Shell Casings

I have a brass frog that weighs about 10#. It was made from cartridge brass left over from the war somewhere in France.

Also, as I walk through the desert at some popular shooting locations, there is little to no brass, except for .22 which is not re-loadable and too small to pick up.

I always pick up all of my spent brass when I practice. I reload it.

If you watch the military channel, you see gun ships and warthogs spewing out 20mm and 50 cal ammo from Gatling guns at 2800 RPM. That's a hell-of-a-lot of brass raining down on the enemy. In this day of recycling consciousness, Why hasn't someone figured out how to reclaim the brass?

It would seem a more concentrated source of brass to mine than digging it out of the ground. ga.

Chris

No need to figure that one out; ... only to figure our how to make recovery other than a money loser. See?

We're trying leave something around for brass miners in the next millennium!

Some casings are consumable. I believe that the ammunition used in the Abrams tank fits into that category, the only thing that is ejected is a steel disk that formed the base of the round and held the ignition cap.

I have seen some multi-barrel weapons that returned the casing to the feed system so that when the gun was reloaded the spent casings were dumped into a container. Look at the machines used to load guns like the one on the A10 Warthog, I don't know if it reclaims the casings.

Small arms ammunition is probably not worth reclaiming, the soldiers are too busy. Artillery casings and larger naval gun casings (40MM and up) may well be worth collecting but the logistical overhead and the tactical cost must be weighed against the value of the reclaimed casings.

In an unrelated but interesting tidbit of information, during WWII they started using paper mache drop tanks on the P51's. They had to used within eight hours of being filled but it avoided dropping valuable aluminum over enemy territory.

In my military experience in the reserves of many years ago we reclaimed all small arms casings and tank casings but that was on a range and not in the heat of battle.

Lt. P.S. Hinman CA(M) ret. That is pronounced Leftenant in Canada like all of the British Common Wealth

I did some further research. The ammunition in the A10 Warthog is contained in a special drum from which it is fed to one of the chambers on the gun. The spent casing is then returned to the drum from which it will be retrieved by the machine that actually loads the drum. One of the reasons for retaining the casings is to help preserve the center of gravity of the aircraft even though a spent casing would be much lighter than an unfired round.

"even though a spent casing would be much lighter than an unfired round."

I would call that an understatement. The projectile is a 1" (ok, 25mm but what is .4mm among friends, eh?) diameter chunk of depleted uranium.

Can't speak for any other time or place, but:

As a Hooker in Vietnam, we often sling-loaded nets full of spent artillery/tank casings back to the main bases from outlying fire bases during our resupply missions. The main reason was that the bad guys loved using them for booby traps, now known as IED's.

I suspect the US military still does this for anything larger than small arms casings.

Hooker

You would have to perform a careful study of the economics of reloading used shell casings. As a reloader, I can tell you that at minimum, brass cases would have to be carefully cleaned, annealed, and resized for reliable reloading. Shell casings retrieved from the desert or other hostile environments might have imbedded particles that aren't removed during cleaning. Such particles can wreak havoc on reloading equipment. Civilian ammunition might be a good market for such reloads, but with lives at stake, I would need to see data before approving them for military use.

I would expect that if one is going to retrieve casings from the battlefield, the best bet would be to melt them down and start over again. I think though that our troops are too busy to bother collecting small arms brass.

I wasn't thinking of reloading spent casings. I was thinking of reclaiming the copper content.

I think in the spirit of recycling, of preserving the welfare of mankind and the planet, spent casings fired during war should be recycled so as to allow them to kill again at reduced cost. Rayzer

In the same spirit, we might as well recycle the dead bodies into food for soldiers and politicians. You are what you Eat!

Isn't killing people also a sort of "Recycling"?

(I just saw that someone else posted almost the same thing, sorry to all concerned!)

Some people just need recycling...

I know that after WWII a lot of the casings and other scrap from c-rations cans was used to make all kinds of trinkets from cigarette lighters to you name it. I remember taking the wadding out of a look alike ronson lighter and seeing a coke-a-cola logo. case was made from a coke can turned inside out.

oilcan13

Good day all. I live in Namibia, just south of the Angolan border, as you probably know the Angolan border war with then South Africa was pretty shitty, I was a kid then, but today I still see casings by the ton, coming in in old petrol drums, to scrapyards here in our country for export scrap. Angola is pretty buggered up after the war and +- 12 million people have to eke out a living from nothing. I've seen aircraft aluminium in the form of wrecked MIG fighter jets, tank tracks and loose metal shrapnel from what must have been some pretty nasty engagements end up here in the yards. At least they aren't trying to reload old casings!

Cartridge brass also becomes de-zincified and turns brittle upon exposure to ammonia gas found on or near a battlefield, and in some seemingly benign environments, such as your laundry room or areas where animal droppings are found.

Also near or in saltwater (quickly loses its zinc), fresh water (slowly loses its zinc!)

President Obama screwed America in some of his first days. What was once used in America is now scraped to China.

Brass shell Casings - MUST Read!

