This is a discussion forum. This is a thread about "junk" ammo. What part of those two points makes my opinion inappropriate? I'll wait.

You responded to my post by saying I was wrong and your path is to just buy cheap and stack deep. To which I quite correctly, mathematically and otherwise, pointed out that your "stack" would be cheaper and/or deeper if you used steel cased ammo. I also clearly wrote its your money and do whatever you want with it.

Relax.

Its a discussion forum. We are discussing. We disagree. It's completely ok. Ignore the next paragraph for fucks sake.

To everyone else, I would love to hear actual steel case failures especially if it damaged parts of your gun. The internet is big on damage claims but small on details. Please don't bring up the lucky gunner test (lol) and I'm more interested in pistol stories not rifle.

I have never personally had a problem shooting steel or aluminum cased ammo. I don't do it much anymore since I started reloading and I value the re-usability of my brass, but I wouldn't hesitate to do so if I was unable to find components, or possibly shooting at a facility where I knew I wasn't going to be able to recover my brass. I've shot a lot more of it through rifles than handguns, but I have shot several different varieties of it over the years.

The only problem I've ever seen with it was about 16 years ago. It was right at the beginning of my shooting "career" and some college buddies and I had bought handguns and we're going to the range together whenever we could spare money for ammo. One guy had scored a case of wolf steel-case .40 at a gun show, and he was the envy of the group. Yeah, ammo was cheap back then compared to today, but we were broke 21 year-old college students, and the thought of 1000 rounds was just about mind boggling. We were all jealous, right up until he tried putting it through his Glock (I don't remember...it was either a 22 or a 27) and the gun started having malfunctions. It wasn't extracting consistently, and he started getting stovepipes. Ultimately, a case stuck in the chamber and wouldn't extract, and he was done for the day. Had to go home and pound it out with a rod. I felt pretty good about my meager 100 count box of WWB after that...and my Beretta 92!

I don't remember what he ended up doing with the rest of that case of Wolf, but I know I didn't get any of it because I didn't own a .40 at the time. I know it didn't damage his gun, just caused a malfunction athat required tools to clear. We shot the gun several times after that with brass-cased ammo and never had a problem.

At some point the steel cased stuff had a lacquer coating and then they switched to a polymer coating. I may have it backwards or something. Whatever the older stuff was it apparently could get hot and leave residue in the chamber. I never had that issue so I think Tula uses the “other” coating.

I inadvertently lied earlier. I forgot I tried a box of steel cased 380 in my old interarms ppk/s. It wouldn’t run to save its life. Of course that gun was never great so it was probably the ammo. Probably. The PPK/S is a great gun to start a name what should be a great gun but in reality is kind of a turd thread.

quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
At some point the steel cased stuff had a lacquer coating and then they switched to a polymer coating. I may have it backwards or something. Whatever the older stuff was it apparently could get hot and leave residue in the chamber. I never had that issue so I think Tula uses the “other” coating.

I inadvertently lied earlier. I forgot I tried a box of steel cased 380 in my old interarms ppk/s. It wouldn’t run to save its life. Of course that gun was never great so it was probably the ammo. Probably. The PPK/S is a great gun to start a name what should be a great gun but in reality is kind of a turd thread.

I think you had the coating thing right. I shot lots of Wolf ammo through my AK's with zero problems (this was years ago). The consensus was that Russian ammo worked well in these, but the steel cases and the lacquer were hard on extractors. Fast forward to 2022, I don't know if these problems still exist. I knew guys who shot Wolf in their handguns and saved so much money with the Wolf, they didn't mind a broken extractor once in awhile.

At the time also .40 Glocks were having problems with kabooms. Glock warned against non fully jacketed ammo due to the rifling getting clogged up with lead, the casing not seating properly,and the gun firing out of battery. Glock has since changed their rifling, but I don't know their current stance on ammo.

