Anyone tried the new Wolf steel-case .303 ?

[Sentryduty]

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.

[browningautorifle]

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.

[Gil Boyd]

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

[Bruce_in_Oz]

"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.

[CINDERS]

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.

[Peter Laidler]

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?

[Bruce_in_Oz]

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".

[Gil Boyd]

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!

[bombdoc]

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!

[browningautorifle]

loads of misfires, weapons caked and requiring a serious wire brushing

caused by the LACQUER top-coat, "building-up"

remember the garand that karked it badly using Tula

But it was full of dynamite or TNT

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...!