Wanted: Reloadable Canadian War Dated .303 Brass

[cletrac (RIP)]

I can see the safety issue with dummy ammo if you use live primers since that could lodge the bullet in the barrel if fired. With WW2 dated .303 ammo, I can't imagine anyone trying to fire the real stuff. I had a bunch back in the 1960s and about a quarter of it wouldn't fire then. If one didn't fire you had to put the gun pointing in a safe direction and leave it for a while. You couldn't be sure if they were going to fire in a few seconds or minutes or whatever. A dummy round would be way safer than that, holes or no holes!

[rob love]

Originally Posted by cletrac

I can see the safety issue with dummy ammo if you use live primers since that could lodge the bullet in the barrel if fired. With WW2 dated .303 ammo, I can't imagine anyone trying to fire the real stuff. I had a bunch back in the 1960s and about a quarter of it wouldn't fire then. If one didn't fire you had to put the gun pointing in a safe direction and leave it for a while. You couldn't be sure if they were going to fire in a few seconds or minutes or whatever. A dummy round would be way safer than that, holes or no holes!

I fire WW2 ammo all the time; I have over 20,000 rounds of it. It all depends on how it was stored over the last 70 years. I know the hangfires of which you speak, they are especially noticeable in the late fall and winter with some versions of 303 (especially the Indian stuff).

However the safety I speak of wrt no primers in the pockets (expended or otherwise) and small holes drilled through the sides is to enable one to easily distinguish the dummy rounds from live ammo. Accidental mixing of live and blank, live and dummy, dummy and blank, can all result in in death or injury. No amount of authenticity is worth the safety factor involved.

In the military, very strict rules are involved with regard to live/training ammunition and ordnance. Yet still incidents happen every year. Intentionally making your dummy ammo look too real is not a good idea in my opinion.

Keyan: I have several hundred rounds of the chrome dummy 303 ammo. I may be talked into parting with some of it, but it will be a bit more than the 50 cents a round you paid for your one.

[horsa]

We've done a lot of WWII displays over time and at first made really accurate looking dummy rounds. Figured it would be OK simply having dimpled primers since we're usually doing events in Texas which is for the most part a gun friendly place. But over time we encountered more and more venues where the cartridges needed to be easily inspected for being inert or they couldn't be brought into the facility. Dimpled primers with the bullets in the end of the cases indicate a hung round to most people and they sure were not going to rattle them around to see if they were free of powder or cordite so we could display them with weapons.

Given the option of possibly not having a belt of display ammunition in a Vickers or using cases with drilled holes in the sides or fluted drill rounds and always being able to display them, we chose the less authentic approach.

The general public is OK with items being visibly demilled in the case of ammunition as nobody expects you to have working firearms laid out and ready to shoot in your display.