I had a few different brands of these and recently got some vintage boxes to add to the pictures. What do you think? I wish today's shells came in crates like these!

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

Winchester has offered a wooden case for the 50th anniversary of AA target loads.

I've got a couple of those old crates. They are full of gun stuff of one kind or another. Probably need to dump 'em out and see what I've forgotten that I have.
f.t.

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South Carolina-God's country

Wooden ammo crates were being phased out by the late 1950s, and nearly extinct by the mid-1960s, having been replaced by corrugated cardboard. There are several different construction styles of wooden ammo crates. The very early ones were very well made, got cheaper as time went on. Note the jointed corners of the Remington crate vs. the others with simple nailed corners. Your shotshell boxes are from the 1950s and 1960s. The one piece cardboard shotshell boxes began in the late 1930s, and were about the only kind in use from the end of WWII onward. Prior to that, most shotshell boxes were two piece. The oldest wooden shotshell crate I have is a UMC crate for 10 gauge shotshells from around the 1890s. Printing is barely visible.

Nice boxes. I have three myself but are of new manufacture.

Bobby,
Probably full of junk like pre-war SATs, early tool kits, MOP and ivory grips, Tyler T-grips, bags full of pre-war N frame Large Silver Medallions, and pre-war grip adaptors.

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

Probably paid too much,, but had to have this one

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War Eagle! '10 BCS & '13 SEC

Those boxes definitely have personality & character, much more so than the plastic ammo cans I make do with.

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Lounge Lizard Extraordinaire

Those boxes are very cool. Thanks for sharing. Somewhere in the garage, I have a similar box labeled Dynamite. I need to dig it out and see how it was constructed and what the company was/is that made it.

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I'm gonna grow fins.

I have several dozen assorted wooden ammo crates. I get them at garage and estate sales, but the supply seems to have dried up, as I haven't seen any for quite awhile. I use them for storage, keep them on shelves full of various types of stuff. The smallest I have is one for .410 shotshells. It's for hose clamps. Largest is a GI WWII crate for shotshells.

I picked up one of these a few weeks ago. Also my grandfather had a few of the older Western Cartridge Company crates and I was able to salvage a couple of them before my cousin got them all. Great to store gun & hunting stuff.

Don

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Laus Deo! <><

All I can understand on mine is 7.62mm the rest is in Russian.

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Isaiah 41:10

That bottom one is dovetailed. A bit of a lost art now-a-days. A good joint like that makes the box 100 times stronger than one that is nailed together (other two). Can ya tell I'm a woodworker........

I have wooden crates in 12, 16, 20 and 410 shot shells.
Never have seen a 28 gauge or a 10 gauge. I presume they exist, for a price.

The Remington crate has what is known as box joint or finger joint corners, typical for early ammo crates (and other types of crates and boxes). A dovetail joint is a similar idea, but not the same, and not usually used for boxes or crates as it is more complex to cut. It is commonly seen on older furniture, especially drawers. They resist pulling apart better than a finger joint corner due to the "dovetail" shape locking the corner together.

I stand corrected. They are finger joint corners! My eyes ain't what they used to be.

Curiosity got the better of me today. I saw in some of the posts that these wooden ammo boxes were probably from the 50s or 60s and it got me to wondering.

Especially today with computers being what they are, you can find information on anything. I thought I would look up the "history" of these type boxes. I could not find anything! I also figured that these were kinda collectible, so that there might even be a collectors site for them online.

I guess I am the ONLY one in the world who has wondered such a thing!!

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

If you go onto the International Ammunition Association forum ( International Ammunition Association {iaaforum.org} - Index page ) and search, you'll probably find several threads about wooden ammunition crates. Most of the serious ammo nutcases hang out there.

I have a few. My only complaint is that they really don't hold much ammo.

John

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- Cogito, ergo armatus sum -

In shotgun I have 12, 16, 20, 28, & 410. One dyneemite (Hercules) and a few rifle.

I look for the crates at flea markets and antique malls, to pass the time while my wife looks for cookbooks. I am still looking for a 10, a 28, and a 9mm shot. An odd one I found in Wisconsin at an antique mall is .22 Long shot.

Friday night at about 3:45 am, I was awakened by a strange sound. I thought the scratching/gnawing sound was coming from the attic above my bedroom. If I banged on the wall, the sound stopped for a few minutes, only to continue.

