found this at the range

[Jesse Heywood]

I would expect firing out of battery failure to have been case failure around the wall just forward of the base, which is far weaker than a petal-like break across the head. That is the strongest part of the case and fracturing from the center out, the hardest way to break. I would assume someone shot down the center.

To verify the out of battery theory, go back to the range and ask for the guy with the new nickname: "lefty".

 

[suzukisam]

Well since I recently had this experience I can tell you first hand what MAY have happened.. it may have been an old federal case which were known to do this EVEN IN FACTORY LOADS. Also it may have been over charged, in any event the gun was probably fine..probably got a new barrel though... looks like the webbing failure in the federal cases, also looks like the gun fired out of battery possibly..if he was wearing glasses a change of pants may have been the only problem

 

[Dodge DeBoulet]

This looks exactly like the case head separation I saw recently at our range. I was the RSO Saturday morning at our weekly plate shoot; one of our regulars was shooting relatively mild reloads in his Glock 22C with a Lone Wolf barrel.

He pulled the trigger, got a pretty impressive bang, and the magazine shot out of the mag well and slammed into the ground. Fortunately he was wearing gloves (it's still pretty cold here in the northeastern US), as the frame cracked on the right-hand side. The barrel and slide looked like they escaped damage, but the extractor disappeared somewhere. Fortunately, he was completely uninjured.

We're suspecting brass that's been recycled too many times. He's very meticulous about checking his charge weight on each and every round and has been reloading for a very long time.

I wish I had taken some pictures, but the case head looked virtually identical to the one in the first post in this thread.

 

[BeerSleeper]

I couple of times I've had the fortune to come home from the range with a 5 gallon bucket full of brass. I've sorted them all by caliber, and in each bucket, I found several like the one in GW Starr's picture a few posts above. Each bucket had a handful of split 40's (most likely shot in a 45), and a few revolver cartridges of a caliber I don't remember off the top of my head (.32-something? a little help here?), that looked like they had been shot in a .38/.357 despite being too small for that.
It's a little scary to find that much evidence of that much ammo fired in the wrong size gun. Definitely makes you want to not stand too close to the guy in the next lane. Who know's what he's shooting.