I have a bunch of vintage F A '42 .30-06 brass. It is clearly unfired (pulled component) and it seems like a shame to waste it. Will it stand up to modern loadings? I have loaded some elderly .45 ACP brass but never any rifle brass, or at least none this old.

Dave Sinko

I'm sure the brass is fine, but the primers are corrosive and crimped. Modern .30-06 brass is so common, I wouldn't bother with old military stuff.

__________________
"I also cook."

Most everyone I know reloads that does so for a Garand. They are lighter loads due to the gas system. The do actually seek this brass out though.

Use them...they are fine! If you use the original primers make sure that you clean the gun with a solvent that will clean up corrosive primers.
Randy

I'm shooting up some Denver Arsenal Ball ammo dated '43. I shoot the stuff in my M1.
Then I've been reloading some of the brass for my Sedgley '03sporter.
I like it's heavier construction for use in the '03. I imagine that's what some of the Garand shooters like about it too.

I did anneal the necks after the first firing, a habit from useing MilSurp ammo from years back .
Remove the primer crimp after the first de-priming.
I haven't had any brass loss yet, but I keep the loads minimum or extra light cast loads for the Sedgley.

Yes,, make sure you clean appropriately for corrosive primes after the initial use.
Everyone has their favorite it seems,,as long as it's effective.
I use Windex or similar glass cleaner,,and have for almost 50yrs.

That brass is great for reloading!I reload using alot of wwII brass. I even have some loaded WWI ammo!You will not have any problems with the brass.

I've used a lot of mil brass in the past, but the last batch of .30-06 cases suffered an unusual number of split necks after firing. Not the same batch, and I don't know the year, but check it as usual after firing and you should be good to go.

If the lot is good, its good. Remember it was wartime production.
I was recently given a batch of DEN 43 that had undersized primer pockets. After fussing with it for a while, it all went into the recycle bin.

__________________
-jwk-
US Army '72-'95

Considering safety aspects, new brass is cheap and there have likely been technological improvements in its makeup and manufacture since the 1940s. Despite advice to the contrary, why take a chance with 70-year-old brass?

OK, I'm gonna punch the primers, discard them and ream the pockets.

I'm still trying to decide if I want to use the powder. There's 50.5 grs. per case, exactly what I use of Varget with a 168 gr. bullet. But I don't think Varget was around in 1942.

Dave Sinko

Dave;
If you can't identify that powder 100%, BURN IT OFF or sprinkle it in your garden ! ! No savings in ammo is worth the gamble of destroying a fine rifle. M2 Ball was loaded with a variety of different powders, depending upon mfr. If the brass is truly unfired, it won't have any of the mercuric salts from the corrosive primers, so just decap it and load as new brass.
I don't think there's any PC way to dispose of the primers that doesn't cost a lot. Throwing them into a body of salt water will make everyone who sees you angry, as will throwing them 3-4 at a time into a large fire, so, um, don't do either of those things, right? Remember, HAVE FUN but BE SAFE !

Larry

I would never attempt to decap live primers. "Kill" them with oil or fire them before attempting to remove them.

I have removed live primers on several occasions. Ten to twelve times or so...damaged brass/split case found after seating primer. Absolutely no reason not to reuse them. I have read hear and on other reloading forums, posts from experienced reloaders, that they do the same.
Go slow and wear safety glasses...as you should always do anyway.

I think the concern here with de-priming is original military primers will be crimped or staked in place.

The force required to de-prime is significantly higher and much more likely to set off the primer.

I used to reload Lake City 30-06 brass, until I broke my Dillon 550 and got tendonitis from doing so. Military brass is harder than commercial, because it is designed to run through belt fed machine guns. If you do reload it, be sure to resize the primer pockets and lube the outside and inside of the necks well. Or just use commercial brass, which is alot easier to reload.

The hazard with firing the cases with the original arsenal primers is not that they are mercuric. Mercuric primers hadn't been used before WWI.

The hazard of using the fired cases is the firing residue, if not cleaned immediately is hygroscopic and will cause after-rust. The American Rifleman mentioned this a number of times. Hence, the reason for the military ritual of cleaning your rifle three times in three days thrter firing. The risk of after-rust is reduced to almost zero after the three daily cleanings.

