Dudemeister
Member
This weekend I was visiting my Brother in law, and while there I went to the range to fire off a few rounds. I was shooting my trusty '90 Buckmark.
On the last magazine of a 4 box set, it went Bang, Bang, Bang, Kaboom! It was such a shock, I didn't even bother to check if all my fingers were still attached. I never expected to have a kaboom from a .22LR, much less my Buckmark, which had gone well over 15K rounds without a hitch for the past 20+ years.
The gun is mostly stock except for a Picatinny top rail with Williams FireSights. I had been using a Micro -Reflex sight, but at the time it was off, as I seem to do much better without it anyway.
After recovering from my initial shock, I inspected the gun: the top rail had buckled upwards, and the extractor and it's spring/plunger were gone. on it's way back, the slide tried to feed a new round in, but couldn't, so it was jammed at an angle. When I took the magazine out, a flattened head of a case fell out as well.
I turns out the round that went kaboom had blown it's head completely off, leaving the case body inside the breech. My first thought was that the previous round had not cleared the barrel, and when the next one was fired it all went to hell, but upon inspection, the barrel was clear. When I went home, I extracted the casing quite easily using a metal pick. Inspection of the barrel using a watchmaker's 10x loupe doesn't show any visible barrel damage. I would have thought that any kind of doubled up shot would show some kind of damage/distortion inside the barrel, but I can't see anything, so at the moment, I'm not sure that my original theory stands.
What could have caused this? Has anyone else come across a similar experience?
I plan on buying the extractor parts and a new rail to repair it. Should I worry about the integrity of the gun?
On the last magazine of a 4 box set, it went Bang, Bang, Bang, Kaboom! It was such a shock, I didn't even bother to check if all my fingers were still attached. I never expected to have a kaboom from a .22LR, much less my Buckmark, which had gone well over 15K rounds without a hitch for the past 20+ years.
The gun is mostly stock except for a Picatinny top rail with Williams FireSights. I had been using a Micro -Reflex sight, but at the time it was off, as I seem to do much better without it anyway.
After recovering from my initial shock, I inspected the gun: the top rail had buckled upwards, and the extractor and it's spring/plunger were gone. on it's way back, the slide tried to feed a new round in, but couldn't, so it was jammed at an angle. When I took the magazine out, a flattened head of a case fell out as well.
I turns out the round that went kaboom had blown it's head completely off, leaving the case body inside the breech. My first thought was that the previous round had not cleared the barrel, and when the next one was fired it all went to hell, but upon inspection, the barrel was clear. When I went home, I extracted the casing quite easily using a metal pick. Inspection of the barrel using a watchmaker's 10x loupe doesn't show any visible barrel damage. I would have thought that any kind of doubled up shot would show some kind of damage/distortion inside the barrel, but I can't see anything, so at the moment, I'm not sure that my original theory stands.
What could have caused this? Has anyone else come across a similar experience?
I plan on buying the extractor parts and a new rail to repair it. Should I worry about the integrity of the gun?
