I have ~1800 rounds of Ecuadorean 8mm with the headstamp "1955/AA" that I picked up a few years ago. The bad news is that only ~1 in 7 rounds goes bang. The good news is that I only paid $0.04/round for the stuff. My plan is to pull it apart, sell the brass to a scrapper (Berdan primed), sell the stripper clips, sort the bullets by weight and reload them into new, Boxer-primed brass with a new primer. I am trying to decide if it is worth attempting to salvage the powder. I have pulled the powder from 10 rounds and the charges weigh 43.24 - 45.44 grains. They average out to 44.66 grains. I was considering reducing the charge by 10% to 40.20 grains and loading up a few rounds to test. Am I crazy to re-use a powder for which I have no formal reloading data for with the new primers? Should I just buy a can of new powder and go with published loads and use the surplus powder to fertilize my tomatoes in the Spring?

I have some of this same ammo, in the future I am going to pull the bullets and save the powder, will reload using the same powder at a reduced charge as the rounds that do go off feel fairly hot. I also have some Ecuadorian 8mm that was made in 1954 and every one of them fires, for some reason the 1955 stuff has bad primers.

Save the powder. When you have all of it pulled, mix it up very well as it might not be from the same lot. This way you are making it one lot. As you are pulling it down, weigh a few and record the amount. Then average it after it is all pulled. If you want, reduce it by a couple of grs to make it shoot a little softer and you will end up with extra to load if you have other bullets for it.

Is this 8MM Mauser? Remember you can form 8MM Mauser  brass from 30-06 brass. not sure if I spelled Mauser correctly sorry.