Have you ever hunted with OLD hunting ammo?

turn of last century? sure I got some 2000 era rounds!

Kidding, kidding.....1900s stuff I have not seen, I wouldnt fire ammo that old personally.....

Having used some of the “old designs”, I can tell you most worked quite well.
Of particular mention is the Remington Corlokts. I cherish and tightly ration my use of existing stock of the Corlokts! For the likes of the .30/30, .35Rem, 8mmMauser, .303 British there exists no better Jacketed HUNTING bullets. The lead hardness and jacket thickness are optimized to the factory velocities.
To replicate them, I’ve found cast slugs with moderate hardness to be the best replacement.

Although depending on lot-to-lot variation, I found the accuracy of the old Round Nose Corlokts to to be superlative.
Likewise the Winchester Power Points, and Open Points.
I really miss them.

The oldest ammo I have and fired successfully is some 7.62x54R that was made in the 1950's. It works but is noticeably inconsistent in performance. It is also corrosively primed and nearly all ammo pre-WWII will be corrosively primed. I would certainly be will to try to shoot older ammo if I had some but I am not sure there is any good reason to try to hunt with 100+ year old ammo. There is no reason not to get newer "fresh" ammo for you hunting rifle of choice.

Now that said if you gave me a box of bullets from 1910 and I had a cartridge/bore they were the right size for I would load them up and shoot them and if they shot well would even hunt with them. I have no desire to use 100+ year old primers and powder but bullets sure.

I have about 200 rounds of USGI WCC 54 .30-06 cartridges along with blanks (DEN 42). I have fired several of the 54 stuff and they all fired and were quite accurate.

Back in'87, I got to fire a few .45LC dated 1888 (US issue packaging), all of them functioned perfectly at 99 years.

RedlegRick said:

Back in'87, I got to fire a few .45LC dated 1888 (US issue packaging), all of them functioned perfectly at 99 years.

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That’s cool man thanks for sharing.

Scout21 said:

I'm curious how well the old bullet designs worked compared to what we have today. When I say old, I mean old! I'm talking turn of the century stuff. Stuff made around 1900.

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I don’t have any on hand that were made that long ago but I have killed stuff with a round ball of lead wrapped in a cloth, shoved down the bore with a stick, after some goex.

That combination has worked for longer than I have been alive and still will after I am long gone.

Here's a good article you may be interested in.
The core locked bullet was introduced by Remington in 1939.
https://www.fieldandstream.com/guns/new-remington-core-lokt/#:~:text=The Original Core-Lokt&text=In 1939 Remington introduced the,deer—than any other bullet.

Doesn't look like it changed much.

If your interested about reloading from that era you may also like this.
https://archive.org/details/Complete_Guide_to_Handloading_Sharpe_1937/page/n1/mode/2up

You can download it here in PDF, just scroll down and look to the right.

I think that the advances in bullet design we're necessary to get good performance out of more advanced cartridge and gun designs. What do I mean? Take a muzzleloader, for example. You shove a hunk of lead on top of a bunch of black powder and kill stuff within100 yards. Big bore, big hunk of lead, short ranges. Along came the 30-30 and simple cup and core bullets on top of smokeless powder. The bullet stays aerodynamic until it hits something, then expands and you are good to 200 yards. Consider modern designs like a 6.5 grendel. Way too small to reliably kill deer unless you get violent expansion, especially at the ranges the cartridge is capable of. So exotic bullet designs are favored.

Shooting something from 1900, I would want a bullet matched to the cartridge and not push too hard on range. This fall I will be using a round ball out of a percussion rifle. It kills deer just fine.

brewer12345 said:

I think that the advances in bullet design we're necessary to get good performance out of more advanced cartridge and gun designs. What do I mean? Take a muzzleloader, for example. You shove a hunk of lead on top of a bunch of black powder and kill stuff within100 yards. Big bore, big hunk of lead, short ranges. Along came the 30-30 and simple cup and core bullets on top of smokeless powder. The bullet stays aerodynamic until it hits something, then expands and you are good to 200 yards. Consider modern designs like a 6.5 grendel. Way too small to reliably kill deer unless you get violent expansion, especially at the ranges the cartridge is capable of. So exotic bullet designs are favored.

