heavy charges damaging barrels?

[zimmerstutzen]

For all our technological progress, mankind still does some pretty stupid things. It is amazing how the Popeye syndrome still pervades in some circles. i.e. if a little powder is good more must be better and a lot more must be a lot better.

 

[Stony]

ff WARNING ff Back when I was in college, I had a part time job in a local gun store. There was a Chicago coroner (?) who stopped in every now and then to use the gun range. He once brought in some pictures and a story about a shooting that happened. A drug dealer was shot twice. A police car had just passed the guy standing in the middle of the block when at the end of the block, the officers heard two shots. They looked back and saw him crumpled on the sidewalk. They went back and found him dead with two bullets in his chest. Searching the area, on the other side of a iron rail fence they found a .38 with two shots fired but no clues how the gun got there. Later it was figured out that when the dealer first saw the squad car, he tossed his gun over the fence. After the car passed he was able to grab the barrel and pull the gun towards him. A stick somehow got into the trigger guard and prevented the gun from being pulled through. He jerked the gun, probably thinking the stick would break but instead fired the gun, jerking from the impact of the first bullet, he jerked the gun hard enough to fire a second bullet. The idiot killed himself. The lesson, NEVER point or cause a loaded gun to "aimed" at yourself.

 

[hoochiepapa]

...or anyone else!

 

[zimmerstutzen]

A few years ago, near Harrisburg PA, a woman dressed and in a hurry for church, grabbed the muzzle of her hubby's flinter to pull it out of the car. she died as a result. Whether he dumped the prime and perhaps some additional powder trickled out the touch hole will never be known.

 

[Rifleman1776]

You are right, of course.
OTOH, those people did find a cure for stupid.
As for the drug dealer shooting himself. Another way to avoid that would be to not be a druggie. :shocked2:

 

[Pacobillie]

ff WARNING ff Back when I was in college, I had a part time job in a local gun store. There was a Chicago coroner (?) who stopped in every now and then to use the gun range. He once brought in some pictures and a story about a shooting that happened. A drug dealer was shot twice. A police car had just passed the guy standing in the middle of the block when at the end of the block, the officers heard two shots. They looked back and saw him crumpled on the sidewalk. They went back and found him dead with two bullets in his chest. Searching the area, on the other side of a iron rail fence they found a .38 with two shots fired but no clues how the gun got there. Later it was figured out that when the dealer first saw the squad car, he tossed his gun over the fence. After the car passed he was able to grab the barrel and pull the gun towards him. A stick somehow got into the trigger guard and prevented the gun from being pulled through. He jerked the gun, probably thinking the stick would break but instead fired the gun, jerking from the impact of the first bullet, he jerked the gun hard enough to fire a second bullet. The idiot killed himself. The lesson, NEVER point or cause a loaded gun to "aimed" at yourself.

Sounds like one of those guys that end up getting a Darwin award. Post mortem, of course!

 

[Matt85]

eep i come to see my threads been hijacked. what does people accidently shooting themselves have to do with the min/max powder load ranges given by factories?

im not trying to work up a load at the moment and i have no concerns on my current loads. im just curious what sets the max loads that factories put on their barrels. why set it at 80 grains or why set it at 100, has any one seen damage cause by exceeding these? (example: factory max is 100 gr and guy uses 120 grains, will his gun have problems overtime?)

im not talking about doing something silly like 200 grains of 3F with 3 balls stacked ontop of each other.

-matt

 

[silly goose]

If someone goes through the trouble to design a gun and test it, and then give out recommended info for it, I'm not gonna be the one to push it. Everything has a lifespan, and abuse will tend to shorten it considerably.

I am not interested in the term "magnum" when it comes to black powder, but that's only my opinion.

