Bullets

I was shooting with a buddy yesterday and he took me to this military range that was closed after WWII. After shooting we searched for Bullets and other items left on the range after it closed. We were finding them everywhere! After about 2 hours we left with what we had picked up off the ground in the surrounding 3/8 mile area. I am trying to identify each type of bullet so I took some pictures of what I found. I was also told that it was an air force range so I believe they are from planes, but not sure. I believe the larger ones are .50 cal?

The 1st pic is of the penetrator from an AP .50 cal. In the pic of all of them lined up, the top row look like non AP .50 cal. Maybe tracers. I love searching thru old ranges. There are a few here in southern cal. I have only been to the Cadiz site, but the one in Anza Borrego i'm told is cool. Our local MV club does a camping trip there toward the end of the year. The others look like .30 cal.

No scale in the picture, but the large ones are probably 50 cal (1/2 inch in diameter) while the other are probably 30 cal. The smaller 30 cal bullets are probably ball ammo and the longer ones may be AP or tracer. Tracer will have a hollow bottom where the tracer compound used to be - incendiary should be similar. If you cut one in half lengthwise and you find a very hard center that looks like the two in the lower right of the last picture, that is AP. That is a tungsten carbide core.

The larger ones are 1/2 diameter. What kinds of guns would have shot these? Also what kind of vehicles/planes. The pieces on the left center side of the general picture are clips for a belt of 50 cals right.

I did a range clearance project several years ago at Ft. Riley with an EOD contractor. Very cool to be a part of but there were some hair raising moments on the old Bazooka range. I had walked all over there as a kid the the scouts and never saw anything, but go through with an EOD guy and the ground is crawling with munitions. We even saw a few rounds stuck in trees. They did 2 shots there with suspected live munitions, but then we got shut down when one of the teams found evidence of 40mm grenades....nasty buggers. Another site got shut down because they found a single unexploded pod from a cluster bomb. At that time there were only a few EOD units and all but one was deployed to Iraq!!! They wouldn't let the contractors (although most were retired/inactive military) work with high risk munitions.

A couple of them don't look in too bad a shape. Load them up and shoot 'em again!

crubash said:

I did a range clearance project several years ago at Ft. Riley with an EOD contractor. Very cool to be a part of but there were some hair raising moments on the old Bazooka range. I had walked all over there as a kid the the scouts and never saw anything, but go through with an EOD guy and the ground is crawling with munitions. We even saw a few rounds stuck in trees. They did 2 shots there with suspected live munitions, but then we got shut down when one of the teams found evidence of 40mm grenades....nasty buggers. Another site got shut down because they found a single unexploded pod from a cluster bomb. At that time there were only a few EOD units and all but one was deployed to Iraq!!! They wouldn't let the contractors (although most were retired/inactive military) work with high risk munitions.

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My a guy my friend knows put the power lines that now run across the range in and while he was working there he found a belt of 6 .50 cal rounds that were still live. He took them home and removed the gunpowder and has them sitting on his shelf and since were in the desert they look like new except for a few scratches.

My older brother, and I in 1967 use to go out to the old Wendover, Ut. Airforce machingun range. We would find handfulls of 50, and30 cal. bullets! Some of them did not have rifling marks on them! My older brother took a few of the %0 cal AP, and stripped off the jacket and used the core for center punches. FTG2 Wiggles USS EDSON DD 946 1969-1973

Do you know if he was on the ranges right around the impact area or up at tank gunnery? The old bazooka range was down in the SW corner of the base right against 77hwy and old milfor road. I surveyed almost all of the perimeter fence back in '02-'03. I also did the staking on the new (it's been done for 6 years or so now) urban training facility near vinton school road just southeast of tank gunnery and we found hundreds of different types of ammunition from small arms to bazooka and anti tank rounds. While we were doing one of the fence runs down by the OLD barracks we found a case of training grenades and several bandoliers of .30 machine gun ammo. I just called the project inspector and he had the MP's come out and get it. The case the grenades were in was rotted completely away except for the tin (I assume) liner but the grenades (the old pineapple frags) were pretty much in tact. I don't know how long they had been there but it was a long time. I remember after the '93 flood, my dad would go down along a couple of sandbars along the river and pull out thousands of rounds of 30.06 in rusty ammo cans and sort through it for good brass....and there was alot of good brass.