I once fired some surplus Israeli 9mm SMG ammo in a carbine, cleaned and oiled it and put it into deep storage for two years. When discovered,the bore, chamber, and action was covered with fine red rust. It turned out the primers were at least mildly corrosive, and the single cleaning was not enough.

Dave,
Have NO fear. Decap those case. Go with a single-stage press and go very slowly - as long as you don't slam-bang the rounds through the decapping die, they will only very rarely go off. (My average was just under 2 per 100 that went off.) When they do go off, they just kind of sizzle/pop and are not a danger.

Now, as far as the brass, I strongly recommend you do some additional processing. Brass softens with heat (annealling) and hardens with age. since that brass is 70 years old, it could use some additional pampering. I'm betting it is filthy too.


I just processed 1000 1955 arsenal 30-06 brass, and am VERY happy with the results. First step after you get the primers out, is to clean and passivate the brass. (Google Passivate brass, and you'll see what it accomplishes.)

1. This is done by boiling some water, and putting about two heaping Tablespoons of citric acid (I use Lemi-Shine from the dishwasher aisle at the store - cheap and pure) in a plastic bucket along with about a gallon of the near-boiling water. Use a non-metallic spoon to measure the citric acid and stir it into the hot water until it's dissolved.
2. Then, put in as much brass as possible, until the water is full of brass, with none of the brass sticking up out of the water. Let it sit for about 30 minutes.
3. Then, agitate (again something non-metallic - you can just shake/jostle the bucket around), and make sure the brass is all covered by the water again, and let it sit another 20-30 minutes.
4. Drain off the water (citric acid is 100% safe for drains - not toxic waste), and rinse the brass with more hot water (just use a collander and hot tap water) until you feel that it's rinsed well.
5. Then, dry the brass. Guys have put it on towels out in the sun in the yard in the Summer, but this time of year, I've baked the brass in a very low oven (200 degrees or lower, if your oven goes lower - don't go over 220) to get it dry.

Now, the brass should be CLEAN (but not necessarily shiney). Throw it into your tumbler to polish it, however you normally polish your brass. Because the citric acid cleaned it, this won't take very long. I ran mine about half the time I normally run range brass.

Now the brass is clean AND shiney -- looking really good.

Lastly, remember that brass is hard. Correctly annealed brass will have a hard base, a medium middle, and a medium-soft mouth and shoulder. Chances are, with 70 year old brass, you have hard-hard-medium/hard... This means you will need to anneal.

I made an ultra-cheap, fairly fast annealing set-up. Take a variable-speed drill, chuck in a 3/8" socket connector and buy a deep-well socket (I think mine is a 1/2" deep-well, but it might be a 9/16"). Now get a propane torch (I bought the fat-tank model, because it sits up very nicely on the workbench, keeping the flame at about a 60-degree angle pointed up) and set it up on the bench, so the nozzle is pointing the flame up at an angle. Drop a case, base-down, into the deep-well socket. Notice how 2/3-3/4 of the case is protected by the socket? That helps keep the anneal from going too far down the case. With the case in the socket, turn on the drill motor real slow -- like you can walk faster with crutches and a walker slow -- and hold the case in the flame so that the brighter blue point of the flame is hitting right where the neck-shoulder joint of the case is. The darker blue flame will lap around the mouth and shoulder of the case as the socket rotates. You may note some orange flame coming from the mouth of the case -- that is the tar sealant burning off. (The military seals their ammo with tar sealant in the neck around the bullet for water-proofing.) AS SOON AS you see the mouth/shoulder of the case turn blue or purple, take the case out of the flame. If the case just begins to turn orange, you haven't ruined anything yet, but you are darn close, and it's unnecessary to go this far. I used the same collander I rinsed the cases in after passivating to catch the hot cases after being annealed. (There is NO need to quench the cases in water. The anneal happens from heating them - quenching does NOTHING to the brass, so why add another drying step?)

Here's the three steps my brass went through (dirty, passivated, and polished and annealed):


Happiness (can you tell this brass is 57 years old?):


The next step is I'm going to run a .32" bronze bore brush on the electric motor into the case necks to get rid of the rest of the tar in the case necks.

