Ammo failure

[Maddog 521]

I went to the range on Friday and had a very interesting situation happen. I took several guns with me and all worked as they were supposed to except one. The one in question was a Bulgarian Makarov pistol that I have owned since the 90's. I have never had any problems at all with it.
The Mak was in the back of the safe with a magazine in it and loaded with Corbon 9mm Makarov 95gr JHP. I think that magazine has been loaded for at least 5 years but maybe even longer.
I aimed at the target and the gun did not fire. I ejected the round and the second one did not fire either. The 3rd fired but was very low powered and I checked to see if it exited the barrel, which it did. Out of the 8 rounds in the mag only 2 fired as normal, 2 sounded as duds but exited the barrel and the other 4 didn't work at all. All cases had been struck with the firing pin and looked good.
After all of that I loaded the mag with some Russian Brown Bear ammo and didn't have any problems at all. I fired that 50 rd box of BB and all worked.
Why did the Corbon not work? Anyone have any ideas?
Scary to say the least.

 

[bigggbbruce]

Guess you didn't read the manual.. only Russian ammo can be used..

 

[JayFramer]

Strange.

My Bulgarian Makarov is highly reliable with the Brown Bear you mentioned. I’ve fired over 3,000 rounds of it with 0 issues. Maybe it’s time to leave the buck per shot wonder boutique ammo on the shelf and carry what the gun was designed to fire, steel cased ball ammo? The lower velocity, lighter and blunter 9mm Mak does not have the overpenetration problems of 9mm NATO. Many Mak guys carry ball.

Just my $0.02.

 

[Rudi]

Have never had any problems with my Russian Mak. It loves steel case Russian/ Ukrainian ammo. I rotate loaded mags. every 4-5 months. Sounds like a bad batch of Corbon.

 

[alwslate]

Any possibility of oil contamination of the primers of the Corbon ammo?

 

[Nevada Ed]

I hear factory ammo is good forever but........

I try to not have SD ammo loaded in a weapon over a year, two at the most if having a hard time finding it.
Another reason to have a second stand by ammo that you can buy, fresh off the shelf, if needed.

A weapon needs to fired once a year to make sure it is good to go
and also gets a good cleaning and check up on working parts.

A weapon w/o any love is an unhappy weapon.
Five years of neglect..........
I can understand it being a little ticked.

 

[Maddog 521]

There was no possibility of oil contamination. The gun was on the top of my hutch in the kitchen for a while. I then put it in the back of the safe and apparently forgot about it. I found 2 more boxes of that Corbon ammo in there also. There is some corrosion on the base of 2 shells in 1 of the boxes. I will shoot it all up the next time I go to the range. I've have quite of a lot of ammo in there and it has me concerned.
I don't think I neglected it leaving it in the safe and I don't think the gun was the problem.

 

[rwsmith]

Surprising....

I've had ammo much older than that stay good. My rate of failure for very old ammo matches about that of duds that I've made with bum primers. That is disconcerting if you had to use that for an HD situation.

Modern primers have an impervious membrane over the priming material that should protect them very well.

Sorry to say that I'd have to shoot up that whole batch just for reliability's sake.