Collectable ammo

juststarting · October 19, 2018, 1:47pm

I was moving some stuff around tonight and decided to take a peek at old 303 ammo I have squirrelled away. I have banana bender (above) and Pakistani ammo that I have identified. I also have a bunch of lose rounds… So I decided to geek out a little bit and look up their head-stamps. Most are from 1956.

MF
Small Arms Ammunition Factory No 1, Footscray, Melbourne, Australia.

RG
Royal Ordnance Factory, Radway Green, Cheshire, UK. This factory was part of the 1939 - 45 war emergency expansion plans being situated near Crewe and is still in operation. Production of the .303 cartridge commenced in 1940 and the last known production of this cartridge was in 1973.

GB
Greenwood and Batley, Leeds, UK. This company manufactured Ammunition from an early stage, finally ceasing production in the late 1950s. They had a filling factory at Abbey Wood and later during the 1939-45 war a filling factory at Farnham.

KF
Indian Government Ammunition Factory Kirkee (or Kirkee Arsenal).

K57
This one I am not sure about, but it’s highly likely that it was made in (or I didn’t read the stamp correctly):

One of the ‘Imperial Chemical Industries Kynoch’ factories; or
Indian Government Ammunition Factory Kirkee (or Kirkee Arsenal).

no1mk3 · October 19, 2018, 7:40pm

G’day juststarting,
K57 is Kynoch Birmingham, 1957. What is the rest of the stamp please?

sungazer · October 19, 2018, 9:57pm

Apparently the ammo made at Footscray in 1956 was not very good. Again I only have a little bit of the story. I will ask and double check the year if your interested.

juststarting · October 20, 2018, 12:13am

I’ll look it up.

juststarting · October 20, 2018, 12:14am

Yeah, but it’s a neat keepsake… I wouldn’t shoot any of that old stuff anyway.

juststarting · January 14, 2020, 12:54pm

@Nomis I feel like you need to explore this thread

Nomis · January 15, 2020, 5:58am

Uhhhhh I don’t think that’s a good idea. Could end badly.

juststarting · January 24, 2020, 11:33am

@Nomis if by badly you mean, you’d have some cool ammo, yes.

juststarting · January 24, 2020, 12:59pm

So, as you know, I am tinkering with 303-25, but you see, I have this little, tiny really, OCD. I need to have some original ammo for each firearm I own from that time period. 7.5x55 Swiss is my white whale. Sort of like Pokemon. anyway, being that I am tinkering with 303-25, I wanted some ammo, which, shall we say is not the easiest thing to find. About as common as… Well, it’s just not freaking common! Especially when I am after a factory box! And then I came across this dude online, turns out he’s really close, told me that he sold off everything he had (common calibres to his surplus) and this is what’s left - so I should drop by and pick it up, for free I did supplement his ammo stash, with something he wanted and I had, I felt too guilty to just grab it for free and he threw in some other stuff he had no use for (you’re welcome, @bentaz). So, here’s my loot from tonight (so freaking happy, so, so happy)!