Two experiences...
A couple of years back my dentist, who had retired ten years earlier, called me to stop by his house. He used to shoot on the Army pistol team and had a lot of old .45 match ammo that he wanted to get rid of. He gave me 3-4 thousand rounds of ball ammo head stamped '52 or '55. I was leery at first but tested some rounds and it all went off and was very accurate. I assume it was used in bullseye matches. I ended up using it in several I.P.S.C. matches through my Para P-14 and every single round went off.
I recently bought a new S & W M69. I was running some rounds through it and just getting familiar with it. I had a couple of the 20 round boxes of Hornady 180 grain XTP with Frontier head stamps that I had picked up in the late '80's or early '90's. I loaded and fired five rounds and noticed substantial recoil. When I opened the cylinder I was unable to get the empties to eject and had to beat them out with a wooden mallet. I didn't pay much attention to the empties and was basically shooting the rounds up for the brass. Later my brother loaded five more rounds of the Hornady stuff and had the same results. I pulled all of that ammo I had left and set it aside. When I got home I noticed that all ten of those fired rounds had split from the rim to the case mouth. I know for a fact that this is factory ammo and had been stored in a sealed Plano box since it was bought.
|