European Military Rifles

Glenn F.

When ammunition not confined in the chamber of a gun is heated and ignites, the bullet, being far heavier than the case, stays more or less still and the case moves away, but not very fast. The case also will probably rupture and there may be problems with flying pieces of brass. Army Ordinance experimented with heating an ammo box with a few cartridges inside until they ignited and the ammo box was not penetrated.
A danger to firemen at a house or vehicle fire is a loaded gun being heated and going off with the same results as the trigger being pulled.

KEH

Military surplus places have ammo boxes, mostly .50 cal. I order mine from www.cheaperthandirt.com for about five bucks each. They even have nifty little divider trays that stack inside, so you don't have to dig around; handy as all git-out for all the miscellaneous gun parts that accumulate.

c.

Soundguy

Since you're clearly interested in arms and ammo, and you know a lot, I hope you'll be interested rather than irritated if I offer a correction to something you said. Berdan primers are not the same as crimped primers (although Berdan primers are sometimes crimped, too.) Berdan primers are structurally somewhat different than Boxer (named for a person, thus the capitalization) but the main difference is that Berdan primers ignite through two flash holes in the cartridge casing rather than through the single center hole of Boxer primed ammo. This means that you can't deprime Berdan primed cases with a standard depriming die. There are Berdan deprimers although I don't know how they work. The two holes are along a single diameter but there are a lot of diameters in 360 degrees. I don't know how the case is indexed to the depriming die. I've heard that you can deprime Berdan cases by filling them with water, inserting a dowel sized to the case neck, and smacking it with a mallet. Wouldn't work if they were crimped, of course.

Crimping is a process that primed brass is run through so that full automatic fire won't shake primers loose. About 40 years ago I bought a 2,640 round case of Canadian WWII 9mm Luger ammo. Beautiful stuff, what would now be classified as NATO spec---very brisk. The primer pockets were crimped, which meant I had to be careful not to break the pin in my depriming die. Then the primer pockets had to be reamed out before new primers could be pressed in. Easy, actually, but also easy to overdo it and end up with loose primer pockets, the very condition that crimping had been used to prevent.

All the best, Stan

Here's something that has occurred to me: if your house was on fire and the fire department got there in time to mostly save it, would you mention that there was ammunition in the house? I've never heard of a fire fighter being hurt by exploding ammo but the odds are that there is ammo in a large proportion of the houses that catch fire.

Stan

Brad

• 1945 Ford 2N