A friend of mine reminded me of an experiment I did a while back. I live in Florida where it’s a very wet and humid environment for half the year. Humidity levels are absurd in the summer. The idea was to see how Wolf steel cased ammo would hold up to field conditions in Florida, or other wet environments. If TSHTF, we might not have air conditioning down here. It would become humid inside our home, just as it is outdoors. What if we were displaced from our home, and had to rough it? We would be getting wet all the time. Will my Wolf ammo stocks rust to the point that they are useless? Only one way to find out…
Here is the ammo selected. A side by side comparison will be done with brass cased ammo…
I placed them outside in a Tupper wear tray. I like it when the bullets contact each other, because it mimics the metal on metal contact that occurs in a loaded magazine. BTW, it already rained on the bullets in the time it took me to put together this post. I'll keep you updated every few days. At the end of the test, I'll fire the rounds to see if they still function...
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48 hours into the test...
Rust has appeared. The areas of the ammo that began rusting first are where metal contacts metal. All the wolf cases have begun rusting to some extent at that contact point. Only one brass casing, the one that contacted the steel wolf case beside it, has shown signs of rust, but the corrosion on that case seems the worst. The other three brass cases seem corrosion free at this time. One brass bullet is showing some corrosion. For a good picture of the corrosion, I rotated the cases. They were rotated back to their original position, and placed back into the field. It has rained twice in as many days. The ammo is atop a piece of Tupper wear in an open field. The bullets were allowed to dry out between rains via sun and wind exposure.
The experiment continues....
5 days later. It has rained every day. I brought the ammo inside and whiped it down with a rag....
If this was the first time I had seen the Wolf ammo, and someone asked me how long I thought it had been outside, I would have guessed a month or two. The brass ammo appears fine.
9 days outdoors…
Two weeks outdoors…
I cleaned the ammo up a bit with a damp cloth before taking the picture. The rust on the steel cases is beginning to pit into the casing. The brass is discolored in places, but appears fully functional. I have decided to run the test another two weeks before firing the ammo.
Ammo outdoors for 23 days…
Another week to go before I fire them. Can't wait to see what happens.
Here is what the ammo looks like after a month of exposure to the elements...
I cleaned it up with a damp rag. The 5 brass rounds are on the left, and steel on the right. The brass was tarnished but smooth. I felt like I could have made it look like new with some metal polish. The steel was coated with rust and the cases pitted and deformed...
I loaded the rounds into an aluminum GI spec magazine with a green follower...
The ammunition would be fired from my POF. It is a piston driven AR clone. It has proven utterly reliable in the past...
The brass was fired first. All 5 rounds fed and fired without a hitch. Next, the steel rounds. I seated the magazine, and charged a round. The bolt didn’t run all the way forward to lock the round into the chamber. I tried the forward assist to no avail. I was unable to extract the round by pulling on the t-handle, it was stuck halfway in my chamber...
I had to use a trick I was taught in the Army to clear the rifle. I held the t-handle and drove the but stock into the ground twice before the shell ejected. I thought this jam might be a fluke, so I tried to chamber the next round in the magazine. It jammed in the same way...
I repeated the process with the third round, and it didn't even clear the magazine before it jammed...
I stopped trying to chamber the steel rounds at this point, concluding that even if I could get one in the chamber, they were too risky to fire. While trying to unload the remaining steel rounds from the magazine, I noticed they were not feeding smoothly, causing them to hang up...
I got out a P-Mag, and they seemed to feed smoothly, without any of the hang-ups occurring in the aluminum mags. It was a moot point though since the steel rounds wouldn’t seat in the chamber.
In conclusion, if I was expecting to spend any time a field, I would be carrying brass ammo and P-Mags. The steel ammo seems fine for practice and fair weather use. Thank you for your time.
