Cordite

Heym SR20

Well-Known Member
When did we stop using cordite as the main propellant for rifle ammunition.

I know that the Americans have been using granular powders since the start of smokeless powder, but were we still using cordite till late 1980’s?
 
I can't think of anywhere where we were still using cordite as late as the 1980's, although of course, there were still plenty of military surplus .303 ammunition being still used then and no doubt still a fair bit about now. Certainly when I started shooting at Bisley in the 1960's all ammunition for competitions was supplied (heavily subsidised by the government, only .303 was used) as part of your entry fee. The ammunition was all string cordite 1940's production.

I believe it was also used until later as an artillery propellent and also in solid fuel rockets, maybe something like the Bloodhound missile. I believe also, the way .303 ammunition using strings of cordite was made was rather odd. I think the part formed cases were filled with the spaghetti like strings of cordite and then the neck cold formed to shape.

The early days a smokeless propellent is very confusing with governments developing their own or similar versions at the same time although the long strings of cordite are quite distinctive.

Laurie Holland is the chap to tell you about this. - Certainly and interesting area to research.
 
When we switched from .303 to 7.62mm
IIRC 7.62 was never designed to use cordite (and was a US-developed round).
i don’t know, but would be surprised if the .280 Enfield round would have used cordite, either.
 
Can't help with the dates but my old boss was in the RAF as a rear gunner in Halifax's. I remember him telling us that a question that was asked by new gunners was, what was the smell made when firing their guns. They were told when your firing it's Cordite, when it's being fired at you it's S**TE. :norty:
 
If Brit ammo has a 'Z' after the Mark Number...ie .303 VIIz or .380 IIz it is nitro cellulose powder. No 'Z' it is cordite.

But where that ammunition was NEVER loaded, ever, with cordite there's no 'Z'.
 
If Brit ammo has a 'Z' after the Mark Number...ie .303 VIIz or .380 IIz it is nitro cellulose powder. No 'Z' it is cordite.

But where that ammunition was NEVER loaded, ever, with cordite there's no 'Z'.

That sounds confusing - So 9mm x19 Mk 1Z and 2Z, does that indicate that at some time they WERE loaded with cordite at one time?
 
Mk I 9mm apparently did exist. You can search on the internet. But what propellant it used I'm surprised unsure.

But there's cordite, though, and cordite. Some, yes, British handgun cartridges used chopped cordite.

Which looks like a half scale version of H4831SC. Except it's ochre coloured.

Neonite though isn't cordite. It has no nitro glycerine in it and is a nitro cellulose type powder.
 
In the supposable accurate account of the Battle of Waterloo "Four days in June" the author Iain Gale describes the "reek of cordite hanging over the battlefield" A man about 60 years ahead of his time I think.
 
Can't help with the dates but my old boss was in the RAF as a rear gunner in Halifax's. I remember him telling us that a question that was asked by new gunners was, what was the smell made when firing their guns. They were told when your firing it's Cordite, when it's being fired at you it's S**TE. :norty:
My dad was a rear gunner in a Halifax. He sometimes made reference to being "too stinky" to chat with a lady that gave out coffee or tea to returning airmen. I wonder if that was the cause?? Interesting.~Muir
 
I had a pack of 12 .303s that came with a sporterized Enfield German style with set trigger and a full stock. They had been ground off at the tips to look like hollow points reputedly in 1946 in Northern Germany with a British C/Os permission. I had no desire to try leaving jackets in the bore so I have just delabbed them and saw the card over powder wad and the cordite strands which after picking them out to weigh ranged from 34 to 38 grains. I am curious if the cordite would work in a 1909 Mauser 7.65x53 bottleneck case with a modern boxer primer. Perhaps I am just tired of living :coat:
 
Cordite has long since been replaced as a military rifle ammunition propellant. AFAIK it was used in triple base extruded form for some munitions post WW2 and up until the 80's or 90's for some modern artillery pieces (the L118 105mm field gun was one I seem to remember as well as some naval guns) using the later Cordite N and NQ triple based extrusions. It was certainly not used in small arms when I was in service in the mid 1980s. I believe the last factory, in Scotland, was still manufacturing it for the field guns until around then, after which military supplies came from Germany.

Rifles have been using modern smokeless powders since the last world war or at least production of ammunition I understand switched from extruded cordite after Du-Pont developed the IMR line of powders which the UK imported for military small arms. I'm not sure of the date for that (Laurie's your man) but IMR ("Improved Military Rifle") powders have been widely used for military small arms certainly from the 1930's to 1940's.
 
