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Gil,

A friend of mine used to be a serious WBTS artifact collector and once found an unexploded cannonball several feet deep with his high $ metal detector. He got into it somehow and got the blackpowder out, loaded it in his flintlock, and fired it. Said it wasn't black, but Grey in color. Musta been a Confederate cannonball.

SRH

According to info published in Hatcher's Notebook smokeless powder will deteriorate over time. If Black Powder is not exposed to moisture it seems to last forever. Early non-corrosive primers did not have a real long shelf life which is why the Army stayed with the corrosive ones at least throughout WWII. By that point improvements were being made & shortly after that the switch was made, don't recall the exact date offhand.
Fortunately when smokeless does deteriorate it grows weaker, not stronger so the only real danger involved is the possibility of a stuck load, normally a wad in the case of a shotshell.
When firing old load always be aware of this possibility & definitely check the bore if any sounds the least bit abnormal. "SO EASY" to do on a double.

Stan, on the radio last weekend I heard James Dickey's (Deliverance) son, Christopher, being interviewed about his family. He recounted that his uncle, James's brother Tom, was a WBTS relic hunter. He did a documentary about his collecting. Here's a short segment. The segment not shown, but maybe in the program archives, details defusing a shell in Tom's basement. By the time Tom starting pounding on the shell, the camera man and Christopher in a moment of good sense, hauled ass out of the basement and left the camera running on a tripod. Tom's two collector buddies were maimed by an exploding shell while defusing one according to the interview. I remember a few years ago a collector being killed by one up near Rasaca when he attempted to defuse it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWQXodS8oAY

There ya go! What gun did you use?

During the late 70's I shot nothing but shotgun shells stored in a dank basement since the 1930s. Most had lost their markings off the paper hulls. One day I managed to kill a quail with what turned out to be buckshot (a missing head and no other holes were my first clue... I thought I'd just been having a shooting slump prior to that). But they all went "bang"!

My Jules Bury made Louis Christophe 16 SLE. Which is the gun i carry for 90% of my hunting.

I am a one trick pony in that I sold my collection down to a few SLE Christophes and a Greener

I've been using shotgun shells bought 30-40 years ago, stored in cool, dry place, and just opened another good-to-go 700x keg bought 35 years ago. My one-pound red cans of Curtis's and Harvey's black powder are as good as the day I bought them off the shelf 50 years ago.

Never seem to have a had a problem is they have been stored o.k. A couple of years ago I was given a box of World War II Eley airgunner training cartridges. 12 bore with a tracer element. Normally I would have put them away as collector stuff but this lot had been stored badly and the heads were all verdegris and corroded. Out of curiosity I fired them at 25 sporting clays out of an old single. 24 went bang as normal with one failure. At least half still traced as intended and I got 23 kills with only one miss. Quite surprised as I didn't expect much and was just getting rid of them. I have used wartime issue .22rf. stuff and most of that fails with the odd click, then a delay before a bang and then a delay as the bullet strikes low.

A few years ago I bought a case of Hungarian 12 bore 'Nike' tracer cartridges. Great for shooting crows flighting in at dusk. I had three or four boxes left that had been well stored for only a couple of years. I gave a box away and the recipient said they didn't show a tracer. I shot a box and found the things no longer traced as before. Still have the one remaining box left over. No idea what happened to stop them working. The only other odd things were some 10 packs of 16 bore plastic French 'Starlett' cartridges. When I came to handle them the plastic broke up like egg shell. I guess they were of some sort of biodegradable plastic. They had been stored cool and dark. I shot the ones that remained whole and all that came out of the breech end was the brass head. Shot o.k. but totally disintegrated the case. Lagopus.....

I have never had any issues with any Super Double X loads that had the one-piece compression formed hull.

The earlier stuff and even the later 10 ga had a paper basewad and I have had the back of the brass blow completely off some of those.

A little unnerving to say the least.

Will