The vast majority of my steel cased ammo shooting is 9mm by a huge margin. I've never broken a part using it. I hear about parts breakage in pistols but it is always my brother's cousin's buddy said it happened to him. Even if it did, which I don't think it does, a Glock extractor is 18 dollars. You could buy 3 and a half extractors with the savings of one (1) case. If it even breaks them, which it doesn't.

Its classic internet stuff. Everyone has heard the stories but we literally shoot millions of rounds between us all and we have never actually seen it happen. Sounds fishy.

I actually prefer to shoot steel at big matches because they don't let you police your brass. Shooting steel I don't care. Keep my "brass". I shoot the big PSA match up in Hershey PA. It is a lot of fun, it is a lot of ammo, I would rather lose the steel cases. Never a malfunction in a match yet except for steel in a Magpul Glock mag. That combo doesn't work for me.

I had exactly one failure of that type with Wolf 55gr in my first AR. I had a stuck case that I had to pound out with a range rod. This was about ten years ago, ammo was really cheap, and I was going through it at a good clip that session. However, it was my first AR and I was trying to get it to fail, to see where that point was. It was somewhere north of a thousand rounds of Wolf, without adequate lube beforehand, and no cleaning or lube anywhere in there. Pounded that case out, and kept going. I want to say it was around twelve hundred rounds before I finally cleaned it after determining that as long as I kept it relatively clean, or at the very least, lubed, it would run fine.


As to what coating was on it, I actually still have some of that stuff, so I can take a look later.

It all looks like brownish goop to me. Lol

These are kind of an oxidized steel look, dull grey. From what I can find, it may be the polymer coated stuff.

Either way, my experience proved to me that it's ok stuff. Only downsides are the smell and that you can't reload it. I don't reload anyway, so....

quote:

Originally posted by Blume9mm:
I don't mind shooting cheap ammo as long as it doesn't smell like a Russian Whores panties.
(most of the cellulose used in wolf ammo is from discarded clothes)

but as for guns.... I have a rule in life as of late.

I don't skimp on: food, alcohol, tools, cigars or guns. You get what you pay for.

THIS!!100%.

quote:

I have a rule in life as of late.

I don't skimp on: food, alcohol, tools, cigars or guns. You get what you pay for.

The problem with a "rule" like that is that you actually are not following it.

Pick one of the above. Alcohol. So you buy a top shelf booze, do you only drink it out of Waterford crystal? Tools. Do you only pull out your tools if you are handcrafting a oak and walnut dovetail and morticed dresser drawers? What if you are fixing the toilet?

Ammo is merely shot through the barrel with absolutely to meaningful harm done to any of the components. None. Having a top shelf hammer to pound poor quality nails doesn't hurt the hammer.

It is a non rational silly argument. It's also not 87 octane in a high end Porsche either. That is easy to document problems it will cause. Skimping on range ammo has no downside. None. If it works there is no downside yet you will save a lot of $$$$.

I bet you've eaten a wonderful meal on shitty flatware. Did that cause you any kind of distress?

I use to see that all of the time with Vepr 12 shotguns. New owners would buy the cheapest shit they could find. THEN when the gun jammed they would perform several irreversible modifications. And then when it invariably went bad they would bring their hate to the Vepr 12 forum looking for answers.

Then someone would ask, "before you screwed it up permanently so that you could shoot .23/cent a round shotgun shells instead of the very expensive .28/round ones, was it shooting 100% with what the factory manual says are the min specs for reliability: ie, 1300 FPS and 1-1/8 weight lead?

Response: "Huh? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN - IT ISN'T WORKING"

"Did you read the manual?"

"Not yet" they'd reply. Turns out that they were firing rounds which (although priced well) were clearly NOT recommended for use in that firearm and they were getting jams. It happened over and over and over. It takes a certain amount of force to kick the bolt back, and if you went well under that limit, it wouldn't go back far enough. Every time. Turns out that saving a few cents but not having an operational firearm upset just about everyone who experienced it, and they were legion.

So frustrating for them and for forum members.