VIDEO HERE (8:55 minutes)
Not only are they firing 80 year old ammo, but they're shooting it from magazines that have been loaded for 80 years. So much for the train of thought that if you leave your magazines loaded, it will weaken the springs. And no, this isn't the only instance I've seen. Not even close.
Well, mag springs are better than they once were. Time was, I destroyed the spring in an AR-15 30-round mag by leaving it loaded for several years. I don't think it would happen again.
ReplyDeleteThe Indianapolis was sunk by the Japs in 1945. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
ReplyDeleteirontomflint
That's right. So where did this ammunition really come from?
DeleteThis was a WOW video
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised that the ammo worked, as long as it was stored decently -- very little moisture, not too much thermal cycling. When I was young I'd get WWI surplus stuff and feed it through my WWI surplus Mauser.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm really surprised that the magazines ran fine. Put me in that "buh muh springs will fatigue" camp, at least prior to watching this.
30 caliber carbine is a fun little rifle -- I would have held onto mine but that thing could literally shoot around corners, I'm guessing it had a million rounds poured through it before I ever got to shoot it.
Back when Made it USA meant something. Nowadays, meh not so much. Now it’s FUSA.
ReplyDeleteSaw some 45 from WWII in 1911 mags and it worked fine as I recall.
ReplyDeleteback in the late 1990's we shot up a lot of WW2 30/06 and it always went bang.
Deleteshould have kept more of those black tip rounds than I did though. dave in pa.
There was an artice in Gun Digest back in the late 90's about a GI that liberated his 45 and two mags. Threw one of the mags in the back of a drawer loaded with military ball and forgot about it. His son took the old mag and the gun to a range when it had been loaded 50 years and gun, magazine, and ammo ran fine.
DeleteMaybe I missed something in the video, but how did the ammo survive the sinking?
ReplyDeleteReckon the same way Papa Ed did.
DeleteWTF??? Shooting 80 year old's now??
ReplyDelete@Luis-Didn'tReadAnything
I have 4 - 7 rd GI 1911 magazines my father brought back from Vietnam in 1968, along with the Singer 45 he gained possession of during the Tet Offensive. Somehow he also managed to come home with several cans of GI ball ammo.
ReplyDeleteHe would occasionally pull out the Singer and put a couple of mags through it. Along about 1975 he lost the magazines. In 1990 while helping him clean out the garage attic I found the magazines in a box, all fully loaded with GI ball.
He gave them to me so I started using them. The GI ammo shot great.
I've used them frequently ever since. They stay in my range box and get used just about every time I go to the range. I've used them for 33 years in a bunch of different guns and in all that time I've never had so much as a hiccup from any gun while using these mags.
if that really is a Singer 1911 it's worth about $40K.
Delete@B, I suspect the memories are worth far more than that.
DeleteI have 70+ year old .38 Special ammo that was my father's ammo. It still shoots just fine. It was stored indoors in a closet in his footlocker until around 2000. I've kept it stored in a shoebox in a cabinet in my basement since then. No issues at all with it. It's a few years older than I am.
ReplyDeleteI have a good supply of G3 magazines loaded with Hirtenberger 7.62x51 since the early 80s. Every once and awhile i will grab one and throw it in the range bag and there has never been an issue with either the mag or the ammo.
ReplyDeleteKlaus
The “the train of thought that if you leave your magazines loaded, it will weaken the springs” is a pure myth and is plainly contradicted by material science and the engineering design of springs.
ReplyDeleteWhen a metal is tensile tested ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_testing ), it first goes through elastic deformation where the elongation of the specimen is proportional to the force applied. At any time before the yield point, eliminating the applied force will cause the material to spring back to the length where it started. Above the yield point, plastic deformation as opposed to elastic deformation takes place, and the metal will take a permanent set so that when the applied force is eliminated, the material will spring back to a length greater than the original length. Although the design of springs involves torsion of the spring wire and not pure tension, the basic principle is the same. Springs are always designed in the elastic region of the material, so they always return to their initial state. Materials such as lead exhibit a property called creep, whereby a constant tensile force applied to the specimen over a long period of time results in the material continuously becoming longer. A related property known as stress relaxation occurs when a material such as lead is held under stress at a confined distance. Over time, the stress in the material will decrease. This is why springs are not made out of lead.
Ferrous materials such as steel do not exhibit creep or stress relaxation and are therefore ideal materials for springs. Springs are designed whereby the spring material always is in its elastic region, so it will always return to its original shape, even if stored for a hundred years. Fatigue is a horse of a different color, and occurs when a material is subjected to cyclic stress (over 1000 cycles to a billion cycles) below the yield point. That is not a problem in magazine springs. By the way, polymer magazines may stress relax, but the manufactures choose the material so it’s not much. My advice is to use a steel magazine and never worry that it won’t work if loaded for years and years.
This might come in handy for some of you:
ReplyDeletehttps://thecmp.org/wp-content/uploads/m1carbinedisassembly.pdf
Frankly I am disappointed anyone believed the ammo wouldn't fire.
ReplyDeleteHow many times have you replaced the springs in your vehicle's suspension? Those springs have been supporting the weight of your vehicle since it rolled off the assembly line. There are 100 year old Model Ts driving around on their original leaf springs.
ReplyDeleteAs VMS stated above, as long as the spring is not compressed beyond its elastic limit or cycled zillions of times they'll last forever.
Al_in_Ottawa
Saying in the video title that the ammo was from the ship itself was a little click baity. They don’t actually make that claim as they’re describing the history. That the ammo was from a vet that survived the sinking is cool enough as it is.
ReplyDeleteI've posted on this very subject before. The question asked is wrong, and the answers given above are wrong. It's flatly incorrect to say that materials like SS304 do not sustain creep below the yield strength. Any piano tuner knows they have to go back two days later and retune the strings. Here is proof that metals (even SS304) can sustain creep at below yield strength and at low temperatures.
ReplyDeletehttps://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/897/1/012002/pdf
The right question to ask is "How significant is this slight creep?" The answer is that it's not very significant. But the wrong answer is that it doesn't occur.