Dave Rishar
Member
I spent some years as an RSO for Uncle Sam. What did I not see?
Not an explosion, but interesting: one of the gun crews on the ship was having an issue with their M2. As the armorer, I investigated. The gun had timing issues but the crew, not understanding timing, had tried unscrewing the barrel a few turns; as this had helped, they'd kept going. You don't even want to know how jacked up their headspace was by the time it came to my attention. I find it hard to believe that nothing happened. That same gun crew launched a barrel into the Pacific when they forgot to actually screw the thing back in after cleaning and checked the weapon clear - the impulse of the bolt slamming home was enough to send the (loose) barrel flying.
We had another M2 become roadkill due to an errant fork truck. I actually got it sort of working with judicious mallet use, but it required an occasional blow from a hammer. That was beyond my ability to correct and it went back to the depot.
Faulty ammo: I don't know what was going on at Lake City between 2001 and 2005, and maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff. But jeez...9mm with random backward primers, 9mm without primers, and even a can of .50 that contained an inch or two of water and a rusted-up ball of corrosion that had once been ammunition. (We beat it on the deck until the belt started moving and shot it off. Ma Deuce took it, but cleaning the gun up afterward took the better part of an afternoon.)
Now, imagine that you're running a range on shore with new and/or marginal shooters, and you've got 9mm ammo with primer issues. It wasn't fun. We had to reduce the lines considerably so that we could have a line coach on every shooter, basically watching nothing other than the weapons cycling in order to catch squibs. I'm proud to say that we caught every single one. It was nerve-wracking.
You tell the students to mind their hands with the M9 and M14 - fingers and thumbs in the wrong spots are bad. You repeat this lesson. It's not always learned. I had to drive a few students to the clinic for stitches.
But explosions? I saw a M16A3 let go once and we're still not sure what happened there; by all appearances, the cam pin met the bolt carrier and the bolt carrier lost. The result was a split upper, parts in the air, and an ejected and bulged magazine. The shooter was fine.
What happens when a M16A3 is dropped into a drydock? Fortunately, it was returned to us with a report on what had happened. The only thing that I found wrong with it was a broken bolt lug. It probably still would have worked, or it might not have. We never tested it to find out. It went back to Crane.
I had what I guess was a blowback with a M48 Mauser and that '55 ammo before anyone knew about it. After a number of hangfires and misfires, instead of doing the sensible thing and junking the box I decided to shoot the rest of it off. I know better now. I was pretty close to the end when one of them let go. The stock was damaged and my shooting glasses were wrecked; it took months to get rid of that flinch. I wound up with some powder tattooing above my right eye that look a bit like freckles today. This was 10 or 11 years ago, so I'll likely have that reminder for the rest of my life. I'm told that the Mauser was engineered to divert gas away from the shooter in an event like this. My advice? Don't count on it. Wear your safety glasses.
Had a good friend shooting a new FrankenFAL that was having extraction issues. I passed him some of my Radway Green in the hope that I would help. The very first shot blew the receiver cover off and peppered him with brass fragments, which got the attention of the RSO very quickly.
My friend was wearing glasses and was fine, although I was mortified. A later examination by a gunsmith revealed that the guy who had assembled his rifle had no idea about headspace or FALs in general, and the ammo had not been at fault. I still feel bad about it. The FAL was eventually reassembled properly and went on to shoot well.
Not really the sort of explosion that we're talking about, but interesting all the same: M2 is in a hot gun status and malfunctions. Standard SOP at the time was for the gunner to shout, "Misfire misfire misfire!" while the A-gunner positioned his hands under the ejection port. The gunner retracts the bolt and the A-gunner (hopefully) checks the primer while pitching the chambered round over the side, being careful to cup (but not hold) the cartridge. We figured out why that part was there when the round went off during the pitching process. The A-gunner was unharmed but had a stream of explitives available while shaking his hands and doing a funny dance afterward. No one was injured by this.
What happens when the Mk38 on the O-3 level makes a series of funny noises like it's trying to shoot, but doesn't, and an HE round ejects, falls twenty feet or so, and lands smack on its nose on the deck nearby? Simple - I ordered one of the A-gunners to go over there, throw it over the side, and (hopefully) check the primer while he does. He obviously wasn't cool with the idea. I reminded him of how the chain of command worked, he cursed, I cursed, and the round was dutifully pitched over the side without drama. As that Mk38 was woefully unreliable, I believed him when he told me that he'd checked the primer and found it to be not struck. As consolation, I reminded him that in a year or two he'd be ordering someone else to do something like that. Perhaps he is doing just such a thing today.
But I'm getting way off topic here. I have many more stories, and I expect others here to have more of their own. There may be a need for such a thread, but I suspect that it doesn't belong on this forum.
Suffice it to say that I'm far more careful about my reloads these days than I used to be. It gets ugly when the genie escapes the bottle. When the firing pin hits the primer, what follows is really scary stuff.
