30-06 and 7.62 NATO, but later went to spherical WC852 and WC846, respectively. My guess is you got some old 4895 and some newer spherical from one of those two types of ammunition.
There are several potential problems with mixed powder like that. Stick powder is normally less dense than spherical powder. In bulk density, much of that is due to the sticks not packing as closely as spheres, which would not be a factor in the mix. But a little of that difference is due to coatings, deterrent penetration, the difference in nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose density, the longitudinal perforations in the stick grains, etc. As a result, the mix could tend stratify under vibration. This would give you powder whose characteristics and best charge weight would change toward those of one of the constituent powders as you worked your way through the container. How much will depend on what vibration the container and powder measure hopper are subjected to.
For example, in the Precision Shooting Reloading Guide, one of the authors found a load that, if he assembled it at home shot fine, but gave him pressure signs if he assembled it at the range. The difference? Vibration in his car on the way to the range would compact the powder enough to lower the ignition rate by making the flame front pass through tighter spaces. So, with your mixed powder, even if you had it perfectly blended when you loaded it, you might well find a difference in performance depending on whether it was transported nose up or nose down during the drive to the range and on how far away the range was. This is because that would change which constituent powder tended to have a larger portion near the primer.
A third thing is the different ages of the constituent powders affect how near they are to end of life. Once the stabilizers are used up in a powder by scavenging deterioration products, the powder starts to break down at an accelerated rate. Acid products of that breakdown cause the rest of the powder to break down faster, which is why it snowballs. This is all very storage condition dependent. The British put a limit of 20 years storage on spherical powders and 45 years on stick powders. Some have reported surplus 4895 and 4831 they bought having gone bad quickly. Others have fired much older ammo that worked fine, though neither we nor they would know exactly what temperatures and conditions it was subject to at different times of its life. Heat damage is cumulative in powder.
The point is, some of these powders are old enough to be calling it quits or at least to be getting weak. In rare instances that can also make them dangerous, with one blow-up of a Garand shooting WWII era ammo reported (the photos were on the CMP forum, though I can't recall where they were linked from originally). Others have fired ammo from between the WW's without a problem, so this is really unknowable until you try.
I don't own any guns I dislike enough to be interested in doing the experiment. Questionable powder I have pulled down goes to help the grass grow.