Hm, my grandad died around there in 1919 he was a munitions foreman during WW1 and was then buried back in his hometown Newry NI.
 
I had a pack of 12 .303s that came with a sporterized Enfield German style with set trigger and a full stock. They had been ground off at the tips to look like hollow points reputedly in 1946 in Northern Germany with a British C/Os permission. I had no desire to try leaving jackets in the bore so I have just delabbed them and saw the card over powder wad and the cordite strands which after picking them out to weigh ranged from 34 to 38 grains. I am curious if the cordite would work in a 1909 Mauser 7.65x53 bottleneck case with a modern boxer primer. Perhaps I am just tired of living :coat:

Having played with cordite straws off sunken wrecks I can assure you that it will burn and burn bright, being immersed in seawater for 100 years doesn't take it's vim away once it dries out for a few minutes.
 
@Sash got it right. At least some, maybe all, British produced Mk VII standard ball ammo used Cordite until the end of its production life. There were 'z' (non-Cordite) 303s - some in other marks that needed a denser chopped nitrocellulose; or a cooler burning powder for high round-count use in automatic weapons; or were standard Mk VII ballistics but loaded in North America with their powders including US Lend-Lease supplies. One of these interesting historical footnotes is that the very popular Hodgdon BL-C(2) powder started out as a Mk VIIz propellant. The Olin Corporation's Winchester-Western ammunition division was completing a huge Mk VIIz Lend-Lease order at the end of WW2 which HMG promptly cancelled. They were demilled and B.E. Hodgdon bought the powder calling it 'Ball Lot C'. As WW had a trademark hold on the word 'ball' for propellants, Hodgdon renamed it BL-C and it was a huge hit with his customers. When the surplus 303 powder was used, Olin produced a replacement in the form of the powder that derived from that old 303 propellant and adopted as part of its contracted T65 development work for the US Army which in turn became the 7.62mm Nato cartridge. Initially at any rate (things may have changed over 70 years), the new grade, renamed H. BL-C(2), was as per Olin's 7.62 M180 ball cartridge powder, but with the flash suppressant coating omitted.

The 280 British was chopped nitrocellulose from day one, hence its designation as Rifle Cartridge 7mm No.1z during its brief period of official adoption at the tail-end period of the post-war Labour Attlee government (in the face of fierce opposition from the USA and threatening to derail the creation of NATO as a military entity as the US were insisting on a 30-cal design, in effect their T65E3). Cordite would have been very unsuitable for such a cartridge design - not in its burn characteristics but from a manufacturing point of view. The workload in manually creating bundles of cords and inserting them into the case would have become prohibitively expensive by the 1950s and slowed production levels. Moreover, smaller calibre cases like the 303, never mind a 7mm, couldn't have the neck and shoulder formed until after the propellant bundle was inserted. That in turn proscribed final heat-annealing for obvious reasons (why very old Cordite 303 rounds often have neck-splits or incipient splits after long-term storage even in sealed canisters and a proper environment.)

The Kynoch etc big-bore African DG rimmed cartridges that someone mentions were designed for Cordite and the set-up was a part of their success. A Cordite bundle in a way over-size case left lots of airspace between the brass case walls and the propellant and reduced the effects of external super-heating in the African sun. When loaded for magazine rifles the really heavy hitters have to use tubular powders with heavily compressed charges with full power loadings to avoid recoil driving bullets back into the case for the unused rounds held in the magazine.

AFAIK only the British empire used Cordite as we know it - ie bundles of near case-length sticks or rods. Everybody else used chopped or cut powders, ie squares cut from thin rolled sheets or the extruded form chopped into short lengths by a spinning blade attached to the extruder. Ball powders date later from the 1930s when they were developed by Olin's Winchester-Western division whose production methodology was heavily patent-protected. Extruded / chopped etc were obviously much easier to mechanically meter and machine-charge cases compared to manually handled Cordite bundles. I can't imagine how many women were employed in British ammunition factories to create the bundles and charge cases with them manually especially during WW2. (Health & Safety must have been tricky too - nasty stuff in all sorts of ways to be handled for 40-plus hours per week!) Other people used very high nitroglycerin percentages in the mix too just like pre Mk VII 303 Cordite, but also like us learned how quickly they wore barrels. By WW2, the then current Cordite was nevertheless still much higher in nitro-glycerine compared to others, and the Americans had by then moved onto single-based grades typified by the surviving IMR grades such as 3031, 4064 and 4895.
 
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