A SW 317 blows up

An overcharged round seems possible. The working pressure is 24,000 PSI of a nornal round.

The Kaboom was a lot higher pressure.

https://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=601626



Auto loaders can fire out of battery. The brass will separate. Different then the revolver.

Very interesting.

What is most interesting and I find could help think about the scenario is the spent case that was recovered and how it was crumpled inward. It looks like it created a vacuum in the case, could it be that the bullets were seized in the case mouth creating an overpressure, vacuum scenario; thus causing the rim to blow out on the failure case, but on the crumpled case it caused the walls of the case to crumple but still uncork the bullet with the pressure of the explosion in a vacuum scenario.

Then again I'm not sure that makes sense.

The gun didn't "blow up"; a case head ruptured. Isn't it nice that S&W recessed the cylinder on this .22?

Certainly an over pressure round, likely either an overcharge or degraded powder. The fired brass in the next chamber was collapsed by high pressure gas from the head rupture venting up beside it.

And please don't smack ejector rods with mallets, especially when there's a range rod right there on the table!

I don't think it's possible to get enough powder into a 22 LR case to over charge it.

Old smokeless powder can disassociate into base ingredients, essentially turning into a high explosive with much more brisance.

I have seen this happen in several old rounds with damage to guns on occasion (not mine, tho).

Conelrad

PHOTO FROM OP’s LINKED ARTICLE


I have seen cases like this before.
In 1992 I was shooting a High Standard Sentinel Mk IV .22 Magnum revolver using ammo my Mother had sent me with the gun. This gun was my Dad’s before he died. The ammo had been purchased in the mid to late ‘70’s. It was CCI ammunition in the nifty plastic boxes. I remember the Ammo my Dad used to buy for it when I graduated high school in ‘78. MyMom sent me the gun and his remaining ammo after he passed away.

Anyway, I was Arab outdoor shooting area with friends. I had decided tobribg that gun along as I hadn’t shot it since receiving it a few years earlier.
I loaded 9 rounds of the open box of ammunition. On the second round fired there was an extra loud report, more like a boom, and a ball of fire erupted around my right hand burning me and singing all the hair off my hand.
The round in line with the barrel fired and so did the 2 rounds next to it. The round’s bullet next to the fired round was wedged against the frame of the revolver. The second round over had also fired but the projectile exited the cylinder.
Both cases were shriveled up like the one in the photo from the article.
I did not photograph those cases.
The gun was unharmed.
I received first degree burns but no shrapnel.

I have always assumed that, as @Conelrad said above, that the propellant or the primer, or both, had broken down and became unstable.

I will not shoot old rimfire ammo of any make since then.

I did call my Mom afterwards and told her about this. She told me that the ammo had been stored for years in an outdoor storage shed. I have a feeling that temperature and humidity cycling played a big part in the way this ammo reacted. I took the rest of the Ammo she sent me to the police station near me for disposal AFTER laying the ammo out on a board, spray painting it red, allowing it to dry, reboxing it and marking the boxes up with a warning not to shoot.

The author’s experience reflects my own. Glad he wasn’t hurt worse.

I wonder if a few extra drops of the priming compound would produce excess pressure?

GEM- very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Judging by the pics shown, and the explanation, I don't see how the S&W revolver "blew up". It was simply a bad round. Can anyone imagine how an S+W could destroy itself under the force of a bad .22LR?

How can anyone speculate what powder was loaded in that specific brand of 22 ammo.

As mentioned above it could have been loaded with black powder (common in older 22 ammo) or overcharged with smokeless powder.

On a coupe of other forums there are posts along these line where 22 cases have case separations. In the last decade or so with increased production rates and less quality control "promo" ammo has way too many "dudes" and head separations!

Personally I had a head separation shooting Remington Golden Bullets. It felt like and sounded like a 9mm! The head was completely blown off. Several other posters had experienced similar kabooms with RGB's!

Regards,

looks like powder deterioration caused high pressure, the headcase blew out, and due to the recessed cylinder, vented the gas into the next cylinder by the blowout, crushing the empty case. Powder deterioration related explosions are well known, and scientifically re-creatable. The gas path for the blowout leads direly to the next chamber. Thats all I can conclude.

Some 22s are rumored to be loaded with a mixture of black powder and smokeless powder. Seems a terrible idea where the corrosive black powder would degrade the nitrocellulose and potentially create a tiny little bomb just waiting to go into a firearm.

317 guns are the scandium alloy if I recall correctly. Seems that metal would take damage such as what was shown if it were blasted by uncontrolled burn and case head rupture.

