I have been going to the range picking up brass, or going to the shooting pit and mining it. But that's a lot of work and only good for a few hundred on a typical day a thousand on a great day. That's thinking too small. Maybe go to where other people take their brass? Some times. Well it looks like the local air force base did a brass dump. I was at the scrap yard earlier today. I figured I would look in the brass bin as they were closing up to see if there was anything that wasn't shit, usually it's heavy tarnished, beat up or stuff I can't use from the commercial shooting range. I look in there today and there are tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of fresh still yellow LC 5.56 cases. I'm going back Monday with 5 gallon buckets, a shovel, hat, money and some time to dig in. I'm going to get way more than I can ever use (maybe?), sell the rest when the time is right some time in the future. I heard a rumor that ammo was saving up all the brass cases, I think the ammo shop chief was planning on taking it when he retired which they can't do and that there was a building with 1,000L bins full of cases. Well that would explain why I never see any fresh military brass at the scrap yard. Maybe they are starting to get rid of it. The correct thing to do is fill up a bin and take it to DRMO. Check your local scrap yards. Oh and I bought 30lb of bird shot for like $4.
The Air Force has always thrown away a lot of nice stuff, but cartridge brass? That stuff is usually sold at auction. Could still be legit, and certainly not your problem if you buy it from the scrapper. 1000 pounds of .223/5.56 in five gallon buckets will fill the back of a pickup. Remember when they were shredding it before scrapping it a few years back? There was such an uproar from taxpayers about the wastefulness that we managed to get it back into the reloading chain. Maybe they took it to DRMO and the high bidder was a scrap man. Their loss, big win for you if you can save it from the smelter. Chilled shot is over to $70 for a 25lb bag. Win!
It's not a training base where they fire off cases of ammo daily, pallets of ammo monthly. I would say they use cases of ammo weekly. Maybe daily on occasion, a few times a year. I guess the bean counters figure it's not worth auctioning, maybe DRMO tells the unit to scrap it and put the relatively insignificant amount of money into the unit moral fund.
Yeah, I have never heard of the military throwing away brass...but then again I was Army, not sure what those blue suits do but I would bet it's a mistake but ...maybe not then again...who cares!
I think I saw it on Govplanet dotcom a while back in 55 gallon drums. Might be a nice retirement project to buy one, deprime and prep, or convert to 300 BLK.
Every year, we had to shoot up our supply before we got the next year's supply, if we ever had a surplus it got counted against us the next time it was ordered! We also kept a stash outside the normal chain, so that we wouldn't ever get caught short, something that would be very very bad if we ever needed and didn't have because some bean counters and their yearly budgets!
I found a nice five gallon bucket in the woods while I was squirrel hunting on base. Perfect spot to sit and watch the tree tops. Before I sat down I brushed the leaves off and found a bucket full of 5.56 brass. That one was probably stashed there by somebody who was supposed to turn it in at the ASP or DRMO. Stuff on base ends up in the strangest places. A bunch of M60 barrels showed up in one of the base fishing ponds when the water level went down. I found a great big pile of brand new (some still in sealed packages) MOPP suits in the wood pile at the base landfill. Their service life had probably expired, but they sure didn't belong in the scrap wood pile. I loved going to the landfill to drop off asbestos waste. I knew how it was supposed to be done. I learned that the fastest way to get a civil service supervisor to blow his top was to ask the name of every civilian employee I had contact with and write down their name and everything they said. It became a habit that would later keep me out of jail. I never find any live ammo, but belted blank ammo is everywhere. In the shallow waters of the Intracoastal Waterway, in the dumpsters near training areas and for the more creative, hanging way up in the branches of trees. If you do like we did in the 80's (because we had no training ammo) and just yell "Budda, Budda, Budda! GRENADE!!!" while throwing a pine cone, instead of firing those nasty blanks, you don't have to really clean your weapon, and can get through the armory and out on liberty in record time
Could have been mislabeled at DRMO as scrap, maybe? Yep, seen it on various auction sites, like GovPlanet, too. There's never any telling, with the Chair Force, though! The saddest thing I ever heard, was when I spent a year working for the Navy, out on Adak Island (~2/3 of the way out the Aleutian Islands chain). Old timers there told me about when one of the tenant commands was closing (the base was on the BRAC list, in 96), and it was decided that it was cheaper to toss the Snap-On tool chests, full of tools, than it was to ship them back stateside, for auction (not enough return on investment, I guess). So they were loaded onto a flatbed pickup, driven up to the landfill, and unceremoniously dumped there. Bulldozer was standing by, to cover them up with a few feet of dirt, and base security was there, to make sure no one absconded with them!
^^^^^^ I saw this happen with 7th Corps assets in the Iraq war. They determine it would cost too much to ship them out so they buried them in the desert. I again saw it closing some bases in Central Asia. It pissed off a lot of us because instead of burying the stuff we were giving to the local governments that basically had screwed us at every turn then finally closed the base due to political pressure from Russia, basically kicking us out. Unbelievable amount of heavy equipment was left... Lots of guys took tool sets and etc. rather than leave it for the locals. Hell, the taxpayers bought it so why not!
Some scrap yards won't sell it, some will. I have two close enough to me that I hit on a semi regular basis. Largest haul I've gotten at one time from them was a 30 gal barrel full. Also a good source of lead. Congrats on the score.
Someone threw a bunch of shitty range pickup on top of the good stuff. But the deeper I went the better it got. Then I hit a layer of 45cult. I'm not in the 45cult yet but I know someone who is. Started finding 38spl, 30-30, 357mag too. A 5 gallon bucket cost $100. If I didn't have to dig through all that shit on top it would have been at least a $200 trip. About 3.5 cents per 223. I was picking up mostly 223, some 9mm until I hit the 45cult layer. My 45cult guy is new to the cult and doesn't have a 100,000 rounds of it laying around like the rest of the cult members. He would trade primers for 45 brass.
Sorted all that brass, 2 gallons of 45cult brass. At least two thousand 223 cases a bunch of 9mm, 38spl dozens of 308 and 30-30. Only a hand full of throw aways, rounds I don't load or badly damaged. The 308 was clearly fired in some sort of HK, there was no 50bmg so I don't think it was from the air force base.
What's so bad about HK fired brass? I found some one in the know that demo stuff from the base here goes straight to Colorado and Arizona. But there are holes, I found a bunch of ammo cans at the scrap yard and some of them were packed full of very large shell casings like 105mm, 30mm.
#1 on the scrap bucket for anything fired in a fluted chamber. I'm sure I could clean and resize it, but the extraction is so harsh that most cases have a bend in the extractor groove and won't fit in a shell holder. One of these is too many, so it all automatically goes to scrap.
I'll take the HK fired brass. I have HK's and reload for them. I keep their brass to its self. I haven't had any issue with dies getting scratched, but the brass does not last as long as brass shot through non fluted chambers.
Guns that wreck brass or can't handle reloads are shit as far as I'm concerned. I have a wet pin tumbler. Can't tell they were fired in a fluted chamber after they go for a spin or 2. All hk roller delayed blow back rifles use fluted chambers as far as I know.
If you like the fluted brass look for it thirty feet in front of the firing line. Fluted 7.62x51 and 5.56 all seem to go that far out. I just leave it there and let the young brass hungry RSO's pick it up. It's all I can do to police 75 yards of firing line ten feet from the benches in the hour of daylight I have this time of year.