Then, I'm running all the cases through my Dillon Rapid Trim, to the trim-to length for my RCBS X-Die. I'm reloading all of my Ball / Match / AP / Hunting 30-06 ammo with full-length resizing, because I'm feeding 2 Springfields, 3 Garands, and hopefully-soon an M-1918A3 semi-auto BAR, so I want all the ammo to fit any gun and be safe and reliable. (Therefore, it's all loaded to M-1 Garand gas system specs.)

As far as your powder, I would use it. I'm not telling you to use yours, but if it were mine, I'd load it. I would step the load down to 49.0 grs. The M-1 gas system is designed to use the VOLUME of gas that is developed between 45.0 and 50.0grs of powder. The military loaded to pressure and velocity within a certain window of grains of powder for that volume. (Yes, that 50.5grs is within the military's window.) Myself, I'd load down just a little bit, but it appears your powder is on the slow side of 4895, AND, being 70 years old, it may have degraded slightly (but usually if storage is good, it won't degrade much). If you load 48-49grs of that powder with 147-155gr bullets, I bet you'll get reliable functioning and lower-than specification (but still respectable) velocity... Again, this is what I'd do (and have done), but you are on your own, since I'm not there and can't guide you in person in your loading endeavors.

Oh, by the way, if you don't go through all this work and just load-and-shoot, the brass will probably work just fine, but case life will be short, probably 1-3 loadings, max. Age-hardened cases tend to crack on the first or second firing/loading cycle due to brittleness.

I've also had some where the rims were nearly ripped off by the extractor, but that's more of a gun issue, as you don't want to soften the head of the case AT ALL!

Those primers were corrosive, but contained no mercury.

The "corrosive" component is merely salt. Just wash the bore and other exposed parts with soap and water, then dry, then oil.

Excellent write-up MMA10mm.

Very informative answes

Yes, very good info...

I have deprimed about 50 so far with no problems. I resize them slowly. They come out with only slightly more effort on account of the crimped pockets. Since these cases were unfired I can run them through the full length sizing die with no lubricant. I noticed that a few of them were slightly banana shaped; I suppose I can run them through the sizer and they will then chamber just like all the rest.

I notice that a few of the cases have a bit of corrosion in the primer pockets, and the bases of the bullets that were seated in these have corrosion too. These seemed to have increased powder volume in that when I pulled the bullet with the collet puller, I heard a pop and the powder level was slightly higher than in the rest of the cases. Since the fit of primer and bullet were air tight, is it possible that the corrosion was caused by the composition of the primers?

The powder in every single one of these cartridges was dry. The bullet is the black tip AP which weighs approximately 163 grs. so I plan to take the powder charge (50.3 grs.) and load it with a 145 gr. FMJ that I have on hand. It will most likely be shot out of my Ruger 77 Mk II. I will discard the original corrosive primers.

Dave Sinko

Quite right ! I should have said, "....corrosive salts..." Mea culpa.

Larry

I doubt they seek out 70yr old brass. It would deepnd on how it was stored. Brass does get brittle w/ age. I woul dbe supsect of running full power loads but a 3 shot test series would yield so me info. If it splits, toss em all.

A good friend gave me a sealed tin can of TW43 AP ammo. Broke it down and sold the bullets for a good price, deprimed the cases, cleaned the tar sealant from the case necks, reprimed after reaming the primer pockets. Loaded with cheap 150 grain soft points and shot it all in a 1943 Springfield armory garand. No splits, cracks or any other problems. Those cases lasted ten firings before they were retired. Same with some FA50 7.62nato cases. Got these when I used to order military cases in bulk 2-3000 at a time. No problems with those either. I have a bunch of LC67 match cases, those I save for use in my Model 70 match rifle in 30-06. 1955-Israeli 8mm cases, trim and form them into 7.65x53mm argentine mauser no problems there either. Frank

Yes Fred, they seek them out. There is something about shooting a Garand in the first place that makes you proud to show off the period correct headstamps as well. I see the same thing at our CMP pistol matches, some guys police their brass so they get back their vintage correct 45 acp brass.

Just an update here. I successfully deprimed all 213 crimped primers without any difficulty or explosions. I am reloading that 68 year old powder and it works fine. A couple of cases have been reloaded twice and are holding up quite well. Old ammo is good ammo!

Dave Sinko