So......about 4:00 am I am pulling down the attic door to check it out. For more than 30 minutes, I looked around the attic with a flashlight for some kind of varmint evidence with no luck! When I get back in bed, I hear the noise again. Since I am WIDE awake now, I pay more attention to the location of the noise. It is not coming from the attic, it is coming from the wall. When I placed my ear against the wall, it sounded like it was just on the other side from my ear. The noise continued, off and on, until about sunup. I realize many animals have superb sight, but I can't imagine ANY light in my wall at 3:45 am! I wondered if the intruder would be back last night, but it was not (at least as far as I could tell). I know varmints can enter through a very small opening, but on a cursory inspection, I found none.

Don't know if it is a squirrel, chipmunk, or what. There are not any trees close enough to my house for a squirrel to get on the roof, and I don't think they can climb vinyl siding. I need to find their entry point and block it off (hopefully when the intruder is on the outside).

So, why this long story in this thread about wooden ammo boxes? Because, while looking in the attic, I found 2 of them I forgot I had! Must have been up there for more than 25 years. One was for Winchester Super W Speed Staynless Shot Shells and the other one was for Winchester Air Rifle Shot that would hold 100 Size 2 Tubes. I had never seen one for Air Rifle Shot before. After looking online, I found the Air Rifle Shot boxes have a few different labeling kinds. Some were marked Steel/Kopperklad (K1170S) or Lead (K1178S). Mine does not list what the shot was made of, just the K1178S code. I'll post pictures when I get them cleaned up.

So, the moral of the story is......if you got varmints in your wall, you might have wooden ammo boxes in your attic!

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

28 guage for a price is right, mine set my wife back 170.00 bucks. It is a very nice box. It completed my collection of shotshell boxes. I also have a 32 winchester spc,and 30-06, and 22lr and a Hercules Dynamite box.

I think these are Yugoslavian...

I like those old boxes
No ORM-D

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I have a nice Western 7mm Mauser wooden crate, probably from the 1950s. We use it as a stepstool for one of our old arthritic dogs so she can get on and off the sofa to sleep. She can't make it in one jump anymore.

Maybe you'll get lucky, and the critter will have died inside your wall.

..............they are wonderful artifacts of a different time. Here are a couple of .38 Special boxes with a hard to find cardboard "5 pack".

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LEX ET ORDO

Sounds SMELLY!!

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

It wasn't just ammo and dynamite. You can find old wooden crates that bulk packaged bars of soap and other consumer goods.

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You're shy a few manners.

Such as beer...

Be Very careful with your old Military AMMO Boxes. If you've ever noticed that if you set these boxes on a dirt floor or outside they last for ever. No insect damage to them. This is because the wood the boxes are made with has been soaked in Arsenic or Cyanide. Both are very skin permeable. Always handle them with gloves on especially in the summer time when your hands may become sweaty. Just a little FYI.

Hence the name soap box derby... Those old cars were originally built out of cast off parts. I wonder how many Winchester "sponsored" racers there were?

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Join the NRA today

I'm not sure when corrugated boxes first appeared, but prior to that time almost every item of commerce was shipped in wooden crates, boxes, or barrels. I wonder what happened to all of them? Probably most were used as firewood.

Must have been during the 40s or 50s.I remember lots of bushel baskets and gunny sacks still in use when I was small.

This is probably a very early corrugated Western shotshell case. There is a stamping on the bottom indicating (I think) that it was printed in 10/58. By the lot number on the case, the shells were loaded in 1/59. It is of double wall construction. So corrugated ammunition boxes were in use by at least no later than this.

All the wood ammo boxes that I have three came from Germany and were loaded with West German 7.62x51 nato ball, the last two was when I ordered two cases of Bulgarian light ball with the silver tip on the bullet. They have been retasked now by holding the bars of tin and solder. Which is used when I cast bullets. Would love to get a moisin nagant crate. Wouldmake a great coffee table. Frank

Here are the "new" old additions:

There are some differences on these 2 boxes that I found kinds interesting. The shot shell box has printed "Small Arms Ammunition Loaded Shot Shells Made In U.S.A. – Winchester Trademark – Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Division Of Olin Industries, Inc. New Haven, Conn., U.S.A."