Shooting something from 1900, I would want a bullet matched to the cartridge and not push too hard on range. This fall I will be using a round ball out of a percussion rifle. It kills deer just fine.

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I feel the same. Borderline cartridges need bullets that are designed to open quickly. Magnums need bullets that will not disintegrate. Moderate velocity cartridges excel with cup and core bullets.

Reply to Scout21; re: post#4,

Before the first bankruptcy and buyout. And specifically the original design which are the round nose with scalloped jacket. (ie; deadliest mushroom in the woods!).

I’ve got some of the later design pointed- soft points that are superlative. Match accurate, and tough enough to hold up to .300RUM velocities at close range. Remnants of 1,000 I purchased in 2005. You couldn’t always count on good accuracy from the bulk sales, though.
Remington had a nasty habit of dumping seconds or rejects onto reloaders.

Hornady, Sierra, and Nosler sell seconds and rejects; but at least you know what you’re getting.

I've never hunted anything with them, nor has my father but he has some old Rem-UMC 22 Hi-Power hollow points to go with a Savage 99. I don't know how old they are as anything that used to be written/printed on the box faded off years ago. They could date back to 1913 or so but I don't think they're quite that old. My guess would be 1930s-ish but that's just a guess.

I'm fairly certain that they would function if fired as they don't look any worse for wear than the relatively new (likely mid-1980s) Core lock on the right. I wouldn't mind using them on a Coyote if the opportunity arose but I wouldn't use it for anything larger than that.

Used some 80s era Norma .44 mag in a '66 Ruger sporter to pop a deer about 15 yrs ago

Have some WW .256 Win in yellow Super X boxes and a red,green and white box of .35 Rem ( came w a model 14 ).

I set that box of ammo on top of my fireplace by a little 131" 9 pt skull cap. Shot that deer w a diff Rem ( and ammo ).

Martha Stewart I aint.

I used to shoot paper shotgun shells when I was kid. That was back in the late 80s and early 90s. I still have the spent shell that I killed my first rabbit with. It was a 20 ga 6 shot Winchester.

I still have a few 1963 reloads for 8mm mauser.

Shot two around three years ago and they went bang.

Look like a spire soft point. It was the first rifle I carried in 1966...

Still have one of the 18 winchester rounds dad left with his .270 and some from my 30-06 from the early 70's and I won't use the new boxes till this is used up...

I have hunting ammo from the 1960's for my .35 Remington from my dad. Some other stuff that is really old but I never dated it. Also old surplus 30-06 and Mosin ammo. I would probably use it if I needed to. My reloads from the 1980s don't look good though.

Back in the mid 90's I regularly used fiber hulled shotshells that dated from about the mid 1950's. Those all fired and functioned just fine. In the late 2000's I fired some 8mm Mauser dated 1938 and 1939. The few rounds of that I fired ran perfectly

Old damn ammunition is better kept as a curiosity instead of shooting. Gunpowder deterioration is the problem. Gunpowder was never, and is not, immortal. The stuff is breaking down from a high energy compound to a low energy compound from the day it leaves the factory. The confounding thing is, some lasts longer than others. Just like people, people die at all ages, but we only remember the ones who make it to 100.

In 1936, Hercules is bragging about Bullseye pistol powders lasting 25 years.



I loaded this in the 1990's with new IMR 4895 and all the case necks cracked from NOx outgassing from 20 ish year old gunpowder




Finland is a cold country, and vihtavuori powders don't age well in hot geographical locations.



A bud came to the range with ammunition he loaded with surplus IMR 4895. Guess what, the powder had eaten up all of its stabilizers and was severely outgassing NOx. Some of the NOx spectrum is NO2, and in the prescence of water, call it humidity, NO2 turns into nitric acid gas. NO2 is still a horribly strong oxider in its own right.









don't think this happens to just military ammunition







The thing is, not only does gunpowder deterioration eat up brass cases, it also raises combustion pressures.

An example. Do note that heat accelerates the aging of gunpowder, so in accelerated life testing, gunpowder is heated.



