Do not vacuum seal your ammunition!

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kx250kev

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(IMHO) You shouldn't "vacuum" seal your ammo! I did this with some white box 9mm winchester because I thought I was being "smart". I opened up some of it and shot it today with shocking results. One of the rounds was totally dead and wouldn't fire in 2 guns. Most of the ammo barely fired with enough force to cycle the action on my pistol, and the sound level of these rounds was strangely quiet. I figure the air had been "sucked" out of each round. I've just never had such a bad experience with the Winchester white box ammo before, and blame the vacuum sealing as the culprit. Has anyone else have a similar experience with vacuum packed ammo?

P.s. Now I'll be labeling all that ammo as "use first/practice only" now.
 
I cannot grasp why vacuum packing would be an issue. Smokeless powders provide their own oxidizers and do not require air/oxygen to properly burn.

There must have been some other issues, but damfino what those might have been.
 
Smokeless powders provide their own oxidizers and do not require air/oxygen to properly burn.
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As I understand it they use it in ejection seats etc. It supplies it's own oxygen so it'll burn regardless of the altitude and propel seat out etc. But, I could be wrong as I can't seem to recall my source through the haziness of time. :confused:

Regardless, I'd bet on it being a bad box also. I have never vacuum sealed ammo, but I've bought some that had been vacuum sealed and never had any issues with it.
 
I have shot ammo that stayed vacuum sealed for years. No problem, no lack of power.

I have bought fresh boxes of ammo and had multiple failures in 100 the same day I purchased the stuff.

Data is not the plural of anecdote.
 
It supplies it's own oxygen so it'll burn regardless of the altitude and propel seat out etc. But, I could be wrong as I can't seem to recall my source through the haziness of time.
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That's incorrect, since smokeless powder was developed before there were airplanes with ejection seats, so it wouldn't have mattered what altitude the plane was at when ignition was attempted.
 
I'm no pyrotechnic engineer, but it sounds plausible to me. Match ammo is manufactured under controlled conditions. Keeping it in the hot cab of a truck causes the air to expand and force its way out of the cartridge. When it cools back down, a different mixture of air replaces the original. In effect, you no longer have match ammo.

Along that same theory line, if you sucked the air out of those cartridges, then tried to fire them before the air mixture had time to be totally replaced, it seems plausible to me that you would be left with underpowered cartridges. Even if gunpowders do, in fact, furnish their own oxidizers, there still should be a lack of air. If you tried striking a match in a room full of carbon dioxide, it would at least TRY to strike and fail, wouldn't it?

Why not seal a few rounds tonight and test them against some unsealed rounds from the same lot in a couple of days? It would be interesting to chronograph them, too!

Longbeard48
 
It supplies it's own oxygen so it'll burn regardless of the altitude and propel seat out etc. But, I could be wrong as I can't seem to recall my source through the haziness of time.
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Getting right down to brass tacks. Propellant grade smokeless powders do not 'burn', their detonation depends on the instability of the nitrogen bond and the oxygen is really irrelevant. Case in point is a compound call nitrogen iodide. NI is a very sensitive explosive compound that will explode in absence of air yet has no oxygen within it's molecule. Only a weak bond with ammonia ion nitrogen and iodine.
 
BTW, The ammo physically looked fine, and no I didn't marinade them in oil or anything. These rounds were sealed for about 12 months. I guess more experimentation would need to be done to prove this is a bad idea. To be fair, this ammo was also stored in an unheated cabin during the winter, so I'm not sure if that could be a factor.
 
I have a good whacko conspiracy rumor that explains your problem:

Chinese arms factories are using surplus primers, powders and bullets from obsolete ammo found in old Soviet-Bloc ammo dumps to manufacture counterfeit ammo and package it as modern name brand American made ammunition. This is then sold to unscrupulous distributors in the U.S. who mix it in with legitimate shipments to shave their costs.

(I just made all this up, but if you like it say you heard it from a reliable source, so it must be true)
 
Getting right down to brass tacks. Propellant grade smokeless powders do not 'burn', their detonation depends on the instability of the nitrogen bond and the oxygen is really irrelevant. Case in point is a compound call nitrogen iodide. NI is a very sensitive explosive compound that will explode in absence of air yet has no oxygen within it's molecule. Only a weak bond with ammonia ion nitrogen and iodine.
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WHOA! What was that whooshing sound?:confused::confused::confused: I know it was that post going right over the top of my head. I gladly admit that my chemical expertise about gunpowder begins and ends with consulting my reloading manual for the proper charge for my ammo.

Come to think about it, I'm pretty much out of my depth with anything more than Elmer's glue unless there are simple instructions to follow. Preferably written with words of two syllables or less.:D

But thank you for the information. :eek:
 
That's incorrect, since smokeless powder was developed before there were airplanes with ejection seats, so it wouldn't have mattered what altitude the plane was at when ignition was attempted.
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What does the development timeframe of smokeless powder and airplanes have to do with physics?
 
Along that same theory line, if you sucked the air out of those cartridges, then tried to fire them before the air mixture had time to be totally replaced, it seems plausible to me that you would be left with underpowered cartridges. Even if gunpowders do, in fact, furnish their own oxidizers, there still should be a lack of air. If you tried striking a match in a room full of carbon dioxide, it would at least TRY to strike and fail, wouldn't it?
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again and again, gunpowder provides all the chemicals needed for it's own reaction NO AIR IS NEEDED

gunpowder will 'burn' underwater just fine once started.

People often say fire needs fuel, air, and heat to burn. More specifically, fire needs heat to be able to start, and it needs OXYGEN, not just air.

Here's another thing, let's say you have, oh, 12 grams of carbon, how much oxygen is needed to burn that carbon? 32 grams. 12 grams of carbon is basically a teaspoon full, while a cubic foot of air wieghs 36 grams...but is only 20% oxygen, so you'd need 5 cubic feet of 'air' to burn a tea-spoon of carbon.

hence, the 'air' between the grains in gunpowder is just not enough to matter for anything.
 
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