Very old .30-06 military ammo

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David Sinko

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I recently acquired a few boxes of elderly .30-06 ammo. Can anybody tell me if this has any value, or appeal, or if there's even a chance that it will still fire?

Box 1:
20 CALIBER .30
BALL CARTRIDGES
Model of 1906
For Aircraft Use
Powder C.P.Pyro,D.G.W.532 Cartridge Lot No. 488
Manufactured by Frankford Arsenal.
Class 47 Division 3 Drawing 22

Headstamp is F A 18
Most have heavy corrosion and I'm pretty sure the powder is wet and/or contaminated. Six of them look very good and serviceable and I can hear the powder rattling inside when I shake them.

Box 2:
20 CARTRIDGES
BALL
CALIBER .30 M2 ALTERNATIVE
AMMUNITION LOT S. L. 8090
DISPOSAL OF EMPTIED CARTRIDGE CASES
MUST BE MADE AS PRESCRIBED BY A. R.
ST. LOUIS ORDNANCE PLANT

Headstamp is SL 43
These are all in excellent condition and look like they'd all fire. These look like FMJ and attract a magnet but do not have a colored tip.

Any info on these would be appreciated. I am curious about the "For Aircraft Use" on the first box.

Dave Sinko
 
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The WWII ammo is probably still good. The WWI ammo is probably for an aircraft machine gun. At that time machine guns were synchronized to fire through the prop, so it was loaded to strict standards. I think it is probably collectable, not shootable.:)
 
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They might fire but I would not shoot them both of the cartridges listed are corrosive primed SL headstamped cartridges were not loaded with non corrosive primers till mid to late 1952,There is a chart posted in the ammo section in the CMP Forums.
 
AirCommando said:
The WWII ammo is probably still good. The WWI ammo is probably for an aircraft machine gun. At that time machine guns were synchronized to fire through the prop, so it was loaded to strict standards. I think it is probably collectable, not shootable.:)
Click to expand...

What he said! Yes the war II stuff is corrosive but as long as you clean it properly as soon as you come home from the range, no problems, do not let set uncleaned even over night.I've shot a lot of corrosive ammo with no bore problems.
 
To shoot 20 rounds of that stuff you will spend an inappropriate amount of time cleaning the rifle. Offer it for sale whoever wants it. Spend the results on primers and powder.

Regards,

Tam 3
 
Damn Yankee said:
What I would like to know is, how was this done?

synchronized to fire through the prop,
Click to expand...

Anthony Fokker invented the interruptor mechanism in WWI. It used a cam driven by the engine to interrupt the firing mechanism through a system of rods and levers that went from the cam to the gun. The idea was to stop the gun from firing as the propeller blade passed through the area in front of the machine gun. It was first employed in the Fokker E1 comonly called the Ein Decker or single wing as it was a monoplane. Anthony Fokker was actually a Dutchman who sold his planes and designs to the Germans.

He designed this mechanism after seeing the setup used by the French on their monoplane fighter called the Morane-Saulnier. The French just had heavy steel deflectors attached to the prop so they could deflect the bullets. The French actually thought of the interruptor concept but they knew that the performance of their ammo was too inconsistent for the interruptor to work reliably. Fokker took one look at this design on a captured wreck of a Mourane Saulnier and in a few days he came up with the interrupter mechanism that was successful enough to be employed right on through both WWI and WWII. The US only used them on a few of the earlier fighters in WWII because we mostly favored wing mounted guns that fired outside the propeller arc. The interruptor was introduced by Fokker in the summer of 1915 and Max Immelman was the first German pilot to shoot down an enemy plane with Fokkers new invention in August of 1915. The two leading German aces of the time (Max Immelman and Oswald Bolke) both suffered interruptor gear failures which resulted them shooting off their own propellers. Immelman's fatal crash a few months later is thought to have been caused by such a failure.

The inerruptor design did require tighter ammo specs to keep all the rounds at tight tolerance in velocity for obvious reasons. A round that was either too fast or too slow could shoot your prop off. This why there were specific tollerances spec'd for aircraft rated ammo in WWII. A rash of guys shooting off their own props is bad for morale.
 
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Very interesting. My first thought was that it was some kind of anti-aircraft round, but that didn't make sense. I never would've guessed that it's for shooting THROUGH the prop. How fast did the prop spin anyway?

I just noticed the date of manufacture on top of the box. It was made May 29, 1918. If it were stored properly, would the corrosive priming mixture still fire? I pulled a few of the really nasty looking ones and the corrosion had gotten down into the powder charge. The bullets came out with one light tap of the bullet puller. But six of them are in excellent condition with no visible contamination whatsoever.

Dave Sinko
 
The story I read is that, as a boy, Tony Fokker would easily throw stones past the spinning blades of the windmills. Bullets travel much faster than the spinning propellor and voila'!
 
The Fokker Eindecker used a rotary engine. Rotary engines look like conventional radial engines with one major difference. With a rotary engine like that on a Fokker E1 the crankshaft is bolted to the fire wall and the prop is bolted to the crankcase and the entire engine rotates. By late in the war these contraptions reached their developmental zenith and their speed peaked at 1000 to 1200 rpm. With a two-bladed prop that meant that a prop blade passed infront of a gun muzzle 30 to 40 times per second. With two guns firing through the propeller arc, there were as many as 80 chances per second to shoot your prop off when firing your guns. How do you like those odds?

These rotary engines were also used on the Sopwith Camel and the Fokker Tri-plane to name a few. The famous Fokker DVII, the SE5 and the Spad XIII all used stationary liquid cooled engines in either inline or Vee configurations. These ran at higher RPMS but some also used gear reduction to slow the prop down.

For more details on rotary engines see Wikipedia.
 
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