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Electro plating processes will introduce atomic hydrogen into the metal. That is why baking a part after plating is necessary - it drives the hydrogen back out of the part. If the plater does not bake the part, the hydrogen moves to the grain boundaries, and causes a brittle failure. The mechanism is called hydrogen embrittlement. The bubbles are microscopic. Any plater worth paying money too will do this automatically as part of their process. It has been standard for a long time... Billski

I shot it last year - Great Match! Last year they had seven stages with one at serious distances, while the rest were from bad breath range to 50 yards. I had a 1.5-5x and used it above 1.5x only on the distant targets. Know your holdovers. They also used some precision rifle targets - they are half size, so your holdovers are different... One stage had two or three targets over a wall where you could see the target, and get the gun on the target. Trouble was that you could not get the rifle on target while looking through the sights. You could however point and get all A's. They had one stage with five firing ports on one firing position and three mandatory reloads, so I also brought 4 GI 20's and a GI pouch for 20's, just for that stage, and then they allowed us to pick up ejected mags... The only thing I can tell you for sure is to make sure that you study the CoF's and be ready for a challenge. Billski

Fuzzy target and sharp front sight is what you want when you go to shooting with precision. If you really want to learn how to shoot irons with precision, mix some NRA High Power into your cross training for a year. My club has 600 yard Slow Fire Prone practices on Wednesday nights. That will teach you about the sights. Now, if your eyes are old or if you have had cateract surgery (my problem) , your glasses' 'script has to be set up to give you the front sight and let the target go fuzzy. It works great if you can see the target well enough to get the sights on them. For high power, with black targets on buff earth, it works great. Another scheme that helps out is Bob Jones Sights for shooting irons. He makes a diopter that goes into the AR15 rear sight. Use your regular eyewear, look through the aperture, and the front sight is sharp. Pick your diopter based upon results. He also includes several aperture sizes too. When I started shooting practical rifle, I was faced with buff colored targets on a buff colored background (clay and sand here in Michigan), and that gets tough when you can not shift focus to the target during target acquisition. Then somebody puts a no shoot over part of the target, and now where do you put the post? I shoot a scope now for just that reason... Billski

StealthyBlagga, I am with you. The more I look at it, the more I think that it is a Foreign Object. Look out for your competitors... Billski

Soveral thoughts: That part is way too small to be the shell latch, which is somewhere around 3/8" wide and six inches long; The photos are hard to interpret - Is there a of a claw or hook on one end of the part? Look at all of the surfaces and figure out which, if any, look broken. If there is a hook on one end and it is broken on the other, look at the intercepter latch and compare it to the drawings in the manual. If it is broken or looks like it has heavy wear along the long edges, pull the barrel, action bars, and bolt, and then look inside the reciever for something missing. Usually, that takes a bunch or rounds. Billski

I have been shooting the ACTS matches for a year, and I am having fun. We don't enough opportunities to shoot the tactical rifle/carbine in Michigan, so come on out and shoot. Billski

Hmmm. If I was doing short range ammo for those bullet hose stages, I would just shoot it as is and commit to cleaning the bore, chamber, and gas system immediately after each shoot. If corrosive ammo gives you the willies, punch the primers, swage pockets, dunk the cases in lacquer thinner to get most of the sealant, and seat the large rifle primer of your choice. Some battle ammo has bullets of indifferent accuracy, others are quite capable. If you re-use the bullets, a quick dunk in lacquer thinner will get the sealant off. Billski

We have two groups doing monthly (sort of) USPSA Three-Gun and one group doing Tactical Rifle. USPSA Three Gun www.livingstongunclub.org - 2nd Sunday in April, June, July, September, and October - Brighton Michigan. I go to these. Good Club! www.d-s-c.org - 1st Sunday, June to October - Utica Michigan. Tactical Rifle www.actshooters.com - 2nd Saturday of every month, year round - Kalamazoo Michigan. Yeah, we shoot in the snow. This is primarily rifle, with some transitions to pistol. June, September, and October you can do a ACTS on Saturday and USPSA Three-Gun on Sunday. USPSA matches areound here are on Sundays, so you won't be able to pair a USPSA Three-Gun match with a USPSA Pistol match. There are also good IDPA matches on 1st and 2nd Saturdays (http://www.lindensportsmenclub.com and http://www.lcsa.info/Default.asp?width=1024) in SE Michigan to pair your three-gun days with if that suits you. Billski

