Not my gun, but a wicked example of a wrong powder or overcharge situation.



More pics at http://smith-wessonforum.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/530103904/m/1781078561

And I also managed to find a blown Anaconda I saw earlier:

http://iris.nyit.edu/~bithead/anaconda/

A guy I used to buy guns from had Colt Python that looked sort of similar to the Smith posted above he had that over his reloading bench! Not his gun, but he got it cheap as a reminder! I have seen a guy at the range stick a Rem 700 bolt with errant round! Had to be opened with a cheater bar! As long as people reload there will be boo boo's!

OR it could be a low volume detonation....

Just as dangerous...

Low Volume; thats when too little powder is in the cartridge and the powder goes Ka-Boom instead of burns?

Yup....

Rare but with some powders it can happen.

That culprit powder more then likely would be Bullseye!

Ouch!

Yeah OUCH -

the potential for someone to get hurt really bad is certainly there. We follow the recipes in the loading books - the ones published by the POWDER COMPANIES and are free.

When I work out of a book with the data from a Bullet Manufacturer - I cross reference with the powder manufacturer to see if they are even in the same ballpark.

The published Data is really pretty good allbeit conservative.... The only real way to tell is with a chronograph and knowing what to look for with the primers.

We like to sneak up on things slowly - we always start with the most conservative data and work up.

Why is it that a lot of people that reload seem to want to push the bullet as fast and hard as they can.

I think I would rather have something slow and easy on the hand. Probably sub-sonic as crossing the speed of sound twice makes the bullet less accurate and losing the two sonic booms would be nice as well.

The Shooters Version of Speed Freaks! Don't you know speed kills? Most shooters have no clue how fast their reloads go, and they would be surprised if they were to actually chrono the loads! Chrono's are great tools for many things!

Working out drop charts for rifle rounds.
Calculating NRG levels.
Keeping thing sane!

When I first started reloading, I was often surprised at how divergent load manuals could be. I seem to remember a minimum load in Speer 13 was about 0.2gr below the MAX load for the same bullet in a Lyman Pistol manual; of course the Speer load max was much higher than the Lyman max. This kind of freaked me out, but I went with the Speer numbers as they seemed to describe their testing methodology more thoroughly than the Lyman book, as well as mostly using newer PSI numbers and not the old copper crusher numbers.


How accurate is reading primers? Speer 13 shows two cases side by side with identical looking primers and one case was fired well over the max PSI and one well under, their point being "don't try to read primers."


Other than some at-maximum 10mm loads, there's not much percentage in tearing up guns plinking with nuclear loads, so I like to stay somewhere between the middle and the minimum.

I am not going to split hairs.