Last weekend I attended an auction liquidating the private collection of a local gun collector. I bought some interesting 30-06 ammo, which upon further review has me wondering.
The head stamp id's it as LC 51. Which I assume is Lake City USA 1951.
Whats unique is that the bullet has a rounded lead head. (http://cartridgecollectors.org/30-06intro/30-0he31.jpg) It looks like the fourth cartridge from the left. Which would make it a Guard or short range cartridge. According to http://cartridgecollectors.org/30-06intro/ It was designed by the Army for the National Guard which needed to train at shorter ranges closer to populations and did not need a full powered round. Sounds perfect for an Appleseed huh?
The cases look good and primers look ok.
My question is will this ammo require any special cleaning after use, like using a Black Powder type bore cleaner to remove the lead from the barrel? I know that black powder shooters use a different brew of chemicals for cleaning lead and powder removal than we do.
Or should I even bother with it?
Thank in advance for your counsel.
I'd suggest you first ascertain if this ammo is more valuable as a collector item than for shooting.
But if you want to shoot it, there are tables to tell you if it is corrosive or not - I assume an internet search would turn them up. "Tables" because 1951 was the year nearly all the manufacture of US military 30-06 shifted from corrosive to non-corrosive primers.
The general rule is "1952 or later" = non-corrosive; any earlier should be considered corrosive.
1951 being the shift year - and assuming the stuff you have is boxed, so that you have lot numbers - you can ascertain by the tables whether it is corrosive or not.
If you have no lot number, then treat it as corrosive, and clean your bore three days in a row, using US Army bore cleaner. You'll need to clean the gas system, too.
Or, you could use hot, soapy water. Or black powder stuff...
But I'd bet it's worth more to collectors than as shooting ammo... It'd be nice if you found a collector who'd give you two - or three - or ten - rounds of GI ball for each round on this stuff... :D
This time of the year you can get some stuff from WalMart called Black-Off. It's in pint bottles and it's read in color. I used it last year at the Feb. RBC at Ramseur when I used some corrosive ammo in my M1A all week. Stripped the M1A down every evening and cleaned the parts with this stuff and carb. cleaner before oiling it up, wiping it off and putting it back in the gun case for the night. Never saw any rust (mine does not have a chrome bore as it has an NM barrel). I got some more this fall and put it away as I still have more corrosive surplus to shoot up some day.
As Fred suggested, I did get it back out of the case a couple of times after I got home and cleaned it again both for cleaning purposes and inspection purposes where the light and facilities were better than during the RBC (sometimes the cleaning was on the tailgate of the pick up by lantern light and sometimes in the clubhouse depending on what was going on).
I had some similar stuff for the Mosin Nagant a while back. It was a 100gr round-nose bullet for short range training. They filled the case with a light charge of some pistol powder; this reduced recoil and eliminated the fireball from the end of the muzzle, but I doubt that the same "type" of ammunition produced in a .30-06 cartridge would cycle a garand. The Garand was still an "Army" rifle in 1951 (replaced by the M14 in 1957), so any ammo for National Guard would have been intended for older mothballed rifles like the Springfields.
You might pull one bullet (if you're a handloader and have the tools to do so), and weigh the powder charge and bullet. I'd bet you have around 10gr of a powder similar to modern-day Unique, and a 100gr short-jacketed LRN bullet.
If it is a light charge of pistol powder as I described, it is going to be pretty tempermental in how it ignites. You won't be able to feel it in how the trigger goes off, but you can get a lot of velocity variation based upon if the primer flash is behind the charge, or over the top of the charge as it settles horizontally below the flash hole. I don't know if that would show up at 25 yard shooting, but it sure would at 100 yards or so.
By the end of WW2, they had enough M1's left over to field them to the Guard.
I suspect it's a handload, but if it's an issue cartridge, it would've just required hand cycling of the action.