[PaleHawkDown]

Stealing @animalspooker 's idea, with a twist.

You have to pick only one caliber to secure food, protect against threats, etc.

BUT you can only use the crappiest commercial ammo offered in that caliber. If you choose .22, that means Winchester white box forever. If you pick 7.62X39, you are probably stuck with Vympel (that sometimes blows primers) or the C-grade Tula they sell in white boxes.

What caliber are you picking for all your survival needs, and why?

As I stated in the other thread, .45 Colt is my choice, because the crappiest .45 ammo still isn't THAT bad (Winchester Cowboy), and it is a pretty good all-around choice. Now that I think about it, though, 7.62x39 isn't a bad option either, especially with an SKS, with the occassional blown primer being a possibility.

Rules:
1. Whatever ammo you choose is plentiful, and you have all of it you'll ever need.
2. Only commercial ammo; no surplus, handloads, or reloads.
3. Must be a reasonably common caliber. If you choose a niche, exotic, or otherwise rare cartridge, and there are only a few highly precision companies that make it, that would be cheating. 5.7 FN borders on this.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Yes, the x54r would be a good choice. Similarly the 8mm Mauser. The cheapest and worst ammo for the Mauser is low powered spam can ammo. The newer spam can ammo was made to lower power levels, something about it being possible to use it mistakenly in a similar weapon. A safety thing. Even those lower powered rounds were loaded to 30-30 power levels.
The cheap surplus Yugo stuff on the other hand, was some hot ammo, corrosive, of course.
To be honest, I have never shot modern commercial ammo in either a Mosin or a Mauser. So crappy old surplus stuff is normal with them to me.

Since the only choice is commercial ammo, that wouldn't be a problem.

You ever get in to any of that WWII surplus Turk or Egyptian stuff? Man, it was hot. I fired one round of Turk that made me see stars, and just about crippled my shoulder for a week.

We took apart a round. It was supposed to be loaded with sticks of powder, but the stuff inside had turned to fine talcum powder, and a match set a pinch of it up like a magnesium flare.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Turk Mauser with hot Yugo ammo….I was foolish enough to want to put 50 rounds down range since I had brought 50 rounds out.
By the end of the rounds, Aiming was more like pointing in the general direction of the target. I was hurting. When I got home my wife screamed “ what did you do!” I was wearing a tank top, and my shoulder was a really ugly shade of purple. I had no idea, but it was clearly visible because of the tank top.

I still use Yugo 8mm, and my Yugo 7.62 Tokarev "submachine gun" rounds are kept in storage for a rainy day. The commercial ammo is fine, but that Yugo stuff once fired through a Buick engine block, and exited out the trunk.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

After much thought, .38 SPC.

Crappiest in 38 would probably be either Tula or Blazer aluminum case. That Tula lacquer really gunks up chambers, and sometimes the primers are too hard for revolvers that have had trigger jobs, and Blazer likes to crack in the chambers, and is a terrible choice for lever guns. I love 38, and it has a lot of advantages, but I'm not sure I'd trust either of those ammos in an emergency.

38LC fires in most of the same guns, and the crappiest 38LC I can think of, off the top of my head, is MagTech - and it's "acceptable" at worst.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

HAHA, it wouldn't be fun without rules. It makes you consider the AMMO, specifically the worst specimens available, rather than the caliber, or even what you have experience using.
For instance:
In 40 S&W you'd probably be stuck with Herters or the Blazer aluminum. I would see constant jams and FTF in your future with that choice.
223 it would be steel cased MaxxTech/BVA/Golden Tiger, and I've met few ARs that will reliably run it, and fewer still that would run it at all without a deep cleaning session every few mags. If you have one that does, it would be a good choice.

What's the worst ammo available, in any caliber, that you would risk your life with.

As an example, I started to pick 12 ga, but my favorite shotgun won't even run Winchester or Estate, and there are worse than those out there. I'm mostly set up for skeet, and prefer autos, but for someone with a rugged, reliable, and simple shotgun might be able able to choose it. Heck, if I just change the criteria to "cheapest" instead of "crappiest" I could still choose 12 ga,because B&P and Fiocchi have been the cheapest several times since Covid, and they run fine in my favorite gun.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Having a gun shop, I always try to get every caliber in a bargain line, a mid range, and a premium range. Sometimes I get surprised in a good way about the bargain lines (The ammo out of Bosnia and Turkey, and anything PPU makes, for example), other times I find a real turd that is so useless the manufacturer should be brought up on charges.

I don't carry anything that I will not personally shoot (except fancy-pants defensive ammo), so if I get garbage once, I remember that brand.

