Rifle Blowups

M

murphy

Guest
Recently I become involved in a discussion on the Factory and hybrid rifles forum, on the subject of a rifle which I "blew up". Some folks seemed a bit disappointed that it did not explode like a hand grenade, but merely expanded the shells primer pocket to about twice its normal size and showered me in escaping gas, burned the bolt face and destroyed the extractor. I know a lot of gunsmiths and very experienced people read this forum and my question is, has any one ever seen or heard of a non military bolt action rifle made after about 1950 behaving a lot worse than mine did. My rifle was a Marlin MR7 with the three rings of steel concept very similar to e Remington 700.:eek:
 
Sure, I v seen stocks blown to bits, floor plates blown off of stocks. Extractors blown off of bolts. Shooter get a face full of metal form primers and poorly design gas systems that direct gas back to the shooters face.


Every one of these with factory made main stream rifles. All of the one I've seen has been with factory loaded ammo.

Other than a couple of dozen or so rifle I've seen in something like 40+ years, I guess that's not many.:D
 
Sure, there have been several posted on this site.....the latest I recall was a Sako....do a search. Have personally seen a Howa that exploded and it's hard to believe that a person can escape injury from such an event.
 
Thanks Fellers

I didn't even blow the floor plate off mine so I guess it was just a pipsqueak.:D
 
Defective cartridge brass was a major cause of blow ups of the low number Springfield receivers.
The too soft cases would split and escaping gas filled the receiver ring while the remains of the case head sealed it in momentarily. Those receivers didn't have a gas escape port, which was retro fitted later on when rifles were brought in for maintenance.

A Enfield type Indian 2A rifle blew out its magazine some time ago. I read of this in a reproduced Email from a gun dealer explaining why he no longer sold these rifles. The magazine impacted the shooter's family jewels and surgery was required.

These were of course Military rifles manufactured long ago.

Action failures are extremely rare, gun makers long ago learned that confidence in the product was a necessity if you expected to remain in business.
Commercial sporting ammunition is often loaded to higher pressures than Military Ball ammo intended for use in infantry rifles. Its expected that a military rifle might be fired hundreds and even thousands of times between detail cleanings, so the mil spec ammo is designed to make allowances for bores heavily fouled under conditions where effective cleaning could not be done.
In earlier days military bullets were often several thousandths undersized and rifling grooves cut very deep to allow continued use with a thick metal fouling build up while maintaining an acceptable level of accuracy.

When we get into the sporting rifle compared to the military rifle there are a few basic differences in design philosophy.
Sporter chambers are generally cut to tighter specs, since in the US at least hand loading has been fairly common since the first reloadable cases came along more than a century ago.
To some extent this was also taken into account with US military rifles, since before WW2 reloaded ammunition was used in training machine gunners, both here and in most of Europe. Hiram Maxim wrote of salvaging and reloading cases for MGs being a punishment detail in some European armies.
Freshly manufactured ammo would be reserved for combat.
Any jams or separated cases of reloaded ammo was useful in training gunners to deal with such problems quickly in the field.

I've noted a tendency on some forums to downplay certain potential problems in hand loading or the too often poorly manufactured milsurp ammunition available these days.
Such anomalies as the American Rifleman reports on a 6.5 Jap rifle rechambered to .30/06 which was able to fire a few rounds without blowing up is often repeated to give the impression that oversized bullets can't produce an unsafe load situation.
These ignore the fact that if a bullet only a few thousandths oversized are loaded in a standard case and chamber the case neck may not have room to expand properly to release the bullet.
This is exacerbated by bullet upset on ignition. The bullet is already expanding in diameter slightly before leaving the case neck. Some accidents were reported when Italian surplus 6.5 bullets of .268 dia were used in reloads for the more common 6.5 chamberings which used .264 bullets.
A loosely cut military chamber could usually handle the .004 difference, but sporting rifles with tightly cut commercial chambers showed excessive pressures.
I don't know much about these incidents, I've not been much interested in the 6.5 rifles. I just remember reading of this sort of problem years ago when large quantities of cheap pull down .268 bullets were available for awhile.

Use of oversized bullets can be beneficial in restoring accuracy, but factors of chamber neck dia and case neck thickness must be taken into account.

There are antique rifles, both military and commercial, that are plenty safe with ammunition loaded to the pressure levels of the time they were produced, but not necessarily safe with some ammunition loaded to pressures considered safe with more modern designs.
An extreme example would be the Winchester Model 1895 rifle in .30/06 caliber.
That rifle was safe as houses when the only available ammunition in .30/06 was loaded to WW1 era pressure levels, but a few short years later Model 95 rifles began to shoot loose when pressure levels went up by only a few percent.
The rifle has been reproduced in recent years, and I suppose that the new production rifles take advantage of improved metalurgy. Still I'd rather have one of these rifles in .30-40 or .303 British than in .30/06.

