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It's coming in now at about $.50 a round locally. 174-grain, non-corrosive, non-reloadable. The guys on some of the other rifle boards have had good results, but I'd like to hear the ACTUAL EXPERIENCE of the folks on Milsurps before I shell out for a few thousand rounds, or more.
I've never been particularly impressed with any of Wolfe brand ammo...others may disagree but I wouldn't use any of it. It's quality control, in my opinion is very poor.
If it uses the "standard" Berdan primer in wide use in "Eastern Bloc" ammo, it will be reloadable...
IF you can get the .217" RWS 5627 or 5608 primers, or the Vihtavouri / Kemira equivalent, and ...
IF you have patience, an RCBS or similar decapper and a sense of humour, it is certainly “reloadable”.
IF this stuff is loaded with the flat-based bullet that the manufacturer seems happy to advertise elsewhere, and also uses in at least one loading for 7.62 x 54R ...It should be OK.....
Given the current prices asked for projectiles alone and even then, NOT truly appropriate bullets, I'd be trying a box or two. Run a magnet over your late-production .303 ammo from "elsewhere"; it may be interesting to find out how much of the stuff has just a thin film of nickel or gilding metal over a steel jacket.
Polymer-coated steel cases are not going to ruin your rifle, and, even if the propellant is less "elegant" than the offerings from Alliant, Du Pont or Winchester, etc., it has to be better than the traditional British barrel-burner, Cordite.
Just my 50c worth.
.303 for .50cents a round is cheaper than I can reload it for (unless I am pulling 7.62x54r or 7.62x39). My costs to reload with a factory bullet at cheapest is about .74 cents. Definitely hope that ammo makes it up here at that price.
Since the world of Eastern Euro suppliers is often a tangled mess, does anyone know if Wolf ammunition and Tula Ammo are the same thing?
The product appears extremely similar.
The Wolf WPA and Wolf Polyformance lines are made at various Russian factories, which included Tula and Ulyanovsk until recently.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sentryduty
The Wolf Gold line was at one time made by PRVI but is now made in Taiwan.
Great made in Taiwan 303 ammo and from what I hear from wolf users it is rather on the warm loaded side.
How's the case expansion and chamber wall adhesion compared to brass? Or are the case walls made thinner to ensure that?
I have never used Wolf .303 but one thing, are they lacquered?
Be cautious of heavily lacquered rounds especially if they are manufactured in Taiwan they are desperate to get a measure of the market as they know the stocks are dwindling in .303 and there's money to be made, and corners to be cut on the worldwide stage, if their 7.62 is anything to go by!! Anybody experienced unecessary residue in the barrels after at least 100 rounds? I hope I am not doing them an injustice!
I have run a fair bit of Warsaw pact laquered steel cased 7.62x39mm, from various surplus suppliers, it seems to work well enough in that department.
However my batches of 7.62x54R Warsaw pact surplus has always been a basic steel case with copper wash, it too worked well, being former front line ammunition.
Now this steel cased .303 stuff could be a very different animal regardless of who is making it.
I know that Chinese ammunition in general is a common item in Canada and the reports are in my opinion, mixed. Some users are simply cheap, and looking for cheap ammo to throw down range, other more diligent users has reported some very serious QC issues with the bulk amounts of new produced 5.56mm. Some projectiles were running well undersized in the same lots and performing as you would expect.
Although it can be difficult to track the path of production in this world market of manufacturer-middleman-middleman-middleman-retailer-customer if we could figure out exactly who is building the ammo and their clients it would be a good place to start. If I find any of it, I will do a teardown and post my findings. However currently I have not heard or seen of this steel cased .303 ammo aside my readings here.
We're talking Wolf brand here boys, not any of the others. I've used enough of their product to know I'm totally dissatisfied with it in any form and if I won't use it for 9mm then I sure won't use .303 British.
Jim,
I've mentioned it before on here, they are not alone unfortunately. We had a serious batch of 9mm crap from Pakistan and it had been brought in for the whole of the British Army in the late 90's and right up to 2004.
Sometimes wonder who signs off on this rubbish, loads of misfires, weapons caked and requiring a serious wire brushing to get anywhere near back to where you started. Split cases was the greatest concern at the time.
I spent more time on one knee clearing stoppages than I ever did proposing to my wife :lol:
"Copper-washed" ammo is not only that in many cases (so to speak).
If you look closely at a fresh round, you will often notice that the extractor groove is "darker" than the rest of teh case.
This is caused by the LACQUER top-coat, "building-up" there.
This tiny film on the case, especially around the necks, gave me the horrors whist working on the early AIA M-10 carbines.
