The worst ammunition you've ever shot?

Indian 7.62 NATO.

I had to carefully hand inspect each cartridge. They often had split case necks and bullets that were seated crooked.

A good friend saw me going to all that trouble, and said... "You understand you are shooting ammo that was manufactured in a country where the population drinks from the same river they $#1+ in?".



The silver lining is that I learned really good non-destructive inspection procedures for my own handloads, once I started handloading.

Fiocchi 12ga, Muzzle flash about 6 feet long and dirtiest I've ever seen.

Rimfire: Thunderbolt. Misfires and loose bullets.
Centerfire: Tula 9mm. Maybe hard primers, maybe primers don't work AT ALL!!

DeepSouth said:

Fiocchi 12ga, Muzzle flash about 6 feet long and dirtiest I've ever seen.

Click to expand...

That's certainly not one that I would have expected to see in this thread. What specific 12ga load was it? What shotgun and barrel length? I really like Fiocchi's Golden Pheasant and Turkey loads. I've never noticed ANY muzzle flash from them and they pattern well from my Super Black Eagle. Never dirty either, but the only ammo that seems to gunk it up are bulk target loads, and that's only after 200 or more rounds.

worst problems I have had were with reloads I bought at a gun show. Never again Both me and a friend made the mistake of buying reloads from "Big Bubbas Bullet Barn" we now both have some ammo of questional reliabiality Im not shooting it,I am not going to resell it,guess Im going to give it to someone who can dissamble it and re use what they can salvage.

highlander 5 said:

Remington Thunderbolts,had a case rupture thought the gun blew up. Dirty and a fair amount of misfires.

Click to expand...

+1. Remington Thunderbolt .22LR. Very dirty, 1 out of 10 won't go bang. Have had some squib on me as well.

I fired some of my Winchester Super X 22 junk today, just to get rid of it. 2 rounds out of every magazine failed to extract and I could tell its inconsistent = garbage.

I won't be buying anymore of this stuff.

This Colt 1911 22 eats CCI ammo all day long like a clock.

Herter's circa 1965. Just generally low quality fodder: malformed bullets, crooked bullets and wildly varying MVs.

I've heard they've improved their quality but I haven't bought any in 50 years ... or there abouts.

ku4hx said:

Herter's circa 1965. Just generally low quality fodder: malformed bullets, crooked bullets and wildly varying MVs.

I've heard they've improved their quality but I haven't bought any in 50 years ... or there abouts.

Click to expand...

Current Herter's ammo isn't bad. It's not the best thing on the shelf but I wouldn't call it the worst either. Herter's went out of business and came back. They made a deal to import ammo with Cabela's being their only dealer. I think Herter's specs it, contracts the production out, Herter's imports it and sells it exclusively to Cabela's.

I've used their 7.62x39, .223Rem, and 7.62x54R steel cased rifle ammo. It's all just as good, if not better, than Tula or Wolf. They don't currently have any of the steel cased stuff on Cabela's website, makes me think they let the contract expire or maybe the sanctions against Russia effected the deal.

The also have Herter's Select which is all loaded by S&B, both rifle and pistol ammo. It's normally the same price as S&B but every now and then I find it cheaper. I've used their .38spl, .45acp, and .223Rem. I've had no problems with it either except the pistol brass seems to get brittle after reloading. I normally only get 3-4 reloads out of it before a bunch of the case mouths start cracking, which is unusual for pistol brass.

Then there's Herter's TNJ (total nylon jacket) pistol ammo, loaded in aluminum casings. It's loaded by CCI/Blazer. I can't speak to it's quality. I stay as far away from aluminum cased ammo as possible.

Give it a try. I've never used the old Herter's stuff, wasn't even alive back then. But I bet it's nowhere near as bad as the old Herter's.

bearman49709 said:

Federal is worst I've seen in over 50 years shooting, don't matter if its rim fire center fire or shotgun.
I see very few people using Federal at any range and when asked almost all tell they have more problems with Federal than any other brand.

Click to expand...