Lifetime tests are commonly conducted at 165 F, and if the powder fumes within 30 days, it is considered unsafe

this is from 1970 or 1968, a page from a conference presentation I found on the web.



The thing is, shooting old damn ammunition is risky. Old ammunition has blown up lots of guns. If you have to shoot old ammunition, because of some nostalgic compulsion, pull the bullets and load with new gunpowder. If you see corrosion on the bullet or the case, the cases are toast.

Back around 2002 i fired some 1942 Turkish surplus 8mm mauser. No issues at all. I still have some and it still looks brand new, super pointy cupro-nickel jacketed bullets and all.

I routinely shoot 20 year or older ammo with only one incident. A 10 year old 17 HMR round went piff. Bullet made it about 4" into the barrel and the case had a ton of coagulated unburned powder in it.

Scout21 said:

I'm curious how well the old bullet designs worked compared to what we have today. When I say old, I mean old! I'm talking turn of the century stuff. Stuff made around 1900.

I saw a photo of a box of ammo supposedly from the '30's which prompted me to think about this.

I'm primarily referring to soft points, but I'd love to hear about other designs, as well.

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Nope. For my rifle all the ammo that old is FMJ and that is illegal to hunt with here.

BigBlue 94 said:

Back around 2002 i fired some 1942 Turkish surplus 8mm mauser. No issues at all. I still have some and it still looks brand new, super pointy cupro-nickel jacketed bullets and all.

I routinely shoot 20 year or older ammo with only one incident. A 10 year old 17 HMR round went piff. Bullet made it about 4" into the barrel and the case had a ton of coagulated unburned powder in it.

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Not everyone died of COVID who got it. The dead ones ain't talking. Dance on the edge, one day, you will topple over. This Garand blew up in the 1980's with WW2 ammunition.



And this gunpowder will sure as heck blow up your firearm, or burn your house down. That's why the powder company is recalling the stuff. These lots don't date back to 1942



I will bet you never looked into the massive quantities of munitions that the US military, or other militaries, have to de mill. The amount is totally mind boggling.





Camp Minden Louisiana is an ammunition demilling facility. The quantity of munitions to be demilled has exceeded the capacity of the facility. Unstable smokeless propellant goes off by itself, or sometimes, mother nature provides a spark. A shooter I talked to heard the big bad Camp Minden kaboom in Natchitoches, LA where he lives. That city is about 70 miles away from Camp Minden! .



b] New Information: Bunker blast at Camp Minden [/B]

By USAHM-News on October 19, 2012


The following is statement from the Louisiana National Guard concerning the explosion at Camp Minden earlier this week. On Monday night the Camp Minden post security heard a loud sound which could have been a possible explosion. Subsequently, the post security physically surveyed the camp in accordance with established protocols and conferred with contractor tenants who stated that they were not able to confirm the origination of the sound.

Upon daylight on Tuesday morning, a Camp Minden tenant organization, Explo Inc., discovered that one of their storage areas had exploded and reported the incident to the Louisiana National Guard. Following this report, the Louisiana National Guard notified local authorities and the Louisiana State Police of the explosion in accordance with standard protocol.

The substance that exploded was a smokeless powder and does not pose a threat outside of Camp Minden. Explo is currently conducting clean-up operations of the site. The incident is under investigation by the LSP. The incident area is a restricted area and will remain off limits to anyone other than authorized individuals due to normal operational security and safety requirements. For questions concerning the investigation, please direct those to the Louisiana State Police.

6 arrested in Camp Minden explosives investigation

good pictures

http://www.fox8live.com/story/22637088/la-company-managers-indicted-in-explosives-case


Camp Minden: From blast to possible burn

http://www.ktbs.com/story/28065933/camp-minden-from-blast-to-possible-burn


An Explosive Crisis: EPA Pushes for Massive Munitions Burn at Louisiana's Camp Minden

https://truthout.org/articles/an-ex...ve-munitions-burn-at-louisiana-s-camp-minden/


Bombs in Our Backyard

https://projects.propublica.org/bombs/

https://www.propublica.org/series/bombs-in-our-backyard

Clark Custom Guns is near Camp Minden.



They hear huge kabooms regularly. Of course, the military did not tell anyone what went kaboom.