ohmy! Seeing things like this give me nightmares, and force me to to concentrate more on calibration when I am reloading. Does anyone know what happened?
It was just listed on GB to show off the pic. Here's the description, sorry thought I got it on there first time Customer brought this in today, he had his son make up some reloads and instead of using 5 grains of powder, he used 15 grains. He said that they used W296. The magazine was blown out the bottom of the frame. The frame appears to be salvageable, but he won't know until he gets the slide and barrel off of there. The auction is just to show the photos, the pistol is obviously not for sale.http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=274782579 No one was hurt, but the shooter had to go home and change his shorts.
Wow. That's a pretty big mistake there, 15 grains instead of 5. From what I know of Winchester 296 powder, it is a slow-burning powder optimized for extremely heavy "magnum" loads, and is identical in composition, manufacture and burn rate as Hodgdon H-110 (both -296 and -110 manufactured by Winchester and marketed by Hodgdon). It is inteded for pushing very heavy loads and near maximum pressures. Tripling the load would have first resulted in powder compression in the casing when seating the bullet. Any competent reloader will always check for powder compression when calibrating powder dispensers and bullet seating depth (and overall cartridge length). Obviously, this step was skipped. Must have been quite a brain fart to set 15 gains instead of 5 grains. Malfunction between brain and eyes. This kind of load is on the dangerous scale, as you can see from the "ventillated" handgun. It is the net result of carelessness when loading. It is in the same category of sin as pumping diesel fuel into a gasoline-only car. It can cause serious bodily injury. And it is totally preventable. How sad that a precision-manufactured piece of engineering had to be destroyed by some stupid careless idiot who should be banned from handgunning forever.
