.303 British Milsurp Ammunition for Sale

[Art]

Midway USA has gotten in a stash of .303 Brit ball. The ammo is packed 250 rounds in an ammo can. There are three grades: UK milsurp. non corrosive $180.00, UK milsurp WWII issue corrosive $150.00 and POF corrosive $140.00. Shipping is $15.00 which I figure is pretty much the value of the ammo can.

[Art]

I got some of the WWII surplus for bullet pulls. At $.60 a pop the bullets may seem on the high side but there aren't going to be any more .303 Mk VII bullets any more either.

The ammunition is actually very clean, in fact as clean as a lot of the HXP I've received from the CMP. If it wasn't so darned old I'd be tempted to shoot some of it. Its standard generic MkVII ball from various manufacturers in the U.K., mostly dated 1941 and 1942. The bullets are cupro-nickle jacketed I've reloaded and shot other MkVII cupro-nickle bullets with excellent results.

As good as this looks the non corrosive stuff may be very nice indeed.

[Art]

I just checked availability and the prices have been jacked up...way up.

[JB White]

At the old price and just for the bullets you did OK. It's tough to find 174 grain flat based bullets these days. All too often only BT's are available and too many Enfields puke of those things.
Did you get mixed headstamps? Plan to go out and play "fun with cordite" in the backyard? ;)

[Art]

Well I pulled down the cartridges yesterday. They would have probably been ok to shoot despite their age, they didn't stink and they looked clean. The cordite wasn't excessively discolored and only a couple of the cardboard wads weren't intact. Because of that I did not dump the propellant out of the 120 odd cases in which the cardboard wads stayed in place and may use it for emergency propellant if (or should I say when) there is another powder drought. The real indication of how old they were was the oxidation of the exposed lead at the cartridge bases of all of the bullets.

Head stamps indicate that most of the ammunition was made in plants set up for the war effort that only operated from 1939 to 1945, specifically the Royal Arms Factories at Spenneymore and Blackpole. There are also cartridges made by Raleigh Cycle in Birmingham, and the Royal Lab in Woolwich which had been in the munitions industry since the 17th century.

[Johan412th]

So do you think they found this ammo in the UK or some former commonwealth bunker?

[JB White]

I think they found the pallets of crap they couldn't sell during the heyday of 303 surplus ammo.

[Art]

I figure 60-40 in favor of "some commonwealth bunker." I will say, as I did previously, the ammo looks clean, doesn't stink and the cordite mostly looks ok. It should have been very saleable during the "heyday of .303 surplus ammo." Now, as I said above, it's just too old to make shooting worthwhile. The non corrosive may have been another matter since it would have been made at the end of the Lee Enfield era but I wasn't willing to go the extra money on it and I don't trust it to be all non corrosive.

[Johan412th]

Thanks Art. I'm not out of my Greek stuff yet, but I'm not ready to pull the trigger on this stuff. I remember a while back that they opened up a bunker in Pakistan or India and it was just loaded with munitions... I was always curious just what exactly was in there. I would expect at least some British weaponry, right?

[joem]

I bought 3 or 4 cans of .303 at auction cheap. 2 were for a Vickers MG on canvas belts. 2 were cordite and I pulled the bullets and loaded them in my cases. If the auction would have had more I would have bought it.