Several years ago I got some lower-mid-range Israeli .223 ammo that kept blowing primers. It was all from the same lot but some was American Eagle, some was IMI green box, and some was Independence 5.56 (apparently Israeli .223 and 5.56 are either interchangeable, or one or more of these companies were lying). That was just a bad batch of normally good ammo, but I won't buy any Israeli ammo anymore.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

I posted this in the wrong thread…




One caliber, but I get the crappiest ammo... Is 50cal round ball cheating? The crappiest 'ammo' would have choppy sprues and air pockets. They're ok enough to shoot as is, but I could also recast them later. Not an ideal set up, but it's a fairly quiet rifle, especially when I only load 50gr of powder. It's got plenty of power for medium game. I would just need several rifles and pistols so I could fight like Mel Gibson, if needed...

Hmm, you can only use Pyrodex, CCI #11 caps, and unswaged cast round balls from a company with "Ol'" or "Sutler" in the name forever. Not a bad choice.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

I was thinking UMC or PMC was the bottom of the barrel. I've never even seen Tula .38 SPC.

PMC is slightly higher than those two. UMC is WAAAY better than Blazer or Tula. PMC is in the Winchester quality range, and UMC is at least a step above that.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

I'm not much on survival scenarios but I'll play. I'm going to buck the trend, 22 long rifle. I can carry a lot of it. The rifle and pistol are both light. It will take down small game and even a small deer with good shot placement. In extremis it will also deal with predators of the two legged kind. It's also quiet enough that you don't announce yourself to everyone in three counties when you pull the trigger.

But with the crappiest ammo available? You'd need a rod to pound out the fizzles.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

This is a great exercise, but think not just "which caliber works well with crappy ammo?" but "which ammo can you actually get lots and lots of that still works really well?" This becomes a compelling case for 308, doesn't it?

.308 bolt action would be a good choice. Semi-auto, you'd better be able to stop and clean a couple of times a day because there are some really dirty ammos out there.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

I think at one time I had some .308 Winchester (well technically 7.62NATO) that was Cech or maybe Romanian made for Syria. Sky Blue box ammo looked like it was a parallel production line along with 7.62x39 as the cases and primers had the same lacquer finishes. I was told it came from Syria.
Quickest corroding stuff I ever shot out of my FAL back in 1990. Right there shooting on an acquaintances range in the creek bottom it started to rust up the muzzle brake.

If it was highly corrosive, it probably wasn't Czech. Even their "corrosive" WWII ammo is mild next to most. By the 7.62 NATO era they were primarily using non-corrosive powder, and eventually they switched to non-corrosive primers. In fact, I think they were among the first nations to do so.
I know Bosnia and Yugoslavia both had Syrian ammo contracts. Yugo stuff of a certain era is fairly corrosive, a little hot, and surprisingly consistent and accurate, in my experience. From the '80s on it has been pretty great, though.
Bosnian stuff is seemingly loaded with nuclear waste, a little smoky, inconsistent and corrodes almost on contact in Alabama's winter humidity. Breathing the smoke burned my lungs for a couple of days, too. (They make REALLY good 9mm ammo now, so I guess capitalism has been good for them.) It was the stinkiest "smokeless" powder I've ever experienced - even worse than that Hungarian ammo that smells like an electrical fire.
Romanian ammo used to be falsely advertised as "mildly corrosive", but as far as I can tell, that meant, "you have a four hour window to clean this, at best." I don't know if they provided ammo to Syria. Their 7.62x 39 sucked, but the 7.62x54r and Tokarev ammo I had were great.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Plenty of sticks in the woods. Besides, I always buy cheap 22 (used to buy the milk cartons when they had them). I don't think I've ever had a failure to fire in thousands of rounds (I'm assuming we are talking new ammo, not some crap that's been left in a leaky shed for twenty years). If we are talking crappy old ammo...plenty of sticks in the woods.

Several times I have published my epic saga of why I won't shoot Winchester .22s. But the short version is that I had two boxes of Winchester 333 in a row that were duds. Out of the few that appeared fireable I got several fizzles that lodged in the barrel.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Due to the expense of the ammo, a 25-20.

That's one way to do it. You could ad 38-55, 38-20, 38-40 and several "hard to finds" on there if you go that route.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

I made this point in the store yesterday, PMC, or PPU or any other bargain brand brass case will tun for hundreds rounds in any bargain AR-10. Hundreds of rounds of 308 is a LOT of meat in the freezer, or a whole lot of carcasses of some kind. If I want to deer hunt at 250-300 yards with 6.5 grendel or 6mm arc or even 6mm/6.5 creedmore it's 3-4 bucks a shot, 5.56, or 7.62x39, it's wild hand loads and 24" barrels. With the .308 it's $1/shot and barrels down to 18" with the same level of confidence as those $4 and $5 shots in more niche calibers.

That and that cheap soft point .308 is in every store in the country. Those deer loads for other calibers are few and far between.

I might have found a hole in my collection.

