Ned's pictures are worth much wore than 1,000 words ... very instructive
Ned's pictures are worth much wore than 1,000 words ... very instructive
Thanks for the cut away pics NED it does clearly show that a OOB cant happen.
Bad ammo most surely had to be the cause. IMHO
I am sure that someone can correct me if I am wrong. The only time that I have seen a real out of battery incident is on weapons systems like the .50 cal because they actually have an adjustable headspace that has to be set everytime and the fact that the breech simply slams forward and there are no locking lugs per se.
This is why it is absolutely IMPERATIVE to set and check the headspace. I was involved or privy to a few incidents that occurred. In one case a person received minor shrapnel wounds when the pieces of the casing struck them after firing a weapon that wasn't headspaced. One of the other incidents the barrel was launched into the deep blue and was never recovered.
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Ned, what Can I say man, thank you for posting those pictures.
Straight from the "horses mouth"
So, OOB is ruled out, head space was ruled out, the initial diagnosis of bad brase/case failure is still front running.
Derek - back to basics for a minute - if you look through your empties and the remainder of the 'new' case of ammo - are all of the headstamps the same? If not are they all at least Federal cases?
Good to see you weren't hurt.
Good luck on this one and thanks for sharing.
Last edited by Mo_Zam_Beek; 04-28-09 at 11:31.
I agree (oob unlikely).
The only way I know of that an out of battery firing can happen, other than, say, a foreign object on the bolt face firing the primer, is if the bolt carrier bounces after the firing pin has done its duty-- only an issue on full auto. I'm not going to say it's impossible on a semi-auto gun-- one that's been diddled with as mentioned above or one that's just plain malfunctioning. Hammer follows bolt, fires the round as the bolt is bouncing, pressure has not dropped, carrier bounces enough to unlock bolt..... theoretically and mechanically not impossible I guess but that was pretty much addressed in the early '60's with the buffer as a bounce inhibitor.
Given a combo the wrong buffer, say one of the old Mom-and-Pop's Bufferama imitations with no stack of weights and rubber discs, an extra-strong buffer spring (or would it be extra light?), a heavy barrel for the carrier to bounce off of, a malfunctioning semi FCG where the hammer is following the bolt, soft primers that can react to the reduced hammer blow delivered under these conditions, and let's say we've dropped a round in the chamber and then dropped the bolt on it, so there's no stripping of a round from the mag to retard things just a tad........... I'm probably never gonna say an out of battery firing can't happen. But I have definitely not seen it all yet...... and these are only my opinions.
Going by what I see here it's not what happened. The sectioned barrel is chamfered/radiused as per normal and had 10K-plus rounds through it, no blowouts. To me it appears that Derek's case was in a chamber with about the same radius.
Feel free to use the images.
Last edited by Ned Christiansen; 04-28-09 at 13:43.
Excellent photos, Mr. Christianson, but I still believe there is something going on with his gun, as this cartridge would have been over proof load pressure to have blown like it did. And with a commercial cartridge with cannister grade powder, even a full case full, I don't believe would have been catastrophic like this.
Now, if they WERE really reloads, and had the wrong powder in them, it would be a different story.
I was wrong once when I was younger, but still not convinced.
That measurement would still be interesting.
Most commercial ammo I've ever shot had enough additional case capacity that I could actually shake the round and hear the powder charge.
If a commercial load was loaded to the point where the the bullet was compressing the load, I could easily see there being enough pressure to do this.
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