Savage ‘Splosion
Published by Ninth Stage December 5th, 2006 in Guns, Reloading, Shooting.Via Say Uncle.
A hunter’s Savage Rifle in .300 Remington Ultra Mag exploded during a hunt. Now he’s suing Savage Arms and the store where he purchased the rifle.
I find it interesting that he hasn’t sued the ammunition manufacturer. This leads me to believe that he was using handloads even though he claims otherwise. This raises all sorts of questions. Did he set the bullets into the lands so that when he unloaded the rifle a bullet remained lodged in the bore? Did he have a squib leave a projectile in the bore? Did he load with an inappropriate (too fast) powder? There is one thing that blows up guns, excessive pressure, there are myriad ways to get it - most of them involve handloads.
Here’s an article about an honest shooter who blew up his gun. The culprit? Excessive pressure (in this case a calculated 107kpsi) in a reload with the wrong powder.
Another article on blown up guns. The common thread, reloads.
There are plenty of comments at Say Uncle’s post and I’ll address a couple of them here: 1.) A double charge is unlikely in a rifle cartridge loaded to normal rifle velocities, the powder would overflow the case if you tried. It is possible to load too much of a given powder or the right amount of the wrong powder. 2.) A barrel obstruction in a high power rifle can easily blow up a rifle. Near the muzzle it bursts the barrel, near the breach it blows up the gun.
UPDATE: More comments at Alphecca.
UPDATE: And more comments at View From the Porch.
I myself have made a KaBoom, using a friend’s borrowed 1050. Was in a hurry, wasn’t familiar with the machine, and obviously wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I had/have loaded literally 100s of thousands of rounds - but on other presses and just should have been doing a better job of paying attention.
Absolutely my fault. I was lucky. Blew a crack in the frame of my pistol, (a custom built 2011 in .40) right behind the mainspring housing - small enough at the time that no one noticed and I was able to finish the Area match without a problem until the last stage when the frame came completely apart and wouldn’t drop mags; otherwise the gun functioned flawlessly. Blew some slivers of brass into both thumbs and felt like someone had hit me damn hard in the palms of my hands with a 2×4.
“Right behind the mainspring housing”, in the polymer grip frame? A friend of mine got a bullet (.38 super STI racegun) jacket stuck in the comp (his story) and the next round split the barrel top and bottom through the hybricomp holes and split the slide top back to the breechface. The steel frame was OK but the polymer was distorted and the guts of the mag was dumped on the ground. He said pretty much the same thing “felt like someone had hit me damn hard in the palms of my hands with a 2×4.”
Knock on wood, I haven’t blown up a pistol . .. but there was that rifle where the case gave way …
Yep. The polymer part of the frame cracked. The metal part of the STI frame held together just fine, as did the bbl and slide. My trigger group (sear/disconnect/leaf spring) had to be replaced slightly ahead of schedule, but that’s about it. Bought a new grip from Jim Shanahan in MO, undercut and reduced and it was back to normal pretty quickly. It did slightly expand the mag tube that was in the gun, but nothing a vise couldn’t fix. Blew the mag out the bottom. I’ve got a neat picture laying around here somewhere that we took off the video that was rolling….
The guys in my squad (some of my bestest buddies) told me that the very next stage, I did all I could to keep the gun as far away from me as possible for the first target array and then figured out the gun would hold together and proceeded as normal…
Cool. I knew Jim Shanahan when he was stationed at Fort Campbell. He used to shoot regularly with us at a few of the local club matches around Tennessee.