Joe provides us with a little photo essay on what happens when you don’t properly store your ammo.
Updated: So how should you store your ammo?
There are many ways to approach this, depending what you’re after and your goals are (e.g. do you want to store it to last 50 years, or just long enough until you get to the range)? Hit Google and search on the topic and you’ll find a lot of information on the topic.
But the key factor is keeping it cool and dry, emphasis on the dry part. Moisture, humidity, these things aren’t good for ammo. I’d also add that keeping the storage environment as stable as possible helps too. Take Joe’s example. That ammo was being kept in a trailer, which is going to get wicked hot, then wicked cold, lots of moisture and humidity to deal with.
If you can find it, look for military surplus ammo storage cans. These cans were designed to… you guessed it… store ammo. As long as they are clean and in good shape and the rubber seals are good, put your ammo inside, maybe some desiccant (depending what you’re after), add ammo, then lock the box up and leave it alone. I also add a label on the outside of the can to say what’s inside… better than cracking the seal to figure it out, since all cans look the same. For those in the Austin area, I have found that John’s Guns in Bastrop is a great place to buy cans; they’ve always got a lot in stock, in good shape, and reasonable prices (nice folks too).
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I am quite skeptical about storage being the cause of the failures. Until recently the vast majority of the ammo I have shot was military surplus ammo which was mostly from places like India and South Africa where is highly unlikely the ammo was stored in “cool dry places”.
While its true that modern nitrocellulose smokeless powder and non-mercuric (“non-corrosive”) primers are actually LESS stable over time than many older powders with mercuric primers (mercuric primers are less moisture sensitive), I can say that even in the case of 40 year old non-corrosive NATO spec milsurp ammo, I have yet to see any kind of failure that could easily or obviously be attributed to environmental storage conditions.
Metallic cartridge ammo simply isnt that sensitive in general and it takes quite a lot of heat and moisture over a VERY long time to get anything like a significant chance of failure. Ammo stored out in the open near the ocean or in very wet humid areas directly in the elements might suffer from corrosion, which is why so many eastern bloc ammunition factories use primer sealant consistently. However, just keeping your ammo in your Texas garage in the original packaging is simply not going to be of any real significance over the average person’s lifetime.
My ammunition lives very happily inside of milspec ammunition cans, inside a closet in my apartment. Whenever I get a shipment of anything that has those cute little silica gel packets in it, I just toss them in one of the cans – I doubt they do a whole lot of good, but I guess it is the thought that counts.
All that said, I have to echo Rog’s comments – unless you are regularly dunking the ammunition in water, or sending it swimming down a river of acid or other corrosive substance, I have a hard time seeing rounds failing just because they lived outside (but out of the rain) for a while. Heck, people regularly dig up stashes of WWII era ammunition, and it still manages to pop off just fine. Granted, I would probably handle it gingerly, but that is not due to the casing…
Well guys (I’ll respond to both Linoge and Rog)… I cannot vouch for the original article. Not my ammo, not my experience. He knew what was going on and could draw a better conclusion than me or any of us since he was there and we weren’t. I was just linking and posting my feelings on the matter. Maybe it was something other than storage that caused the failures he saw. I just don’t know. But, it’s still a reasonable jumping off point to mention good ways to store ammo.
Nevertheless, I think we’d agree that if you can treat your ammo well, you should. If you have a choice between storing it nicely in the house in cans, or just loose out in the mud and rain well… you’d probably store it in the house in cans, yes? But if you can’t… if as Rog said it has to be in the garage, that won’t be the end of the world…. even in this current Texas heat wave. 🙂
Of course, we should be shooting our ammo… then this wouldn’t be a problem at all, right? 😉