CBC 7.62 Ammo

O

Old Ranger

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A friend was given a hundred rounds of what I assume is 7.62x51 (308 Win)
Headstamped CBC, 7.62 and 75. FMJ bullet. My understanding is that it was manufactured in Brasil. Also assuming 75 is 1975 year of production. How is the quality of this ammo and are the primers corrosive?
 
Not sure of which batch, but a bad batch of surplus CBC 7.62 blew up plenty of rifles in this country for a time in the 90s.
A local dealer has a G3 hanging on display that was 'enlarged' thanks to some bad CBC.
Maybe others can offer better info.
 
Lots of info online about this ammo. There is alot of rumor and speculation but enough info for concern. I have some but won't risk shooting it. I suggest breaking it down into components but scrap the primers and powder.
 
When I had a dealer licence, we got crates of it in. My partsman and I spent a fair bit of time pulling bullets, dumping powder into a bowl, the remeasuring it and dumping it back into the casings and reseating the bullets. I mentioned this some time back on CGN, and someone said that it wasn't the powder that caused the trouble, it was, IIRC, the primers! Jeez, you can't win. Well, we fired off crates of the stuff, both before and after re-doing, and didn't have any mishaps.

If your buddy is worried about the ammo, I am the official Canadian CBC ammo disposal agent, so he can send it to me - prepaid!
 
I had a rifle do a kaboom with the CBC stuff. It came in through International Firearms, shortly before they closed their operations in Canada.

Sadly, it was a friend of mine that was shooting the rifle at the time of the kaboom. He ended up with a piece of brass in his eye and the rifle was ruined. International, to their credit, went good for all of the damages and replaced the ammunition with some commercial stuff made by Hirtenberger that was in 20 round boxes with African fonts.

The stuff was dated 75 and marked CBC 7.62. It was beautiful stuff. As kjohn mentioned, not all of it was bad. Only a couple of rounds here and there. The cartons of were all marked projecitos reformado or reloaded projectiles.

The story I got from International is that there was some dissention in the South American facility that reloaded it and some cases were sabotaged. Like kjohn, I had several cases of the stuff. We had shot off about 2/3 of it before anything happened. Close to 3500 rounds fired before the kaboom. Other than the kaboom, the only complaint I had about the stuff was the black tar like sealant they used around the bullet at the neck. Maybe, that was the real problem??? That stuff was hard as cement and made pulling those bullets a bear.

I still have 20 of the cases, bullets and powder. They all look good. Berdan primed

International, paid for shipping back to them all of the ammo left and the rifle as well as damages to my bud. Not even a whimper about costs but lots of sympathetic overtures.
 
There were kabooms in Canada and USA with this ammo. The American kabooms lead to lawsuits for damages. Century International hired a good lab to examine the issue. I have a copy of that report.

Some of the ammo is loaded with extruded powder that looks like 4895. That ammo is fine. Some is loaded with ball powder. Some of the ball powder rounds are contaminated with very fast pistol powder. It is these rounds that go kaboom. probably one of the loading machines at the factory was topped up with a keg of pistol powder, by mistake. the result is that a few hundreds of rounds out of millions have very high concentrations of pistol powder. A guaranteed kaboom.

A box of rounds all loaded with the extruded powders is good ammo. If it is ball powder, dump the powder and reload with known powder.

There are three flavours of this CBC ammo. Two are virgin factory boxes loaded with either ball or extruded powder. All the rounds in that box/case will be the same.

The third variation are cases where the case mouth was over-annealed and is too soft to give adequate neck tension. This ammo was refurbished by running it through a neck crimping machine. the aggressive neck crimps will be obvious. The boxes of this ammo is stamped with two words referring to this process.

This re-crimped ammo includes both ball and extruded in the same box. All re-crimped ammo must be either re-loaded with good powder or scrapped. I had several hundred thousand rounds of this stuff and pulled all the bullets, collected and mixed all the powder, so that the contamination was diluted to the point of being a non-issue. I still have some of this powder and use it whenever I can. It is similar to BLC2.
 
Just a heads up! I have recently seen some CBC 75 for sale at gun shows in Ontario recently, so keep your eyes open for it and beware. There are many rumor's about what happened with this ammo and I don't know what ones correct but there is a problem with some of it for sure! I would not risk shooting it.
 
CBC did not know where the ammo had come from which wrecked all he rifles. We had at least an MG-34 wrecked here from the stuff.

The offending ammo was packed in nice 20-round boxes which were labelled REENGASTADA, which is Spanish for REPACKED.

The language in Brazil is PORTUGUESE: similar to Spanish but NOT the same.

When the stuff wasn't blasting the bolts out of machine-guns, it made wonderful targets.
 
Thanks for the input gentlemen. I haven't seen how this stuff is packaged. He described it as beeing in cardboard packages and on stripper clips. I told him that personally I wouldn't shoot it but would salvage the bullets. I am going to end up with some of the clips which I use with my Norinco M14.
 
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