Imagine, "I just got me a new .50 cal Lancaster Magnum", just don't sound right. :idunno:

 

[Vaino]

Heavy, maximum and excessive charges all describe possible charges that could be loaded into a MLer and all are indefinite descriptions. Whether it be the manufacturers' recommendations, data in a BP manual or what an individual decides what his load will be....it's still depends on the individual to load his MLer safely. Modern BP bbls are made from various steels and all have quite a "safety factor"...until abused w/ smokeless powder or multiple PRBs ahead of excessive charges of BP.

My .54 cal. Hawken's PRB elk load is 120 grs of 3f and besides performing well on elk and being very accurate, it's a safe load in this rifle. Have shot a lot of these loads in this rifle w/o any problems whatsoever.

A limiting factor whether "heavy" loads are used is the recoil....some are very sensitive to "kick" and load accordingly and therefore might consider the "big loads" as unsafe.....Fred

 

[Bear Rider]

One of the serious problems I read about some years ago in early "reproduction" muzzle loading barrel construction was the use of cold rolled and certain leaded steel. They were brittle from the beginning and quite a few came apart with even regular loads. Many of the same steels when hot rolled were perfectly safe. I think 11L14 was one of the bad alloys that came to light were as the 1114,1117 ,1030 and several other common barrel alloys were fine when hot rolled instead of cold rolled. MD

I remember when that issue first surfaced, back in the 80's, IIRC. I caught a lot of flak for agreeing with those articles. It was particularly annoying because my college minor was metallurgy, while most of those jacking their jaws at me wouldn't know a eutectic if it bit them and thought that a phase diagram was something that you saw on Star Trek.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

About 20 years ago, Muzzle Blasts contained an account of a gent who decided that some pretty fireworks were in order. He loaded his flint lock pistol barrel, full to the muzzle with powder with no ball, raised it up high overhead and cut loose. As the smoke was clearing, he still had a trigger guard wrapped around his mutilated trigger finger. A few splinters in the palm and the rest of the gun was gone.

I simply have no plans to test or verify the story. That a reputable shooter reported having witnessed it is sufficient for me.

 

[Stony]

I'm sorry Matt, wasn't trying to hijack your thread (which is why I put the off topic warning at the front of my post.) When I first started shooting muzzleloaders, I was told I couldn't over load the gun as any extra powder would just "blow out of the barrel" and I'd just be wasting powder. And I'd be knocked on my butt before I'd get that far. In fact, over loading can be dangerous. And yes, makers tend to give lower loadings as max because people have changed. It use to be if you goofed up, you only really had yourself to blame. Now if someone didn't warn you about a common sense no-no, it's their fault for not telling you, not your fault cause you have no common sense. As someone pointed out McDonald's MUST label all coffee as hot, that only cost them about a million dollars to find that out.

 

[Dphar]

One of the serious problems I read about some years ago in early "reproduction" muzzle loading barrel construction was the use of cold rolled and certain leaded steel. They were brittle from the beginning and quite a few came apart with even regular loads. Many of the same steels when hot rolled were perfectly safe. I think 11L14 was one of the bad alloys that came to light were as the 1114,1117 ,1030 and several other common barrel alloys were fine when hot rolled instead of cold rolled. MD

I like to post this now and then.
Its letter that was printed in the "Buckskin Report" back in the 80s during a discussion of barrel steels brought about by a metallurgist writing about tough and brittle steel gun barrels.

The discussion was specifically ML barrels.
I am not a metallurgist. But I know enough to realize that if a metallurgist interested in guns and a STEEL MAKER both agree that possibly I might want to pay attention.
Given the pressures that BP is capable of making a barrel should not fail even with a short started ball if the barrel is made of a tough steel. So when you see someone pointing out that the ML barrel failed, slit or fragmented, due to a bore obstruction I contend that is should not have done more than bulge.
There are brittle steels in use in modern firearms, invariably 416 or a simlar stainless. The use of this stuff has resulted in numerous failures and at least one recall. The real shocker is that 1911 45 ACP barrels have failed. In this case the unsupported brass cartridge case base is the weak point. But some stainless barrels failed even though the standard barrel design has a "waste gate" that should have failed long before the barrel.
Dan