Anyone know if there will be or are any current imports of the Chinese 5.56? Seems to be the last hope for cheap .223/5.56.
It's tough because while the boat is on the way here, you don't know where prices are going. Lots of 5.56 available in the .20 range still, but importers are marking it up as high as possible. The ammo crisis in Canada is nothing more than the supply chain getting greedy.
Lever Arms has 800 round 5.56 metal spam cans.
Around .70 a round shipped, not cheap but reloadable and non corrosive.
The Chinese use a load of ball powder, beneath their 55grain bullets that looks very much like BLC2. It must be their equivalent, because the average charge weight is 25.4 grains, which is exactly the load used with BLC2
Used by who, for what? I use BL-C(2) for all my bulk 556 and x51 loading and 25.4grns is going to be relatively slow with a 55grn FMJ. 28.2 grains barely gets me to M193 speeds with Norc brass, or any for that matter. I use 27.5 with a 62grn FMJ and I am well under max pressure.
If it were their take on BL-C(2) it would be easy to duplicate without being so far off of their charge. Using their brass, Magnum primer and a nearly identical bullet and my charges barely break 3200 from several different 20" barrels. BL-C(2) (aka WC846) also wasn't used to load 5.56 for very long at all before it was blamed for leaving too much calcium carbonate residue in M-16s and replaced by WC844 (H335) powder. I had an AR with 3000+ rounds and no cleaning, never had any issues with reliability so I believe it was wrongly blamed or they managed to fix that in the meantime.