UNBELIEVABLE... PROOF THAT WE HAVE SOME IDIOTS IN WASHINGTON.

This is totally crazy and it should make you want to slap the * out of the idiots we have in Washington DC.

Georgia Arms is the 5th largest retailer of .223 Ammo in America. They sell 9mm, .45, .223 ammunition. They normally buy spent brass from the US Department of Defense. Spent brass is "one time used" shell cases used by our Military for training purposes.

They buy the brass, recondition it, and then reload the brass for resale to Law Enforcement, Gun Clubs, Gun Shops, and stores like Wal-Mart. They normally buy 30,000 lbs of spent brass at a time.

This week the DoD wrote a letter to the owner of Georgia Arms and informed him that from now on the DoD will be destroying the spent brass, shredding it. It will no longer be available to the ammo makers, unless they buy it in a scrap shredded condition (which they have no use for).

The shredded brass is now going to be sold by the DoD to China as scrap metal, after the DoD pays for it to be shredded. The DoD is selling the brass to China for less money than the ammo makers have been paying, plus the DoD has to pay to have the brass shredded and do the accounting paperwork.

This sure helps the economy now doesn't it? Sell cheaper to China , and do not sell at all to a proven US business. Any hidden agenda working here? Obama going after the Firearms Industry and our ammunition!! The Georgia Arms owner even related a story that one of his competitors had already purchased a load of brass last week. The DoD contacted him this week and said they were sending someone over to make sure it was destroyed. Shell cases he had already bought!

The brass has no value to the ammo maker if it is destroyed/shredded/melted. The ammo manufacturer only uses the empty brass cases to reload different calibers, mainly .223 bullets.

The owner of Georgia Arms says that he will have to lay off at least half of his 60 workers, within 2-3 months if the DoD will no longer sell spent brass cases to the industry. Georgia Arms has 2-3 months of inventory to use, by summer they're out.

If the Reloading Industry has to purchase new manufacture brass cases, then the cost of ammunition will double or even triple, plus Obama wants to add a 500% tax on each shell.

You can read the information and see the DoD letter to Georgia Arms here: The Shootist Sitehttp://www.theshootist.net/2009/03/ ... itary.html
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After reading the article in THE SHOOTIST dated 3/15/09, I was under the impression that this matter has been resolved.

" DOD rescinded the order after a firestorm of criticism--which began almost immediately when they issued a directive to mutilate all expended military brass before it could be sold to the civilian reloading market.
"

Issue has been resolved. Thanks to the efforts of good Americans, we at the P.D., along with others across the country are now once again buying used brass for reloading our practice rounds; we have an armorer who (as a volunteer) reloads for our training ammo. This includes used DoD brass.

I believe I already addressed this.

President Obama screwed America in some of his first days. What was once used in America is now scraped to China.

How does it feel to be a tool of the right-wing noise machine? (Probably the same way it feels to be a tool of the left-wing noise machine.) Here's the NRA's take on the situation. Note that the policy that drove the glitch in the civilian supply chain was established in 2008.

http://www.nraila.org/News/Read/NewsReleases.aspx?ID=12244

Actually they were classified as DEMIL class E in 2008, which would require shredding/mutilation but were granted a waiver for reloadable brass. What happened was in Feb-March of 2009, that waiver was revoked without explanation or warning, the DLA reclassified used casings as Class B . This occurred not in 2008 as you state, but in Feb-March of 2009, 2-3 months after Obama took office.

At about this same time period agents of the BATFE started visiting people who had purchased large numbers of guns and were demanding to see all of the weapons, even though they did not have warrants or probable cause for a search. Most were politely told to shove it up their alimentary canal. But many were intimidated into complying, violating their 4th amendment rights to a search warrant. BATFE agents copied down SN# and model# of each weapon. Obstensibly this was in connection to a request by the Mexican Government that was attempting to track recovered weapons that had been originally sold in the US.

I believe you are the one that is part of the "noise machine"

I would suspect (no proof) that government lawyers might have declared spent brass as being hazardous to reuse and reloading it might expose DOD to law suits if a reload were to explode in a civilians firearm.

nope, they were not accepting any liability and the brass was clearly sold as-is, so that theory doesn't fly, especially since it was the reloader that was taking all the liability.

Can I PROVE that it was the administration's hatred of all things that go bang? no, but the circumstantial evidence would tend to support the theory.

My bet is that is was some stupid idiot who did not investigate the why's and wherefore's of what was being done at the time, and thought that he could be "THE ONE!!"

We had this often when I was in the computer business, the factory would change something and save $0.20 per device (give the Guy who thought of it $10,000 to go and party!), and we would be saddled with more callouts at 100's of Dollars per callout.....

We never once got them to go back to the good original system, so we just did it ourselves. Then they hit back with their statistics showing that there idea was best as it had reduced part usage to ZERO.....they got real upset when we told them we made the old part ourselves......so we had no need of their shit!!!!

Boy did they get a "hissy fit" then!!!! I laughed my socks off.....