The Air Rifle box has printed "Air Rifle Shot Made In U.S.A. – Winchester Trademark – Winchester Repeating Arms Co. Division Of Western Cartridge Co. New Haven, Conn., U.S.A"

After doing a little online research, I found the following information:

"Winchester Repeating Arms Company went into receivership in 1931, and was bought at bankruptcy auction by the Olin family's Western Cartridge Company on December 22 of that year. Oliver Winchester's firm would maintain a nominal existence until 1935, when Western Cartridge merged with its subsidiary to form Winchester-Western Company; in 1944 the firearms and ammunition operations would be reorganized as the Winchester-Western Division of Olin Industries."

This may tell something about when each was manufactured since they have the different information on them.

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Miss Buddies crsides & fat tom

The Winchester name progression is (roughly)
Winchester Repeating Arms Co. division of Western Cartridge Co. (1931)
Winchester Repeating Arms Co. division of Olin Industries, Inc. (1944)
Winchester-Western Division Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation (1954)
Winchester-Western Division Olin (1969)
Winchester Olin (not sure of date, I think early 1980s)

I prefer the lilliputian size wooden ammo boxes. Much easier to carry.

bdGreen

Here's one I've had since the mid-80's. It was for mortars and is marked loaded in '69. Most likely used during the Vietnam war.

When I first arrived in the Detroit area years ago, it seemed everyone had a Henry Ford story, usually about how cheap, uh, frugal, he was. Here's one about re-using wooden boxes.

It seems that back in the early years of the Ford Motor Company, Ford noticed that a supplier sent metal parts in large boxes / crates made of oak. He told them to make the containers out of oak boards of his exactly specified dimensions.

When the boxes arrived, they were emptied then broken down and the boards were taken to the assembly line. These boards were exactly the correct dimensions to be used as floor boards on the Model T, no cutting required. (Yes, way back when, "floor boards" on cars were really wooden boards. Dash boards too! )

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You're shy a few manners.

Henry Ford also had a charcoal business (Kingsford) to use up all the odd pieces of wood cut from boards used in car construction at the time. I think there was a Kingsford who ran it, who was some relative of Henry. What wooden crates and boxes he couldn't use for floorboards or making Woodies probably ended up in a Kingsford charcoal oven. Charcoal was sold through Ford dealers. I remember seeing bags of charcoal sitting in dealer showrooms back in my youth.

The summer I turned seventeen (right after the Battle of Antietam) I worked in the warehouse of a large sporting goods company here. Unloading and stacking cases of ammo and barbell weights. I was a skinny little bugger, but I damn sure was in shape. I remember without much fondness the times we got half a truckload of ten gauge shells.

As I recall, some of the ammunition we got in may still have been in wooden crates--that would have been 1954.

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Oh well, what the hell.

"As I recall, some of the ammunition we got in may still have been in wooden crates--that would have been 1954."

Probably so. I have understood that the main transition from wooden boxes to corrugated shipping containers took place during the 1950s. I have one Peters wooden shotshell crate that I am reasonably sure is from the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s I know for sure that cases of ammunition was shipped and sold in corrugated containers. I bought lots of them.

I have more than a hundred of those setting in the field,,,
They work great on my shelves to hold junk,,,



34 inches long,,, IIRC

I gotta get rid of them some day,,, Hmmmmmmmm

I was riding my bicycle today along the Mississippi River and saw this washed up on the bank. After checking it out I hid it under some logs, then went home and got my car and lugged it back home. I've seen ammo boxes but never one like this. Anyone know more about it, or what war it came from? It's in good shape. Just needs a coat of Rustoleum. Writing on it says SMALL ARMS AMM BOX MKI MOD O. There's also a neat inscription of an eagle. All the hasps work and it looks like the seal is still in good shape. When I first saw it I was hoping it had a German Luger or a bunch of money in it but no such luck.

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Looks like a WWII Navy 20mm ammo box. I've got one in my garage as a rag holder.

I told my wife I was going to use it as a coffee table in the living room. She didn't think that was funny.

Navy 20mm ammo box. Mine is almost a half century old. Have about a half dozen crates that hold two 440 spam cans of 7.62x54r in the garage. Some are holding my tin stash and old solder bar remnants. Pretty good find as you don't see them much anymore. Rust-oleum machinery grey comes close to the original color. Frank