British No.4 rifle actions converted to 7.62 NATO have been the subject of some controversy, including recent British NRA warnings against use of ammunition that uses a bullet weighing more than 144 grains. When these conversions were first made the 7.62 NATO ball ammunition generated pressures little higher than the old MkVIIIZ .303 machinegun loads, but in more recent times special purpose 7.62X51 loadings such as M118 Long Range Special Ball have been loaded to pressures far higher than that of standard ball ammo. The converted rifles were never intended for loads that generate such high pressures and were not proof tested with such pressure levels in mind.
To make the matter more confusing equivalent heavy bullet loadings of .303 to the same velocity and energy levels will generally produce lower chamber pressures than the .308/7.62X51.
The limited OAL of the NATO cartridge means that longer heavier bullets must be seated further back into the case reducing effective case capacity.
This is something to keep in mind when loading longer heavy bullets in other short case chamberings as well.

All in all I'd much rather handload for any centerfire rifle than to trust the ammunition manufacturer to keep pressure levels within safe limitations for every individual rifle chambered for their product. This is especially true in recent years when theres no way of knowing just where the components used to assemble some imported ammunition may have come from.
 
Catastrophic Failure

At Carters Country, in Houston, they have a Rifle hanging above the sales counter that is definetely "blown up", I can't remember exactly what the circustances were, but I think a shooter managed to load a 308 into a 25-06, or something like that.

I am going to do a search and see if I can find PO Ackleys originol test in loading military actions to destruction. I can remember reading it when I was a kid. It took more than most would think.......jackie
 
jackie schmidt said:
At Carters Country, in Houston, they have a Rifle hanging above the sales counter that is definetely "blown up", I can't remember exactly what the circustances were, but I think a shooter managed to load a 308 into a 25-06, or something like that.
Click to expand...
In hatchers Notebook there is a list of known blow up incidents of low number Springfields and a few other rifles. Mix ups where a 7.92 Mauser cartridge was fired in a .30/06 chamber accounted for several such accidents.

I am going to do a search and see if I can find PO Ackleys originol test in loading military actions to destruction. I can remember reading it when I was a kid. It took more than most would think.......jackie
Click to expand...
It generally required pressures of over 85,000 PSI to blow up a military action in good condition, and even higher if the cartridge case was of the type used for high pressure proof testing loads. Loads in specially constructed cases that would hold up to 120,000+ PSI were used in a torture test of the Garand action. The Receiver itself never failed a bolt was damaged though.

I've read of an Arisaka action with bore plugged by a welded in steel rod holding up with the barrel stretching out and snapping off. That was probably one of Ackley's tests.

In Hatchers Notebook he tells of a 7.7 Jap rifle being fired with .35 Remington cartridges by a couple of youngsters. They had to beat the action closed with a mallet.
The rifle held up to three shots, with the fourth shot destroying the action and sending fragments into the young shooter's brain. He survived his foolishness, though barely.

I've been thinking of the story of the 6.5 rifle rechambered to .30/06.
If the bore was oversized as the bores of many Jap rifles were, and the bore was significantly worn, the rifle may have acted much like the squeeze bore rifles that were experimented with at one time.
The squeeze bore principle worked with some sucess with high velocity anti-tank guns, but wasn't practicable for rifles. Very few sporting rifles of this type were made.
In practice a bullet fired down a tapered bore presents an ever smaller base for the propellant gases to push against during bullet travel.
Before well regulated propellants were developed this allowed ultra high velocities from relatively short barrels while keeping chamber pressures within limits.
 
Words Fail Me

Think I wiil go and do some dry firing, to get rid of my flinch.:eek:
 
I was at the range one day when a close friend of mine arrived to sight in his 25/06 AI. He thought he had a max load of 61 grains of 4831 behind a 100 grain bullet. His sons had helped him load the ammo and it had 61 grains of 4198 that he had been using for his 222. No one really hurt but all the gunsmith could salvage from the almost new custom rifle with a FN mauser action was the trigger and the sling. It was really loud and the bullet did not reach the target at 50 feet.

I would hate to post the guy's name here. He is still alive, a little jumpy, but has not shot in years as far as I know.

Concho Bill
 
On The Subject Of Foolishness.

Remember an incident a while back at my then local range at Belmont Australia. A guy fired his 220 Swift with a cleaning rod still stuck up the barrel, From all accounts he walked away from it but I think his cleaning rod would have been cactus!:D
 
Several postings have discussed failures in Springfields.

A great source of info is Crossman's Book of the Springfield.

A number of different steels were used in the manufacture of Springfields over the history of this rifle. The earliest Springfields -- first few thousand -- were actually unsafe.

Some of the case hardening in the first years of manufacture was improperly done, perhaps with the temperatures wrong.

The late number Springfields were made with nickel steel, which makes them quite strong and quite safe.

=======

As for the blown up guns, I suspect that a common culprit in handguns is the "double charge." I load .44 Magnum ammo using a light charge of Red Dot behind cast bullets. This particular load scares the heck out of me. The charge only fills about 20 pct of the case. It would be so easy to double charge and not see it. Even a visual inspection would not necessarily flag it, esp if the reloader was in a hurry.

Most rifle cartridges cannot be double charged because a normal charge fills so much of the case. A double charge attempt would just spill powder all over the reloading bench. Light loads may pose the greatest danger.

