M1 Garand KB: be careful when reloading.
Here's what was a nice M1 rifle after firing a single round reloaded with a fast burning pistol powder. The shooter walked away unharmed, though the rifle turned into little bits of wood and metal. I believe the load involved was a 150 Grain FMJ, with about 45 grains of a flake style pistol powder, I can probably find out exactly which powder if anyone cares, but in all honesty, 40 grains of ANY pistol powder should produce the same results.
I've posted the rest of the photoset here:
posted by Bob at
3:32:00 PM
2 Comments:
yikes!!
By
NotClauswitz, at 1:29 PM
*Just for the record, I was neither the shooter, nor the reloader, or even present when the rifle let go, but I have handled the remains of the gun in person. I've had one person already ask if I was OK, and I thought I should clearify that I wasn't personally involved.
As a tangent, I don't have a copy of Hatcher's Notebook with me, but from memory, he got up over 100,000 CUP before cracking lugs on M1's, so a pistol powder load has to be something like 5X normal pressure.
Interestingly to me, unlike a reload that destroys an M1/M14 via a heavy bullet and slow magnum rilfe powder, the op rod wasn't severely damaged or broken. Granted it was a late drawing number NM rod with the safety radius, but it didn't show much damage at all. Which leads me to think that the pistol powder simply detonated, and didn't have high gas pressure in the bore at all, instead spiking momentarilly to something on the order of 250k CUP before the bullet even moved.
By
Bob, at 7:48 PM
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