The green lacquered stuff seems to be actual "Mil-Spec" and the "chocolate brown" lacquered Chinese appears to have been made as a purely commercial "export product"; the lacquer often flakes off the neck area after firing.
Late production "grey" / "polymer" coated stuff seems to hold up better.
All in all its better to just give it a miss but I am sure there will be those that will use this stuff at their peril through the old girls, remember the garand that karked it badly using Tula which I posted on a thread a while ago.
Nope if you have a vintage car or rifle you do not use a cheap as dirt oil or crappy ammo even if you have to miss a day at the range to save cost every now and then better that than have a rifle blow up in your hands from crappy made commercial ammo. 10 years ago I could only afford 1 shoot a month due to finances and could barely scrape enough together to buy the components for my 303's to reload its different now but if you have to make the sacrifice for the sport you love then its all worth it.
Gil, off the subject slightly but...... That supposed Pakistani 9mm stuff was part of a three-way deal concerning ex UK Bedford trucks going one way, Tank spares going another way and a whole lot of duff ammo coming our way. We had a load of 7.62mm blank doshed out seemingly to TA minor units and regular training units - to my knowledge from time at Warcop...... This came in wood boxes with green and white bands down one end. One of the ammo techs told me later that this was from some African Country and Nigeria seems to ring a few bells (based on the national flag colours.....). But it was full of dynamite or TNT instead of the usual curry powder.
We may never get to the bottom of it but I know a man that might know. Are you out there Capt Bombdoc?
I have one of the Nigerian wooden boxes here: complete with a Nigerian flag, (Three vertical; stripes; green, white, green) painted on it. It is somewhere out in the shed; filled with camping cooking gear.
Headstamp on the actual blanks was OFN, 7,62 and a year date; in my sample, 75.
These cartridges are a full-length "bullet-form" brass blank, but the six-segment crimp at the nose is quite big in diameter and some rifles did not feed it too well. It may well have performed OK in the Nigerian BM-59s, but I never tried the combination. Maybe it hung up during feeding and was duly "ditched".
Powder seems a little "slow" for a blank, more unburnt granules than one would expect. One problem with slow propellants in blanks is that a "plug' of powder can be driven into the rear of the blank-firing adapter and play merry Hell with the pressure curve for the gas system. Blanks do odd things to gas-operated weapons. Because of the lack of a bullet of substantial mass and inertia, the gas gets to the port VERY quickly and the action thus gets kicked open earlier in the pressure curve.
Anyone who has ever used blanks in open-topped jobs like the Garand and M-14 will know what I mean. The "blank-firing" shield for the M-14 was a handy way to avoid a face-full of partially burnt powder on each shot. For the more adventurous, this shield makes shooting an M-14 with a "muffler" more pleasant.
Maybe a propellant "mix-up" was why they offloaded it.
There is usually a good reason that relatively "modern" ammo gets "surplussed".
Peter,
Thanks for that, knew it was a definite country involved ie Pakistan, but God it was dire, regardless of how it got here which sounds the usual MOD tricks to get some spares and controlled no doubt by Abbey Wood civvies with absolutely no idea about soldiering!!
Some rounds were under filled and others way over filled and then to have them coated with crap, the lads never had a chance on the PWT.
We opted for H&K's in the end and sacked the Pistol for that days wasted training grrr!
The original batch of Pakistani 9mm was procured in the late 1960s. It was something of a "private venture" by Director Infantry as a result of his "shoot to kill" small arms training programme that significantly raised the requirement for 9mm for the SMG (Sterling/Patchett). The purchase did not come to the notice of CILSA (Chief Inspector Land Service Ammunition) until it was just about to be delivered - he was not amused! The problem was that the ammunition was loaded to a much weaker "Parabellum" or 1Z standard instead of the "quite peppy" 2Z standard that was currently in use..
The result was chaos when fired through the SMG, resulting in double taps and runaway guns as the recoil was not enough to reliably re-cock the weapon.. It was quite good in pistols though..
This ammo, and similar, kept reappearing in the following decades, but the Sterling SMG was alway unhappy with it, and needed the 2Z loading to work reliably.. Using 2Z in a P08 was never a good idea, and although the Browning HP was fine, it jumped about a bit with it!
