This coating built up in chambers making cleaning and maintenance more difficult. Steel-cased ammunition earned a negative reputation here in years past based upon excessive fouling resulting from the lacquer coating applied to minimize corrosion. Steel is also more prone to corrosion than brass. This allows incrementally more gas to escape into the action and results in increased fouling. By contrast, steel is stiffer and does not seal as tightly within a firearm’s chamber. When alloyed with a bit of carbon iron becomes steel, a cheap and robust metallic material suitable for literally countless industrial applications.īrass is softer than steel so it expands readily to form a tight gas seal when fired but contracts immediately to ease ejection.

However, iron is the most common metallic substance on earth, comprising, among other things, the earth’s magnetic core.

Brass is fairly malleable and has been used to build metallic cartridge cases from the very earliest days of cartridge-fed firearms. While I want it to be reliable, for simple training ammunition cost is paramount.īrass is a metallic alloy made up of copper and zinc and the relative proportions of these components determine the characteristics of the resulting material. Even running submachineguns, a couple of these generic boxes will keep you squeezing triggers on a lazy Saturday afternoon long enough to make the trip to the range worthwhile. Typically packed 100 rounds to a non-descript cardboard box, I could not count the number of these things I have burned through over the decades. Winchester White Box is the colloquial term for bulk-packed Winchester brass-cased FMJ training ammo.

New winchester 9mm brass