Older Norma ammuntion and pressure.

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Frank grimes

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I have a few boxes of my older Norma factory ammo in 300HH 180gr. It has the cardboard dividers in the box. Bought it off a guy here. I fired off a box, and had a few that were a bit harder to open the action and 2 that the primers came out, one of those was quite abit harder to open. Some rounds seemed fine.
Not sure what to do with the other boxes. Maybe pull them? Don’t want any unfortunate accidents.
Thoughts?

The rifle is a Ruger no1.
 
From this CGN website a few years ago, I was told that all the original Norma factory ammo has a small "NP" (Norma Precision) embossed on the factory primer. No one on this site at the time had ever seen that "NP" on the primers that Norma sold to re-loaders. So seemed to be a good "clue" whether ammo was actually original factory Norma, or somebody's reloads. Has checked out, for me, on both 7x61 Super ammo and 308 Norma Mag ammo.

You may need to zoom in to see the "NP" detail on the primers - three fired, and three unfired factory Norma 7x61 from about a month ago.

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Just checked. No NP on primers. The headstamps say Norma Re 300H&HMAG. The headstamp is also all capitols too. So different from the ones in the picture.
The cardboard insert has the number 02819 printed on both boxes.
The box is labeled Norma 300 H&H 180grains index no. 50
Soft point semi pointed boattail.
 
So, I have no experience with the 300 H&H loads. I do know that when we pulled a bullet from an - at the time unknown to us - it turned out to be a Norma Triclad bullet - the weight was exactly correct - pretty certain that was the one that the magnet stuck to. And definitely "semi-spitzer" tip - sort of a rounded, blunted pointy shape, and it did have a boat tail. From what I read, certainly with the 7x61 history, the original brass was head-stamped with "Re", apparently to indicate that it was "re-loadable". However, Norma re-engineered the brass alloy and their heat treat process and produced 7x61 Super brass as I have shown in picture above - is apparently same strength of case, but with thinner walls and shortened case head - gave about 5 grains powder more room. I have 60 odd of the "Re" head-stamped 7x61 here - all Capital letters, but all have been previously fired and de-primed, so I do not know what the primers originally looked like. I found some "new", never loaded 308 Norma brass that has same logo as shown above, without the "Re", so likely a later batch?
 
If in doubt, pull the bullets, dump the powder and reload them yourself. IIRC, Norma brass marked with “RE” in the head stamp we’re sold as factory brass for reloaders, while those marked Norma having “NP” on the primer were factory loaded ammunition.
 
As far as I can tell from some googling, the re stands for reloadable. Meaning the brass is boxer primed rather then berdan primed. When Norma decided to produce all of their cartridges boxer primed, they dropped the re and head stamped them “norma”. All lower case.
 
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