In this exercise, though, we're talking "crappiest" not "cheapest". We're at a weird point now that many bargain brands are great, but some of the name brand and no-name brand are a totally different story.
I've had two batches of Isreali IWI blow primers, several calibers of Winchester that were either filthy, wildly inconsistent, or made with such low quality brass that they didn't run reliably in semi-autos at all, Blazer aluminum case that stovepiped constantly in some of my guns, several American-made bargain brands that popped up through the years with questionable quality control, and several foreign-made ammunitions from Arabic and Latin countries that disapeared almost as quickly as they arrived.

PMC is "adequate" and PPU is somewhere in the top bracket.

Heck, the current "lawyer-loaded" rounds made by most American companies won't even cycle in nearly an entire generation of semi-auto pistols. I generally have had good luck with Remington, for example, but I can't reliably run a Mauser 1934, the average P08, or an entire continent's worth of blowback .32 and .380 pistols made between 1900 and WWII; but they will run on Fiocchi, MFS, PPU, S&B, Igman, MaxxTech, and MagTech - all far cheaper ammos. That's maybe a bad example, however, for the overall topic, but my point is that "cheap" ammo doesn't mean "crappy."

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Was that old ammo? How was it stored. I have fired a lot of win. I remember when I could buy a box of 50 for $1.50.

Brand new. I've posted this saga several times now.

Short version:
Years ago, I was on the way to the farm and realized I had brought the wrong range bag. I didn't have the right ammo. Stopped at Wal-Mart and bought a box of the cheapest bulk they had, Winchester 333. When I got to the farm and opened the box half the bullets had fallen out of the cases, and most of the rest wiggled.
I pulled out a handful that looked okay.
POOOOW, piff, fizzle. Some were too hot, most were too weak.
When I got home I called Winchester. You can hear those details in one of the other times I've posted this. Long story short, they sent me a coupon for a replacement box of 333.
Went to Academy and picked up a totally different lot number. I should have opened the box in the store, but I didn't.
Got them home. Same story.
Called Winchester, got called a liar. Sent photos. Customer service manager calls me to apologize. I got a coupon in the mail good for one box of ANYTHING from Winchester and used it to buy a box of .45 Colt Cowboy.
The stuff functioned fine, but was the filthiest non-black powder ammo I've ever fired in .45. The stuff varied wildly in my chrony, too.

I swore off Winchester ammo for years until a similar situation popped up, and the only 12 ga. that town's Wal-Mart had was Winchester Super X. The third round I shot blew my intercepter latch, spring, and retainer out of the gun, and bruised my shoulder to the bone. This was dove loads.

Since having the store I have only bought Winchester when nothing else was available. I have had customer complaints about three brands of ammo in 13 years. One was Winchester 223.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

That's a scary story. I was target practicing with Winchester .410 bird shot not long ago and fortunately didn't have any problems, but now I'm probably going to worry next time I go out to shoot. I don't know how old this ammo is, though. It probably came out of the stuff I inherited from a late relative who was a big shotgunner.

Since my father passed, I have inherited his ammo. Winchester shot shells from the '80s and '90s and early 2000s seem fine so far. Something changed in the twenty-teens that still isn't fully resolved, I'm thinking.

I've mentioned before that my stockpile of '90s Remington Thunderbolts are great, but I bought a new box a year or so ago on the fly, and while I didn't have any issues, they are loaded a lot lighter than the old ones, and the bullets aren't seated as tight.

Sad to say, but I'm getting prejudiced against American ammo.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

If they look okay, they probably are. Mine didn't even look okay.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Oh, I know. I may have changed lanes a bit, but I did use my blinker!

It got me thinking is all. "What caliber, out of what I can go find, and afford, adequate amounts of do I trust to get it done?" Outside of home defense, maybe diminishing combat effectiveness at 2-400 yards. I am liking 308.

That does seem to be a strong contender.

 

[PaleHawkDown]

 

[PaleHawkDown]

Another type of ammunition to be wary of is improperly stored ammunition or really old ammunition.
Encountered a old stash of CCI Mini-mags that on fireing cracked every case mouth on fireing and on average 4 out of 6 that spit back gas from crack where fireing pin struck case rim
The Marlin 783 handles routed off gas poorly right into the shooters eye.
Early signs was cracked case mouth rings differently when spent cartridge hits the ground.
Almost all the 14 rounds from that box split case, we stopped when we started getting gas out the bolt as firing pin routed gas right out the back in your face (fantastic reason to always wear eye protection).
At that point the penny pinching side of me thought about firing that ammo from a different type firearm like a ruger 10/22 that utilizes a receiver type that wont vent gas in the shooters eye.
Then the safty side of me said toss this before somw body gets injured or this ammo somehow damages your rifle.
The $200 .22 rifle vs the $8 worth of crappy ammo.
Crappy CCI ammo went in a very deep hole.
Old ammo can hurt you.

It's weird. Brass can get brittle with age, and several ammo companies note this, however I've shot WW1, WW2 and even antique ammo that was fine, and except for reloads, I don't think I've ever had a case split.

Then there's the fact that that there is plenty of medieval and even Roman brass in perfectly good shape.

I wonder if certain formulations are better than others.