Yesterday's Weapons Forums

Bulgarian Heavy Ball

What happened here

Did you fire this in a nagant you are familiar with? I am going to hazard a quess. The pressure was not excessive because the primer cup is rounded and not flat. This looks like a brass case and it probably was not annealed enough during drawing. Too much annealing and the brass is soft too little and the brass is brittle. I have seen this on the neck, but not so close to the base. One sure way is to section the brass to see if it was drawn evenly or had fissures in the metal to begin with. Bad materials??

Were there just the three slits or were there more and did this occur on more than one case? It is curious that they are evenly spaced and the same length.

Unfortunately got none of the information. Just found it while browsing for Mosin photos on Flickr...

I've had some old 8mm do the same, but with only 1 crack at the head area. I chalked it up to old brittle brass. Just pulled the projectiles & used them for relaods

That looks strange. The "splits" look all the same length and spaced the same distance apart. Almost looks like it was done on purpose for some sort of test. ????????

From what little information was available, the feller was just shooting some old surplus ammo and it happened, said he felt the whoosh of gasses venting past his face when he fired the round. I'll try to find the link to exactly where I found it.

wonder if it was in a fluted chamber like on the SVT 40?

Svt Flutes dont go back that far.
I too had Turk 8mm that would do that at the shoulders/neck in a Mauser I wore out. 1440 turks for 100$ landed was the game of the day...

Looks like a bad annealing+time job on the brass. Three insted of the normal one or two is unusual.Maby thats why it was worth posting?

Not the ammo expert here but if it was of some type of blow out why are the top and bottom of the slits rolled in like they were pushed it? I have also had ammo slit but that was all it did was split but a flat split! Sorry had to toss that in. This almost looks like a screw driver was pushed in then fired as the splits look consistent.

Mybusa,

I had also noticed it, but concluded that the leakage jets had formed a back cushion pressure that pushed the edges of the slits inward. The more I think about it though it is just as likely that this might have been man made like crop circles. Look at the far left slit it does look convex with gas marks fore and aft where the gas jets may have deformed the brass inward. ???? Maybe.

It makes me wonder? If I'm really bored tomorrow I'll grab one of the same ammo, pull the bullet and powder and test the screwdriver theory on a parts mozin I have. Although with out powder and bullet (for pressure) in it I doubt I will get the same results but it's worth a try.

I love a good project!

Well to start I thought I had some Bulgarian heavy ball and I didn't. So I dug out one Wolf, Czech silver tip and an Albanian all ball ammo.

I pulled the bullets and powder and darned if I could not even get a sharp screw driver through the cases with out serious denting/deforming to the point the cases will not feed.

So sorry guys I could prove nothing other then we are back to the case must have been really thin.

All the curiosity about this, I'm gonna have to contact the feller and ask him a lot of questions.

Thanks for the research attempt!

I'm no ammo expert, but what if this ammo used to be machine gun ammo and someone pulled it out the belt the wrong way??
Just my thoughts.

Met vriendelijke groet,

Martin

Here is a link to where I originally found it: