Anyone have a have a source of 303 Enfield brass?

[gun-bunny]

Double post, sorry!

[Rosco the Iroc]

A friend of mine bought a box of the Greek surplus to shoot his SMLE in the 100yr service rifle matches. It was really inexpensive, both the ammo and the Fazakerly NoIVMKI*, and he was going to shoot side by side with me with my Savage NoIVMKI* that I shot my reloads. The first match he started digging into his surplus ammo on strippers and had hangfire after hangfire. Some of them were so long between ignition and detonation that he was afraid to extract cartridges that were misfires. I was on the opposite end of the firing line due to how we signed up, not side by side, and I didn't even know what was going on until I heard the RSO disQ him for equipment failure.

I eventually bought the Fazakerly and case of .303 from him, thinking I could reuse the brass and primer by removing the bullet (using a standard kinetic bullet pulling hammer) and reload the cartridges. As it turns out, the problem was not just the old powder- but with the primers also. No luck. I don't want to remove live primers. I guess I could just fire the empty cartridge through the rifle then reload the brass from there, but this was almost 20 years ago and I haven't looked into since then.

It's funny, how the price of everything changed... I used to have a (large) bag of stripper clips that got in the way. I had more than I could ever reload enough cartridges to load them into. I gave the bag to a friend of mine when I found out he bought a Longbranch without much thought. It's just what friends do, help each other out. I never knew they were going for $1 a clip! I don't regret helping out a friend, but yowza, I could have bought a case of .312 lead projos, a box of primers, more powder, and probably had some left over!

I got some WW1 .303 that was like that. Still had the cordite in it. Hang fire 30-65 sec after dropping he hammer. I pulled a round and the "powder" burned like a candle.

[gun-bunny]

Cordite is scarey stuff!