Not an explosion, but interesting: one of the gun crews on the ship was having an issue with their M2. As the armorer, I investigated. The gun had timing issues but the crew, not understanding timing, had tried unscrewing the barrel a few turns; as this had helped, they'd kept going. You don't even want to know how jacked up their headspace was by the time it came to my attention. I find it hard to believe that nothing happened. That same gun crew launched a barrel into the Pacific when they forgot to actually screw the thing back in after cleaning and checked the weapon clear - the impulse of the bolt slamming home was enough to send the (loose) barrel flying.
We had another M2 become roadkill due to an errant fork truck. I actually got it sort of working with judicious mallet use, but it required an occasional blow from a hammer. That was beyond my ability to correct and it went back to the depot.
Faulty ammo: I don't know what was going on at Lake City between 2001 and 2005, and maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff. But jeez...9mm with random backward primers, 9mm without primers, and even a can of .50 that contained an inch or two of water and a rusted-up ball of corrosion that had once been ammunition. (We beat it on the deck until the belt started moving and shot it off. Ma Deuce took it, but cleaning the gun up afterward took the better part of an afternoon.)
Now, imagine that you're running a range on shore with new and/or marginal shooters, and you've got 9mm ammo with primer issues. It wasn't fun. We had to reduce the lines considerably so that we could have a line coach on every shooter, basically watching nothing other than the weapons cycling in order to catch squibs. I'm proud to say that we caught every single one. It was nerve-wracking.
You tell the students to mind their hands with the M9 and M14 - fingers and thumbs in the wrong spots are bad. You repeat this lesson. It's not always learned. I had to drive a few students to the clinic for stitches.
But explosions? I saw a M16A3 let go once and we're still not sure what happened there; by all appearances, the cam pin met the bolt carrier and the bolt carrier lost. The result was a split upper, parts in the air, and an ejected and bulged magazine. The shooter was fine.
What happens when a M16A3 is dropped into a drydock? Fortunately, it was returned to us with a report on what had happened. The only thing that I found wrong with it was a broken bolt lug. It probably still would have worked, or it might not have. We never tested it to find out. It went back to Crane.
I had what I guess was a blowback with a M48 Mauser and that '55 ammo before anyone knew about it. After a number of hangfires and misfires, instead of doing the sensible thing and junking the box I decided to shoot the rest of it off. I know better now. I was pretty close to the end when one of them let go. The stock was damaged and my shooting glasses were wrecked; it took months to get rid of that flinch. I wound up with some powder tattooing above my right eye that look a bit like freckles today. This was 10 or 11 years ago, so I'll likely have that reminder for the rest of my life. I'm told that the Mauser was engineered to divert gas away from the shooter in an event like this. My advice? Don't count on it. Wear your safety glasses.
Had a good friend shooting a new FrankenFAL that was having extraction issues. I passed him some of my Radway Green in the hope that I would help. The very first shot blew the receiver cover off and peppered him with brass fragments, which got the attention of the RSO very quickly.
My friend was wearing glasses and was fine, although I was mortified. A later examination by a gunsmith revealed that the guy who had assembled his rifle had no idea about headspace or FALs in general, and the ammo had not been at fault. I still feel bad about it. The FAL was eventually reassembled properly and went on to shoot well.Not really the sort of explosion that we're talking about, but interesting all the same: M2 is in a hot gun status and malfunctions. Standard SOP at the time was for the gunner to shout, "Misfire misfire misfire!" while the A-gunner positioned his hands under the ejection port. The gunner retracts the bolt and the A-gunner (hopefully) checks the primer while pitching the chambered round over the side, being careful to cup (but not hold) the cartridge. We figured out why that part was there when the round went off during the pitching process. The A-gunner was unharmed but had a stream of explitives available while shaking his hands and doing a funny dance afterward. No one was injured by this.
What happens when the Mk38 on the O-3 level makes a series of funny noises like it's trying to shoot, but doesn't, and an HE round ejects, falls twenty feet or so, and lands smack on its nose on the deck nearby? Simple - I ordered one of the A-gunners to go over there, throw it over the side, and (hopefully) check the primer while he does. He obviously wasn't cool with the idea. I reminded him of how the chain of command worked, he cursed, I cursed, and the round was dutifully pitched over the side without drama. As that Mk38 was woefully unreliable, I believed him when he told me that he'd checked the primer and found it to be not struck. As consolation, I reminded him that in a year or two he'd be ordering someone else to do something like that. Perhaps he is doing just such a thing today.
But I'm getting way off topic here. I have many more stories, and I expect others here to have more of their own. There may be a need for such a thread, but I suspect that it doesn't belong on this forum.
Suffice it to say that I'm far more careful about my reloads these days than I used to be. It gets ugly when the genie escapes the bottle. When the firing pin hits the primer, what follows is really scary stuff.