+1 on not voting because there was no space for regular glasses. In my case, they are impact resistent glasses with good eye coverage, not some of the modern tiny lenses. They don't have side shields, and maybe they should. I have several experiance comments: I have personally aproximately 15,000 rounds using the RCBS or Hornady hand held tool or the Bonanza Co-Ax bench tool. I have loaded several thousand more on my Hornady LNL Progressive. I have decapped several hundred live primers from military cases - these primers were arsenal crimped - with a slow shove of the handle. No primers ever fired accidentally under any of these circumstances; In all types of priming tool, I have occaisionally found myself with the primer stuck when part way into a case and elected to stack additional force to the tool rather than disassemble the tool with the primer caught somewhere. My thought was and continues to be that I would rather that primer fire with the mouth of the case pointed away from my face, my glasses squarely between my eyes and the potential fragments and gloves on my hands than have it fire during disassembly of the tool. I do a slow, progressive squeeze during this operation. No primers have fired under these circumstances either; I spent four and a half years working as a product engineer for Remington Arms. We had a handloading room in the Ilion test lab. We handloaded proof and function rounds for Custom Shop guns that used non-standard ammo, as well as for the 7mm version of the XP100. At Bridgeport we handloaded huge amounts of ammo in support of ammunition product development and testing. These handloading rooms were stocked with catalog items, and we just did not have accidental firings. Between the two job sites, we loaded somewhere around 100,000 rounds during my time with them. My conclusion? Properly done, accidental firing of primers is quite rare. Still, Blindness Is Forever, so I insist upon eye coverage of everyone in my shop when I am loading ammo. Billski

Make no mistake about it - Your gun made BIG pressure, with the evidence being the broken forward ring. Big pressure happens when something is big time wrong. If the case was weakened and failed at nominal pressures, brass particles and propellant gases would have come streaming out of the case, and found their way out of the action via whatever path was easiest. Then you would open the bolt and the empty case most likely would come right out of the chamber. This is because the failed case is an extra way for gases to get out of the gun, so pressures can only get as high as normal, and usually a lot less, when the case fails. Usually the case has to have good integrity to blow the barrel off of the reciever. Herr Mauser put holes for gas to leave his designs and most of his the copiers wisely kept those holes. So those systems do tend to hold up OK when a case splits and dumps gas into the action... Some guns (M16's come to mind) don't have easy paths out of the gun for all of that powder gas. Head seperations and case splits can wreck a reciever, and usually the bolt carrier too. In most M16 blowups, the bolt is still in the barrel extension, the barrel nut is still tight on the nose of the upper reciever, with both of them still firmly clamped around the barrel extension. Swaging the primer pocket should not have substantially weakened the case either. No, my guess is way too much powder, powder not as advertised, obstructed bore, etc. Hmmm, on the topic of obstructed bore, were all of the cases whole after firing? A seperated neck from a previous case might have remained in the bore. Another one is a squib load leaving a round just down the bore. Holes in the paper don't mean that they went downrange individually. At Ilion, the obstructions as well as the last round usually went through the target. Anyway, suspect the amount of powder in each case, the powder, a bore obstruction, and then remember that for future work... Billski

If your military brass is from any of the US arsenals and has a headstamp later than 40 (for 1940) it will not have seen any mercuric priming. US military ammo was using chlorate priming from sometime well before WWII until after WWII, when they went to styphnate priming. Mercuric priming was used by some countries (France among them) into the Korean War period, and I think that they were Berdan type primers too... Most of that stuff dried up in the 1980's, so there is not much chance of getting any of that. Billski

Richard Whiting's offering brass prep, huh? Cool. I took a High Power Class with him a couple years back, and he is a really good guy. If he is doing it, you can bet that it is first rate... Billski

