I am resizing the bullets I purchased at Knob Creek back in 2002...yea, its taken me a long time to "circle back to these" (quote from Biden's Psaki mouthpiece). I have a couple hundred tracers and some ball.  The tracers seem to be all burgundy tipped and weigh in at 635-642gr.  There are two different bullet base openingings on these ..one being simply an exposed brownish composite material; the other, having a red plastic looking covering disc in the base.

On function testing my reloads, on a 35 yard range, the exposed base rounds showed no inclination to light while the red disc bottoms lit a bright red about one in five.  I don't know the reason for both seemingly same tracers having different base treatments...exposed composition versus sealed with the disc.

My question for the forum is this...has anyone found a reasonably reliable method of lighting off the old tracers?  
My simple mind went first to adding a couple grains of black powder to the base and glue a piece a paper over it.  Then I considered cutting the end off the "strike anywhere" match head and add a dab of glue to hold it in place.  Then there is the infamous "thermite" (from my high school chemistry days ! ); don't know if ignition would be as reliable as a standard Mg fuse....heck, maybe just cut a piece of Mg and dab it onto the base? I don't know any smokeless powders that would burn hotter than the 5010 I'm using for powder...maybe a couple grams of 844T used for 5.56 tracer?

Worst case, I'll just reload the "open base" tracer as shooting fodder assuming its not going to light.  If anyone has experimented with this before, I'd appreciate hearing about your experience, successes and failures.  The "launcher" for this ammo is an M2HB so the barrel length should be sufficient for any experiment.

Thanks for any information.
Darryl

The reason some of the projectiles have a base closure cap, plastic or metal foil usually, is because the military found out in WW2 that tracers have a shelf life of only about 18 months.  The exposed tracer compound absorbs moisture from the air in the case and goes inert.  Eventually the bullets swell to the point of cracking the case neck, then the bullet itself, assuming the green grundge doesn't start oozing out first ruining everything, powder, primer, case, bullet.  Around the 1950's, they started putting those caps on the base of the bullet, sealing the tracer compound, and shelf life went from 18 months to practically forever.

So the ones without closures are WW2 vintage and probably demilled because they won't light any longer, while the capped ones are 1950's or newer vintage and demilled for some other reason.

Not much you can do to make the tracers work if they aren't capped.  I've never heard about cutting into the exposed (un-capped) tracer compound to improve tracer reliability, so have never tried this myself.  I suppose it's worth a try.

I was told by a licensed ammo reloader (Jerry Hazlett-Amer-I-Can Ammunition) that to get the tracers to reliably light, you needed IMR/stick powder (extruded) rather than WC/ball powder.  The extruded burned hotter.  One other thing he recommended was putting a pin hole in the plastic cap to increase the probability of tracer lightoff from the powder.  Factory didn't do that of course, they're supposed to light on their own, with the cap on, but if you load them with a lighter charge than factory, or use the ball powder rather than the extruded, the opened cap improved reliability.  Opening the cap though, starts the clock running on how long they'll last.  I did some limited testing of this myself and my results pretty much agreed with what he said.  Some will scoff at this, but he loaded tens of thousands of rounds of tracers of all calibers, so who am I to tell him he was wrong?

Your mileage may vary......

Pretty much what everyone else has said - use a hot burning powder. I'm not familiar with IMR 5010. But, you can obtain WC857 in surplus(pull down) from vendors that have it in stock currently. This is the exact powder the military uses to light their M17 tracers with. Not sure if it would work better versus IMR, but may be worth a shot.

I would also add that you should put a good factory crimp on the tracer rounds. This gives it a microsecond or so of extra burn time before the projectile is released from the cartridge. I use a Lee Factory Crimp Die and I like it better than the crappy roll crimp on the seating die.

Definitely get rid of the tracers with exposed compound in the base, or consider them "ball" ammo. They are a lost cause as others have mentioned. I have also heard about the poking/scoring the bottom caps on tracer rounds to improve lighting percentage. But, I'd also be interested in the longevity of said rounds - over a year in storage like that and you have to worry about the rounds swelling and being compromised? Maybe tracer formula has evolved and no longer swells - I have seen many "exposed base" tracers in other calibers and never seen a swollen one after decades of storage. The only thing I notice is corrosion starting to form on the outside of the projectiles.

Lastly, it's interesting you mentioned red plastic plugs on the tracer bases. I have blue plastic plugs on all of mine. I wonder if one is newer than the other? Or, the factory just randomly uses what they have on hand like the random colors of primer sealant Lake City uses!

You may be getting a light with the capped ones already.  Your shooting into a berm at 35 yards if I read that correctly.  Depending on several factors some .50 will not light until 75 yards.  Any idea who the manufacturer is, was?