That has not been my experience. Never had a single issue with thousands of rounds of federal bulk 12 or 20 gauge, and fired 10k plus of federal champions pre Obama with 1 misfire. Post Obama it's about 1 in 500 rounds which is about 39087% better than any Winchester 22 I've tried. Winchester white box center fire ammo has generally been good for me, as has federal.

A-Merc, almost any caliber! I have had failure rates of 10% and the brass was horrible. It had some off center primers and was too soft to reload. Some of the .38spl split on the first firing.

Got some 9mm and 223 repops from a gun show. It was junk. 'Nuff said about those.

I was going to mention how much I hated most any federal 22LR, because they wouldnt reliably cycle my 10-22. But a volquartsen extractor fixed that!

Lastly, When I originally went through my dads reloads, I found a batch (about 350 of 'em) of 380 JHP that had a hot 9mm size dose of bullseye in them! Im glad I was bright enough not to run them without a proper inspection.

Magtech .45LC Cowboy loads. Half of them would go "BOOM", half would go *pffft*

S&B 55Gr. FMJBT

Remington Thunderbolt - bought it in an ammo can, cheap, from Midway and ended up giving it away to a bunch of folks. It was very dirty and had, on average, 2 out of every ten duds, one in 100 were squibs and the velocities were all over the place. Shooting a Ruger rimfire challenge, we had numerous jams and sometimes there was an audible delay between shots going off and hitting the target (or ground) at 3yds.

Yugo 1950's production 8mm Mauser and Turkish 8mm Mauser surplus ammo - must have been the rare UN "Safe Ammo" contract - it rarely ever fired. Had to pull the several hundred bullets and reload into good commercial brass, powder and primers.

For commercially available ammo, the worst has been Remington Golden Turds and "Armscor Precision" which wasn't very precise at all.
Bought a box of Winchester white box 9mm Luger once that had three rounds with the primers installed sideways.......

My Colt M1991A1 refuses to digest anything wearing the "Speer" name - loaded ammo, brass or bullets. Any other ammo, bought or handloaded, not a problem.

Remington 'Golden Bullet' 22LR.
About 10% seem to be missing the priming compound.
Tried rotating the cartridge and trying up to 10 times to find a spot that would work, without any luck.
Remington Golden Bullet and Winchester Super-X used to be surefire when I was a kid.
Now I depend on CCI and Federal.

412

MOST of the complaints about 22LR are gun specific. If I find a certain ammo that works well in a certain gun then I keep it marked accordingly. There is actually a good bit of difference in the shape and size of different 22 ammo and it causes inconsistency in firing and in extracting. I have never had anything even close to a 5% failure rate with any bulk ammo. 1 or 2 out of a box may need to be rerun.

I did buy some reloads from a local gunsmith in 9x18 and wound up taking a gun back to him to remove a squib. I posted a pic here a while back. They worked fine in the German but not in the Hungarians.

.32 ACP Magsafe was just crap

Do reloads count? Vet-Made Ammunition sent me some very erratic .380 reloads, including some loaded with split cases. Farrar Ballistics also sent me a thousand rounds of 9mm that don't function well in most of my guns, as well as a few reloaded aluminum cases that snuck into their bulk packaging somehow. No one took credit for that.

For factory loads I've never found anything worse than Remington Golden Bullet .22

Would have to be Tula Brass Maxx. 115 gr 9mm. Was also the only ammo I've had any failures with. Something like 2 FTE and a light strike or two. All were among the first 100 rounds I ever fired out of my new XDs. So it might have just been the pistol. Especially since I haven't had a single issue then and I've gone through about 600-700 of whatever cheap 9mm I can find.

KansasSasquatch said:

Current Herter's ammo isn't bad.

Click to expand...

Yes, I've heard that too. But it's completely irrelevant to me now. As of about 1970, I make almost all my own. I do buy maybe 50 rounds of premium factory SD stuff every 5-7 years, but that's a minuscule amount. I'd guess if Herter's hadn't improved they'd have long ago gone belly-up. Or not.