ButchW, WOW! Glad to hear that your are OK. My first job out of college was with Remington Arms in Ilion NY and later in Bridgeport CT. Yeah, doing product engineering on guns and ammo. Damn nearly ruined an excellent hobby too. I have used up about 45 little boxes of primers and match bullets shooting the M1 in High Power too, so I know a little about the .30-'06. Among other things, we did blow up tests with our and competitive rifles. One that was most memorable was a post '64 Win M70. It was 1981. Nobody went around blowing up valuable collector firearms that had been out of production for 17 years. With a couple bullets hammered into the breach end of the bore, and a regular round fired behind it... The front reciever ring broke, the barrel went downrange, the fore-end was broken up. We caught the whole thing on high speed film camera. The barrel looked OK until you mic'd it. The breech end of the barrel was now bigger than it was before it was fired. The case stayed in one piece, expanded with the chamber, and came out of the chamber. I forget what pressures were reached, but it was way up there. The modern M70's support the case pretty well, so they do not tend to blow out when pressures are really high. Your rifle looks pretty similar. The pre '64 M70's had less of the case head supported, so the case could blow out more easily, freeing the case head to come off and limit the pressures a bit, but it still got high enough to swell the barrel and break the forward ring. You had some mighty big pressures, but how I can only guess. Best bet is that the powder charge was high. You don't need a double to blow a rifle. 125% will probably do just fine. Maybe even less. My guess is that 27 g of 2400 in Arsenal brass is probably pretty close to 28 g in civilian brass, and both are about as hot as anyone should ever take this stuff in an '06. Anyway, if you only got a partial load out of the meter on one throw, and the next throw got a full one, plus the partial load that was stuck in the funnel of your meter, well, that will put you firmly into blow up range. And you can easily get 45 g in an '06 round. The other major guess has already been made - it is not 2400 in that can. Personally, I would fertilize some flowers with the remaining 2400. Powder is cheap, guns are pricey, and eyes are irreplaceable. Some other comments. What kind of cleaner did you clean those old cases with? Nothing that has ammonia in it should ever go near cases that you will ever load again. Hoppe's No9 has ammonia, as do just about all bore cleaners. So does urine, glass wax and window cleaners, and many household style brass cleaners. Ammonia causes stress corrosion cracks in strain hardened copper based alloys. The British Army learned about this during the Boer War. Horses and wooden ammo crates in the holds of ships. Everything from pistols to rifles to machinguns to artillery pieces blowing up. The cases split, which is a longitudenal split through the case head, just like you see in a log before splitting it. So, those cases that spent time in cleaner, was that something that might have ammonia in it? Scrap brass if it was... Powder does not usually go KABOOM when it goes bad, but instead looses its poop. If it smells acid or sharp, bad, if it smells like ethanol and acetone, good. If it looks dusty red or brown, bad. If a powder has gone off, it is still great fertilizer for the flowers. There are only two basic ways that the powder could be faster than the it is supposed to be: It has been broken down into a finer powder by some mechanical means; it is not what the label says. My thoughts. With jacketed bullets, use 4895, RL15, etc in .30-'06 Springfield. The cases are then full enough to see haigh and low charges. Charge powder in to a tray of shells, look at them for high and low charges. Load on the soft side. Its OK, the deer can not tell the difference between a 180 grainer at 2500 ft/sec from one at 2700 ft/sec. Geez, and be careful. Billski

I just heard off of AR15.com that Tom died a while back, and that Nikki is making a go of it, so RVO is still providing services. 3000 cases go to RVO via UPS tomorrow. Jeff Bartlett lists no services for processing your own cases, and he don't offer sized/trimmed anyway, so I supect that he is not in that business. Billski

Brass doesn't really age sitting around at house temperatures. If it is clean and bright, load it and shoot it. If it is brown, dusty, or has cobwebs, you could tumble them first to see if they clean up. If they have obvious scabs of green or blue-green corrosion, they are just scrap brass, but that is 16 pounds of scrap brass at non-ferrous metals dealer. I get the impression that it looks OK. It will work fine. Billski

Does anybody here know if River Valley Ordnance still in business? On vacation somewhere? Their website quotes $25/k for processing your 223 casings (cleaned, deprimed, pocket swaged, sized, trimmed, and clean) and states a 2k minimum. Cool. Trouble is the website has not been updated since 2005, the voice mail is full, and no one answers the pages and e-mails. This has been going on for two weeks. So I wonder if they are still in business... Next question is, does anybody else who processes a lot of brass do bulk reprocessing? Billski

If you really can not stand the brown color, put a little jeweler's rouge and a tablespoon of automotive antifreeze in your media. The jeweler's rouge will cut the corrosion, and the anti-corrosion additives in the antifreeze will keep it from re-corroding before it hits the tumbler next time. Billski

+1 on George and bigdawg's comments. Run what you got. Make sure that they run well and you know where they each shoot. I get embarrassed for some folks... Oh, do dry drills on loading and running the gun - match days are too rare to wait until then to practice, If you have big fun, then figure out what you want the rifle and shotgun to be, and do that. Billski

On past threads, I advised people to buy Pat Sweeny's shotgun book. Worth its cost on this installation alone. And then it will help with other stuff too. Even better if your local library has it... Yeah, not the most straightforward thing to install, but now that I have tuned mine, it works great. I also tuned the loading path and it loads easy too. Search this forum and you will find all kinds of stuff on it. Billski