I am also wary of loading batches of rifle ammo with no check on the throw of your powder measure. Bridging can occur, especially with the longer "stick" powders. I throw a few tenths light, and use a trickler to complete the charge. But for those shooting hundreds of rounds a weekend, I can understand that this would be too slow.

Interesting thread.
 
I agree, good and informative thread,


A very well known Benchrest shooter was killed when his gun blew up because of a powder mixup. Even the teeny-weeny PPC is a bomb when too-fast powder is loaded.

Another bowup occurred within the last year when Dennis Tinkham forgot a knocker rod in his PPC. Tink is the guy "shooting with mirrors" now.

I soooo agree about the pistol powder. My 44mags just frighten me. I keep wanting to make up a "plug" of a wooden dowel mebbeso .400 diameter hoping this could be used to find a double charge.

I'm currently using H4350 for one of my rifles. This stuff bridges like crazy! With my measure grounded I've had charges hang up to short one load 10gr and add 10gr to the next charge...... spooky stuff.

I now weigh EVERY charge unless I'm using ball powder or shortcut stick..

be careful out there


al
 
I recommend the powder check die from Dillon. The powder check die is and easy check for proper battery charge. Like all things mechanical, charging cases is doomed to failure. The powder check die is cheap insurance. :D
 
I also had a old friend that lew up his 17 classic 3 times.
Just like you described
He would get a drinking then load up some shells.
One time he put 5 grs to much powder in this 17 remington.
The other times he was loaded hot and seating the bullets into the lands.
Has a problem readig the scale or something like that he said.
His name was also Murphy.
Maybe it is just Murphy's law.
 
Montana Pete said:
Several postings have discussed failures in Springfields.

As for the blown up guns, I suspect that a common culprit in handguns is the "double charge." I load .44 Magnum ammo using a light charge of Red Dot behind cast bullets. This particular load scares the heck out of me. The charge only fills about 20 pct of the case. It would be so easy to double charge and not see it. Even a visual inspection would not necessarily flag it, esp if the reloader was in a hurry.

Most rifle cartridges cannot be double charged because a normal charge fills so much of the case. A double charge attempt would just spill powder all over the reloading bench. Light loads may pose the greatest danger.

Interesting thread.
Click to expand...

Precisely the reason for 'Trail Boss' great stuff, just don't squeeze it.

D R
 
The culprit seems to have been overheating of the steel during the drop forging process, the steel already being compromised before final heat treatment.
Workmen were eyeballing the color changes to judge when to withdraw the billet, and the temperature range was too critical for this 19th century method.

The problem was far from universal to these early run actions, but at the time no testing procedure existed which could spot the bad actions to weed them out.
If I remember correctly only about 50 or so actions out of 800,000 failed in service and those usually under conditions that would have destroyed most rifles.

Even after a number of actions failed and Ordnance officers asked that the early actions be recalled and replaced with new receivers properly heat treated the bean counters decided that it was worth the risk to leave these in service and replace the rifles on a case by case basis when sent in for overhaul.
The Marines never turned their low number rifles in, they instead added a gas escape port to the receiver ring for added safety.
Few if any of the low number rifles failed specifically due to brittle receivers, other factors caused the failures, but the extent of damage was laid to the brittle steel.
Later rifle subjected to the same abuse might also fail, but in a less spectacular manner, with less danger to the shooter and leaving the receiver in a condition where it might be repairable.

Low number rifles were proofed at 70,000+ psi, but the sort of bore blockages and defective or wrong ammo incidents listed by Hatcher could generate pressures in excess of 100,000 PSI.

Receivers made from the same Ordnance Steel and given the dual heat tretment were among the strongest actions ever made.

I vaguely remember an article on a custom order sporting rifle that failed during a test firing. In this incident the dovetail for a rear sight base had been cut too deep and intersected a frature line that woul otherwise have never caused a problem.
This is why I prefer that rear sights not be secured by screws or dovetails. In general this leaves only receiver sights, though sight bases that are part of a barrel ring mount would also avoid such a possibility.
 
Examples B U's

There's a Savage? on display at the big public range in Salt Lake City. There's bolt gun blown Savage too? at the indoor range display near Palmer Alaska. And like Jackie said there's one at Carters Country in Houston. Once saw a guy at highpwer match in Utah shooting an M14 or M1A1 it was putting up clouds of smoke and he was cursing or mumbling something during the shooting after the relay I walked over to see what was up most of his cases were black and with heads separated how it was extracting I dont know cause some were in two pieces!!! His gun and face were all sooted up too!. I think I still have some of the cases. Scary stuff man! STBE
 
Many years ago, loading .38 cal ammo using Bullseye powder, one of my trainees got hold of a double load. At the fifty yard line, prone, he fired the double load which jolted him severely, blew the wall out of that chamber of the cylinder which in turn blew the top strap out of the frame of his K-38. The gun looked like a convertible with the top half way down and we never did find the missing part of the cylinder. Good thing he was prone. In any other position he might have eaten that piece of the cylinder. :eek:
 
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