Anyone have experience using composite polymer cases like these?

www.tvammo.com

I’ve shot some of the US Military blue plastic bullets years ago, they had a brass base and a polymer bullet and most of the case. They wouldn’t cycle a semiauto but worked fine in a bolt gun. Or used single shot for quals in shortened ranges indoors….they were for training

Yes back in the 1980s a machinist coworker was working part time for a guy that was using brass heads with polymer cases trying to sell the concept to the military. I still have a box of 38 Special and a 50 BMG round left. In testing I found neck tension for the bullet to be lacking and or inconsistent.

quote:

Originally posted by Jelly:
I found neck tension for the bullet to be lacking and or inconsistent.

This company claims better accuracy (precision) with their product than with brass cases, but I’m somewhat skeptical for that reason.
It will be interesting to see whether their claims are valid.

I'd like to get some once fired .223 polymer cases and play with them a bit.

I had a couple boxes of poly cased ammo from an estate I bought last year,

sold it quickly on the net,

I don't recall the brand, but the cases , IIRC, were gray plastic/poly

I have never tried any but as I recall they used to available about 15-20 yrs ago.
I think they died out as either being unreliable or uneconomical.

Appears to be similar to ammo used with Simunitions training.
But that is low pressure stuff.

Doesn't make any sense to me for any use at all.

Ive had them in 4 different rifle rounds but never fired them. Some were DAC manufacture and practice rounds. These new Truevelocity rounds are pitched for military use. Mainly the 6.8 round can be used in various full autos like the SAW. They actually claim great accuracy and quite higher velocity. Believe I saw a 20% increase in velocity. The Browning linked belts in the video worked perfect. Then there is the reduction in weight as opposed to brass cased rounds. The new poly rounds have a stainless steel case head. All thats required to use them are barrel swaps. Better cartridge performance.

As pictured here, the True Velocity 6.8mm cartridge submission to the Army uses a case that appears to provide much more support to the bullet than the cases of cartridges like the 223 and 308 do. A totally new cartridge and case design can do that, but I would think that avoiding neck tension problems with plastic (or “composite”) cases of traditional design would be much more difficult.

It will be interesting to see if polymer cases are finally successful after having been experimented with for so long. I have always sort of assumed that someone would figure out how to make them work. As the articles that discuss them make clear there are significant advantages to the idea, especially for military use, and if countless shooters are willing to use steel cased ammo for making noise and kicking up berm dust, why not polymer if it works at least as well?

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
Doesn't make any sense to me for any use at all.

But it does for the military. They could carry 30% more ammo.

I sold about 8k of the PCA Spectrum ammo back in the early 2000's when it was discontinued. Bought it cheap sold it for a bunch! Fired a few hundred, while I never had any issues with it others had the brass head pull off leaving the poly case in the chamber. It never caught on though.

I have always thought poly-cased ammo would have issues in full auto, e.g., M249 and M240 machine guns. Fire a couple hundred rounds and stop...will the cartridge case in the chamber melt into goo?

Tried some Russian plastic-cased .223 somewhere around 15 years ago. To this day that's the only ammo I've ever shot where the rifle tried to simultaneously load two cartridges into the chamber. Far more of a PITA than it was worth.

Then again, that was years ago and that was Russian commercial ammo. I'd be willing to try an updated attempt at making it work, and I'd be thrilled if it did work.

The thing is, if they can make it work for the relatively high pressure 6.8 Army ammo in automatic weapons then I would suspect that making it work for civilian ammunition would be a piece of cake.