Your mag tube and barrel should be parrallel, both before the clamp is applied and afterwards. Any other result means something is out of whack. If you have one of those stamped sheet metal clamps, you can tighten them too much, bend the arms, and then, yes, they will spread the tube and barrel. Not a good idea at all, I would be concerned that the threads on the end of the basic mag tube would fatigue and fail... I have a machined clamp that won't distort and then push the mag tube around. I actually get concerned about damaging my mag tube on a barricade, so that is why I run the clamp. Nobody around here requires a sling on a shotgun, so I don't run one. When I had an M1907 leather sling on the rifle, I would remove it for stages too. Billski

I am firmly in the "run what ya got" camp until you know that you love this stuff and know what you want to run. You already have a good pistol - you need 32 rounds worth of magazines - run it. If you already have a good shotgun - you need a dozen rounds worth of rounds on your belt or pouch - run it. Beg or borrow a 223 autoloader or M-1 Carbine and run it. A buddy has an M1 Rifle or a G-3 - You need a pouch or two for the amgazines and run it. Advice on playing the game: Know what the range commands mean and what is expected of you for each one. Listen to the RO; Be safe in your gunhandling; Walk these CoF's until you get comfortable; Get your hits, fast misses are meaningless; The saddest thing I see in matches are guns that do not work and shooters that do not know where their guns hit. The next saddest thing I see is shooters that can not hit their targets. So practice. Dry fire including load and unload, reloads, are all good ideas. Live fire practice enough to know that your equipment is reliable and zeroed. Now quit worrying about what you should buy: borrow a rifle, mentally rehearse, practice, and go shoot. You will have fun! Billski

I love rifle only matches - went to the one in NY State in April, and it was great, and I am doing the ACTS matches, which are local to me here in Michigan. Kentucky is doable for me and I am agitating for other folks who want to go to West Point... The NY Match was mostly short stuff on paper, and then they had a long range stage with steel that needed no resets, self setting poppers and strobe steel. Worked great. I could have shot that stage several times... http://www.squaredealipsc.com/ go to their match info page, and they still have stages and scores. Billski

Cool. Anyone from Michigan want to go by small airplane? Billski

Once, about 26 years ago. Full sized Colt 45 ACP and light loads. My first encounter with primers that would not light the powder charge. Some would go bang normally, a few would go "poont" and the eye could follow the bullet to the target, and other times it went click without even moving the bullet. I got used to these three modes, then I got one that squibbed. I responded like it was the dud the others had been, and the next round pushed two bullets. Ringed the barrel, but it still worked afterwards. Now if that had been a serious load, the mag would have been blown out the bottom, the barrel ruined, and perhaps the slide too. Always check for barrel blockage when something is not right... Billski

George, Good stuff! I will be the last guy to say that such and such a load is safe in a particular gun. Pressure signs and groups on paper rule the day. No signs of high pressure and good groups equals an excellent round in that rifle, no matter what a SAAMI test barrel says is going on. Guns vary. I have a rifle that I can not load too much of a suitable powder in, and another that I have to be careful about or it will extrude little buttons of brass in the ejector hole. I was just trying to point out that pressure signs, broken parts, rapidly worn barrels go togther. Lots of experience with this too. Want less broken parts and longer lived barrel? Use a little less powder. And George's experience shows us that Varget and SMK's are apparently pretty easy on barrels too. Lots of people have violated the bit of advice from Sierra about max velocity, and push 69's and 77's fast with accuracy. Maybe Sierra took the hint and made the jacket a little thicker to prevent slump. Or maybe slump does not really matter. That would not be the first time a manufacturer overstated a case. Pressure signs mean that you are being hard on the operating mechanism. No signs, and nothing should break. Getting as many rounds on a barrel and its staying accurate is great. I hope it holds up. I have seen 22-250 barrels that advance the throat so fast that you can never get the load right... Throat length has a lot to do with pressures (and temperatures). A guy I have known for years had bought an AR15 Service Rifle used, as a learning tool. His short line shooting was OK, high 90's, but his 600 yard stuff was weak, and his primers looked like they were fired with no bullet. Then he tried to work up better loads, got his velocities, and they were really low, he could not put enough powder in the cases. Then he tried to check his throat length with a case slit at the neck and an 80 in it, and could not even find the throat. Well, that did it, he bought a new barrel, installed it all, and milled half the old barrel away to expose this long throat. He had a good 1/2" with no rifling. Now I would not recommend his loads to anyone - he had all the 748 he could get in the case and then just barely hold a SMK 80 - but they were safe with that barrel. The previous owner made no statement of the rounds through it. +1 on the advice of light bullets and big charges of slow powder to make the brake work. Heavy bullets and fast powders mean no brake action... Enjoy, Billski