I had a situation where the guy installing my furnace didn't finish the job and left a dirty water discharge line hanging freely above a couple of storage boxes – where factory ammo and primed cases were stored.
This led to many valuable factory centerfire cartridges and primed cases being immersed under some really dirty brown water for several weeks – before this freak situation was discovered. As some of you may know, reloading components – and even certain types of factory ammo – are currently in short supply, so this involved more than a financial loss.
I air dried the wet cartridges and threw away the many waterlogged factory ammo boxes – then tumbled the grubby, tarnished, sometimes hard water encrusted cases. To my surprise, the majority of the rimfire ammo seemed to still fire. The centerfire stuff was a different story.
Some handloads were Okay – as was a quantity of the Russian surplus fodder – which had been made with that that black bullet and primer sealing compound. What was left was really unpleasant to even test because shooting the damaged stuff involved random duds, potentially-dangerous squibs, and some nasty hang fires. I was glad to not have had to share the range with anyone that day.
I found that, if a weighed a given lot that had been immersed, I could find the heaviest rounds and then thereby generally establish the individual cartridges most likely to have taken-in water. Then, I took these sample test cartridges for that lot apart. This method helped me to figure-out which groups of ammo were flooded and need to be taken apart and dried-out. As much as possible, I used an RCBS bullet puller – using one of those kinetic bullet pullets only where I couldn’t get the right collet, or the ammo didn’t permit the use of the RCBS puller.
The water-logged powder – coming from the cases – often was a dark, paste like substance. However, after this was air dried, it looked and worked like new. I keep notes of my reloading, so in the case of my handloads, I was able to IDENTIFY and reuse the powder. At first, I left the primed cases to air dry, but I found that only about half of these worked. I decide that if was likely that the primers can’t dry-out sufficiently, unless they are removed from the primer pockets. I did this with a Lee decamping die, and I examined the recovered the primers.
About 30% of these seemed to have been damaged by that removal method – often with the anvils separated from the cup – due to the freefall trip these had made, after decapping. I switched to a Franklin Arsenal “Ultimate” hand decapping tool – and this was a tidy way to remove and non-destructively recover primers. I discarded the primers that looked like they were too fouled, by the dirty water (say, 3% of the total) and – after air drying – reseated the remainder.
About 98% of the recovery effort resulted in perfectly good, restored centerfire ammo. About 1% of the recovered primers developed small blow out holes. I don’t know whether that was due to the extra stresses on the cup metal from the removal and reseating process, or whether these primers were already bad. Apparently, there was a bad lot of Winchester primers, that exhibited this problem.
The bottom line is you can recover and reuse power primers, brass and bullets from totally-soaked ammo. Was it worth it? Yes. Was if fun? … NO!
Will I ever hire that furnace installation firm again? Not likely.
This led to many valuable factory centerfire cartridges and primed cases being immersed under some really dirty brown water for several weeks – before this freak situation was discovered. As some of you may know, reloading components – and even certain types of factory ammo – are currently in short supply, so this involved more than a financial loss.
I air dried the wet cartridges and threw away the many waterlogged factory ammo boxes – then tumbled the grubby, tarnished, sometimes hard water encrusted cases. To my surprise, the majority of the rimfire ammo seemed to still fire. The centerfire stuff was a different story.
Some handloads were Okay – as was a quantity of the Russian surplus fodder – which had been made with that that black bullet and primer sealing compound. What was left was really unpleasant to even test because shooting the damaged stuff involved random duds, potentially-dangerous squibs, and some nasty hang fires. I was glad to not have had to share the range with anyone that day.
I found that, if a weighed a given lot that had been immersed, I could find the heaviest rounds and then thereby generally establish the individual cartridges most likely to have taken-in water. Then, I took these sample test cartridges for that lot apart. This method helped me to figure-out which groups of ammo were flooded and need to be taken apart and dried-out. As much as possible, I used an RCBS bullet puller – using one of those kinetic bullet pullets only where I couldn’t get the right collet, or the ammo didn’t permit the use of the RCBS puller.
The water-logged powder – coming from the cases – often was a dark, paste like substance. However, after this was air dried, it looked and worked like new. I keep notes of my reloading, so in the case of my handloads, I was able to IDENTIFY and reuse the powder. At first, I left the primed cases to air dry, but I found that only about half of these worked. I decide that if was likely that the primers can’t dry-out sufficiently, unless they are removed from the primer pockets. I did this with a Lee decamping die, and I examined the recovered the primers.
About 30% of these seemed to have been damaged by that removal method – often with the anvils separated from the cup – due to the freefall trip these had made, after decapping. I switched to a Franklin Arsenal “Ultimate” hand decapping tool – and this was a tidy way to remove and non-destructively recover primers. I discarded the primers that looked like they were too fouled, by the dirty water (say, 3% of the total) and – after air drying – reseated the remainder.
About 98% of the recovery effort resulted in perfectly good, restored centerfire ammo. About 1% of the recovered primers developed small blow out holes. I don’t know whether that was due to the extra stresses on the cup metal from the removal and reseating process, or whether these primers were already bad. Apparently, there was a bad lot of Winchester primers, that exhibited this problem.
The bottom line is you can recover and reuse power primers, brass and bullets from totally-soaked ammo. Was it worth it? Yes. Was if fun? … NO!
Will I ever hire that furnace installation firm again? Not likely.
)
