I probably had 40 - 50 lbs of spent shells come into the shop last year from different sources. My dad was military trained so always stressed the safe handling of firearms and ammunition from a pretty young age. My experience was that it was a mixed bag of stuff and was quite time consuming to go through it all and do it right. There were live rounds, spent rounds, misfires where the primer had been struck but the powder didn't ignite, water damaged rounds, rounds that had been re-primed but not reloaded, and steel rounds.

I'm not a reloader so i'm not trained to safely dismantle live rounds or rounds with unspent primers. All of those were loaded into a watertight ammo can and filled with water ... then safely disposed of.

Next came the sorting of the steel from the brass.

The mistake i made was throwing the ammo brass in with my regular brass. Got to the scrap yard had to haul it back to the shop. The ammo brass needs to be kept separate and pays a bit less than regular yellow brass an the yard i go to.



Anyhow ... it was all a learning experience. A bit time consuming but that's just the nature of scrapping. Some brass comes easy. Other times ... you really have to work for it.