On the ammo... I would have trouble as a shooter taking unknown random ammo and shooting it. Especially so with obscure budget brands that nobody has ever heard of. The proper place for that ammo is in the bottom of a steel burn barrel with newspaper and cardboard on top, or in the creek/pond/lake, maybe even buried somewhere, but not in a gun. Never in a gun. Use decent ammo or don’t shoot.

I agree with a few of the others - powder deterioration seems most likely. It's certainly not outside the realm of possibilities for ammo that old.

Agree with others that say describing the 317 as having "blown up" is misleading. I clicked on the thread expecting to see a completely compromised cylinder or top strap.

For the record, the 317 is aluminum alloy. Not scandium.


I didn't know that very old .22 rimfire could behave this way. Glad to have learned that the easier way rather than the harder way. Thanks for sharing.

tubeshooter said:

I didn't know that very old .22 rimfire could behave this way. Glad to have learned that the easier way rather than the harder way. Thanks for sharing.

Click to expand...

Very old gunpowder CAN do this regardless of what it's loaded in. Powder in general degrades. As to how quickly the degradation occurs, that has to do with how it's stored, what type of powder and very likely whatever manufacturing variations take place lot to lot.

Powder deterioration in centerfires, like old 30-06 military surplus ammo, causes hang fires in my experence. Click/bang.

edwardware said:

The gun didn't "blow up"; a case head ruptured.

Click to expand...

I agree with this analysis. I've had it happen, and that's what it looked like. Mine happened with an all-steel semi-auto shooting 22 mag. The explosion went down into the mag well, blew the magazine out the bottom, and gave me some black marks on the heel of my palm. It also welded the ruptured case into the chamber.

In know this is a revolver thread, but back in late 2012 I had a kaboom in my Browning Buckmark. In my case, it was a complete head separation, I don't know if it was a overloaded cartridge or just a defective one, but it buckled the top rail on the Buckmark, blew out the extractor and spring and broke the firing pin retainer block.

This was CCI Blazer ammo, and CCI asked me to send in all the remaining ammo I had and paid for the gun repairs as well in ammo.

Here is a link to the original thread, however, the images are now gone (they were hosted on a server that is long gone). I still have the original images but can't reopen the thread to add them back

https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/my-buckmark-goes-kaboom.692505/

.22lr ammo from 1960 brand no one has heard of storage unknown. Definitely bad ammo. A good reminder not to shoot ancient ammo, especially if it may have been stored improperly.

Once upon a time I bought a crate of Armscor .22 Standard velocity. A wood crate with 10 sealed boxes of 1000 rounds, every round covered with some kind of wax. I'd say that stuff lasted me about 5 years, and other than maybe a dozen or so rounds that failed to ignite, never had any accidents with it. Some of the best and most accurate .22LR ammo I ever had.

I tried some of the new Armscor ammo, and it's not the same as the old stuff

Dudemeister said:

...I tried some of the new Armscor ammo, and it's not the same as the old stuff

Click to expand...

It was Armscor that blew up on me.

I had a .22 LR case separation in my Mk II Govt. Target. I had no idea the case separated, and I got a jam and couldn’t get it to load another round. Only when I got home and took the gun down did I see the cartridge case was stuck in the chamber. It took a super-tight patch-jag combo to pop that case out of the chamber.



My second case head failure experience happened a couple years ago. My son was shooting my Henry .22 Mag, and one older CCI Maxi-mag round had a case head blow out when he fired.

The photo is a screenshot from the video I was shooting when it happened. It shows a shower of burning powder particles that blew back out of the action when the case failed, peppering his face and arms. Some are streaking towards the LC9 laying on the counter to his right. If you look closely you can see where they’ve impacted on the gun and the mat, making little splashes of sparks like a series of machine-cannon rounds from a Warthog!.

Thank goodness for eye protection!



Always wear ears and eyes, you never know what may go wrong.

Stay safe.

"Always wear ears and eyes, you never know what may go wrong."
Absolutely, positively, the best advice, ever!

That ammo brand was Tru Value hardware stores house brand, I may have shot some in my youth but it's difficult to remember all the specific brands of .22 RF ammo that I, my brother, and our cousins all shot up other than Winchester Wildcat my dad bought by the brick for us at Woolco at this point.

Some internet searching I did seeing this thread indicates some of this brand, with different colors on the box, was loaded by Dominion in Canada. The red box clearly says Made in USA (from back when that meant Made in USA) so not a Dominion product no telling who actually manufactured it at this point I'd say.