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Originally Posted by Gil Boyd
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Originally Posted by Bruce_in_Oz
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Originally Posted by CINDERS
I knew shortly the rest would come forward and the glowing reports would actually dissipate... In the long run, money dictates and this is where we end up seeing threads like the M1 that hi-ordered after using the cheapest ammo available. And no one understands what happened...!Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Laidler
Should find that thread again BAR so people can see the results here it is folks have a look at it I say he was lucky just the way the bolt whacks back on recoil oooh dear (Go to page 1 for the vid)
https://www.google.com/url?q=https:/...GL89jCZuKu2fGg
Bombdoc,
Now that does sound familiar ;)
Luckily we had some decent 9mm stuff for CP training
Have never seen the .303 available up here but I've used a lot of the Wolf 7.62 X 54R (174 grn FMJ) in a variety of Mosins and SVT 40's. It has worked very well in everything I've used it in and my SVT's really like it even though it's a bit on the heavy side (bullet).
Ridolpho
That is indeed quite a failure, and clearly an ammo fault. All of those casings that the fellow collected were showing signs of over-pressure, remarkable how hot it was loaded.Quote:
Originally Posted by CINDERS
Any comments on the 762 blank I mention Bombdoc? That first came to my notice as a TA Trg Offr at Warcop in the early 90's. It was all delivered to-site but saw some more later that came from Xxxxxx.
I will NEVER buy nor recommend WOLF Performance Ammo again. Brand new .303 ammo resulted in tumbling bullets impacting multiple feet high and low in 2 different rifles and at least 3 failure to fire. Complete sh*t and potentially dangerous.
Well that's interesting... what's the bullet diameter on it? I could see Wolf's supplier using some .308 diameter bullets because it's easier to procure/produce.Quote:
Originally Posted by kar98k
As for Wolf I've not directly shot any Wolf but I have shot ammo they imported - Klimovsk. Russian made, claims to be non corrosive. I bought a couple boxes to try it as it had a dubious reputation, but it wasn't corrosive and shot fine. Went back, bought a case, shot some more and put my gun away from the weekend after wiping the bore (but not gas system) only because I was in a rush. Came back from vacation to clean it and my gas system had rust in it! Turns out it was a different lot than my trial boxes and corrosive.
Wolf doesn't always import junk though, apparently some of the recent lot of lacquered milspec stuff from Barnaul is quite good, equal in quality to the stuff from Vympel that gets sold as Golden Tiger. But at the same time I don't think they are very selective in what they put their name on. I'll take ammo built by Barnaul or Vympel no matter the name on it, but can take or leave anything else. I am kind of surprised at the comments Wolf Gold is made in Taiwan, as I recall SGAmmo's owner commenting on another forum saying they didn't import PPU's brass .223 because the Wolf Gold is made by PPU and they get a better deal on it, must just be that .223.
Good Rrrrrussian ammo for rrruski rifles the Mosins and SVT 40 comrade Ridolpho :madsmile:
No idea. But they were definitely tumbling. Long, oblong holes and high and low impacts at 100 yards. I'm talking far up the birm and short of the target. It was drastic and then the failures to fire. Awful ammunition that is a lawsuit waiting to happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by cipherk98
They might be worth grabbing with a caliper, for interest's sake.Quote:
Originally Posted by kar98k
I am currently firing 7.62 x 51 from Lithuania, cracking ammo and hope it continues especially at the current price.
Tumbling bullets usually indicates dire lack of stability.
This is almost always caused by one thing: Insufficient rotational speed.
This, in turn, is caused by one or both of two things:
1. Insufficiently fast twist rate in the barrel (for the specific bullet LENGTH and velocity)
2. Insufficient VELOCITY to achieve that spin rate from the nominally correct twist.
.303 BALL needs a 1:10" twist because the Mk7 bullet, whilst somewhat lighter than its predecessors, is the SAME LENGTH, give or take a few thou'.
As discussed in earlier posts, the OVERALL cartridge length was retained so that the entire fleet of small arms did not have to be re-engineered to reliably feed with a shorter bullet.
A badly "flogged-out" .303 barrel will deliver reduced velocities, AND poorer centering of the bullet in what is left of the rifling. This means wild precession at shorter ranges, coupled with lower velocities giving lower spin rates, resulting in VERY poor down-range consistency.
"Keyholes" at 100m are a bad thing; keyholes at 400m are a REALLY bad thing.
Boat-tailed bullets have a shorter parallel bearing surface to engage whatever remains of the rifling; they will NOT shoot well in general in a "deeply pre-loved" tube and, because of gas "blow-by", will only help to destroy any remaining throat (and thus accuracy), that much faster.
If you have a MINT No4 Mk2 it will probably work quite well with Mk8 style boat-tailed bullets driven by cooler-burning "Z" propellants (nitro-cellulose) as opposed to much hotter burning "Cordite".
However: NOTHING lasts forever (apart, apparently, from the two great historical realities: death and taxes)