Hoplites1234
New member
A guy on the web (ammoman.com) is selling ammo for the mosin-nigant. It's stated to be 1970's production--is this stuff still good? Opinions?
A guy on the web (ammoman.com) is selling ammo for the mosin-nigant. It's stated to be 1970's production--is this stuff still good? Opinions?
Earlier on in my military dayz, we were doing some M2, 50-Cal range fire training on North Ft. Lewis, WA. Used to getting the ammo in O.D. green large metal cases, often 'Nam era issue, this was a wooden box with rope bindings & rope carrying handles, a new sight to us VOLAR troops. Stenciled on the side in fading ink was 'Round, ball, 50-Caliber', a run of numbers and a date ending in 1952! Inside each round was dull brown not bright bassy colored and was oozing clear liquid from where the casing married-up with the round. The bottom of the box was saturated with this gel! One of our senior Non-Coms told us to 'scatter' so we did like rabbits. He picked up a single drop on his fingertip, flicked it at a row of sand-bags near-by and that tiny globule blew a 3" hole outa the bag it hit. The gun-powder had secreted nitro-glycerine over 30 years in storage and should never have made it into our inventory, but I guess some genius thought it was still safe to use! No wonder the deuce + 1/2 that bumped it all the way from some ammo dump hadn't gone up in one BF kapowee. We called EOD and they stuck a blasting-cap (no need for a wasted kicker charge of 1/4 pound of TNT) wired into a Claymore mine clicker unit, then we all backed off. "Fire in the hole!" They blew it in place and the concussion wave blew in every glass military vehicle's windows within 200-meters of the box to splinters. It left a 4ft deep crater 10ft wide and those of us (me one!) stupid enough to be standing 'safely' 200 meters away & watching for the 'fun' of the blast, not laying prone, found ourselves knocked on our asses with painful ringing in our ears for hours after. This was in 1981, and this batch had come from the Korean war some 30 years earlier. Talk about old ammo and unsafe training, we sure had both. I can only imagine how much 'fun' we would have had with a belt of that volatile shit locked up in the head-space & timing feeder of an M2, or what would have happened to the gunner and his spotter/feeder! 'Saving Ryan's Privates' and dog tags would have been all we would have found of them! Just a true tale of how to spot VERY bad ammo that is MUCH more dangerous than frigging TNT.
Canis-Lupus