Bizarre Gun Blow-up

[outerlimits]

today's match some guy's gun has seized. i walk over while guys are working on it, thinking there is a live round in the chamber. it is locked up solid, about 1/4" out of battery. single stack .45. anyway, atfer beating it senseless, we remove the front of the 2-piece guide rod and turn the bushing...real tight. finally get the bushing off. now, it gets weird. about an inch from the bore, i can see copper and assume a squib, followed buy another round. wrong! closer examination shows barrel is cracked at 6 & 12 o'clock. slide ain't moving. more hammers and muscle, beating it out of battery to get the slide stop off, we remove the slide.

now we know there's no live one in the chamber, and peer down the muzzle...guess what i see. case head that says "380" on it. thinking i'm drunk, we all look in amazement. ask owner where he got the ammo...turns out it's a reload. so, the theory was this. somehow, a 380 case got into the 45 case during the reloading process. just enough powder got dropped, then, the bullet seated, crushing the 380 brass into the 45 case. bullet fire with enuf energy to get the bullet most of the way down the barrel, then, shooter must have fired another behind it, causing extreme pressure and expansion in the barrel, which is not permanently attached to the slide. this was bizarre.

[zhunter]

I am just glad everyone is ok!!!

[warpspeed]

Yes - glad no one got hurt.

Has to be a commercial reload right ? Sounds like a 380 case fell into the 45 bucket and the rest is history.

[Jman]

Very lucky it was just gun damage.

Jim M

[boz1911]

Glad everyone's ok. Was it a commercial reload or his own reload?

[DougCarden]

Wow..... Glad everyone is ok......But for the life of me I cannot think of someway that you "wouldnt" know when depriming and resizing that you are crunching through something punching out the primer. Hell, I loose decap pins from freakin corncob media.........It will be interesting to find out.

DougC

[ChuckS]

Glad everyone's ok. Was it a commercial reload or his own reload?

+1. I sort of wonder how the .380 case escaped decapping and got primed...

Edited December 16, 2007 by ChuckS

[41mag]

Wow..... Glad everyone is ok......But for the life of me I cannot think of someway that you "wouldnt" know when depriming and resizing that you are crunching through something punching out the primer. Hell, I loose decap pins from freakin corncob media.........It will be interesting to find out.

DougC

What Doug said. Hard to believe you could do this on a manual press.

I now dump my tumbled brass from the media seperator into a large container where I use compressed air to ferret out and blow away the hiding corn cob. Saves some headache while loading.

41mag

[warpspeed]

The way a commercial reloader does it is different than we do. The Camdex-type machines do not deprime & size brass.

They have a separate line that does the brass - check for splits, resize, decap, ream primer pocket

They then pour this processed brass into a feed hopper and the reloader goes to town. So if that 380 case got mixed in somehow, it would be small enough to get through unlike a 40 or 9x19 case which would not let the bullet seat and cause a badly malformed load.

Some of the newer ones have a "check" that makes sure no loaded ammo or crap get stuck in cases.

Edited December 16, 2007 by warpspeed