Do the guns you are talking about include the 2 that Georgia Arms paid to have fixed even though their ammo didn't cause the damage?
I'm still shooting GA .223 and have been using their ammo for a decade or more. John
Read this response from Georgia Arms.
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"This was posted yesterday on M4Carbine.net.....
Georgia Arms Kaboom or NOT?
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Hello, I am one of the guys at Georgia Arms; we manufacture a long list of ammunition choices including a product called “Canned Heat”. I believe most of you read a story about our 223 ammo destroying two AR’s and how we failed to stand behind our product. Even thought I’m not Paul Harvey, I would like to tell you the “rest of the story”. It was reported that two kabooms occurred last year one in June of 2006 and another in August of 2006 both from the same batch of ammo. What you did not hear was that I called tagged 50 rounds of ammo back from the first customer and then 10,000 rounds back from his shooting partner and that BOTH batches of ammo were mixed with ammo that we did not manufacture. This was after the customer who had the second kaboom assured me that he EXCLUSIVELY used Georgia Arms Canned Heat for his training class, no possible chance it could be anything else.
Needless to say when we started going through what we got back and found 23 rounds including factory Federal, factory Winchester and some reloads I could not identify other than they were not mine, (wrong bullet, wrong powder charge, wrong headspace), I was not overwhelmed with confidence in what the customer was telling me.
As I explained the situation to him and indicated that I saw nothing wrong with my ammo and I believed he had a problem with someone else’s ammo he became very upset and said the ammo had to be mine because the headstamp on the case that destroyed his carbine was a WCC. WHAT? Does that make sense to you? Is Georgia Arms the only people who can load WCC cases?
He also reported to you that the builder of the carbines positively identified the casings in the guns as ours. That is simply not true. Consider this; all that was left was two ruined 223 casings, no bullet, no powder, no primer, simply empty cases. Are we to suppose that someone has the power to look into their crystal ball and determine who loaded it last? The bottom line is no conclusion could be drawn from the casings.
So, how did I decide the rounds were not ours? I felt the best approach was to determine what could have caused the problems we saw. Let me first explain the type of failure that occurred. A typical kaboom is nothing more than a case failure. The casing has a defect; it is too brittle, too thin or has an inclusion in the webb or wall. A case failure of this type at normal pressure destroys a magazine but very little else. These types of failures happen every so often and can not be prevented, that’s why we wear safety glasses. The two kabooms experienced here were NOT of that type. Those of you who that saw the pictures will remember, the whole receiver was destroyed, the bolt was split from end to end the bolt carrier destroyed etc.
I talked with Reed Knight at Knights Armament Corp as he probably has as much knowledge and experience with the AR system as anyone alive today since Stoner passed away. Reed indicated that to do that type of damage to a quality gun, pressures above 90,000 psi were present in the firings. This is about twice what normal pressure would be. He narrowed the reasons down to two; barrel obstruction or the wrong powder in the case. I examined the barrels and saw no evidence of an obstruction. I believe these two incidents were caused by someone loading the wrong speed powder in the casing. Normal speed powder used in the 223 (748, H335, WC844, smp 735 etc.) would run out of case capacity long before you could generate this type of pressure. However a 25 grain charge of a pistol speed powder could do this damage (231, HP-38, Titegroup, Bullseye, etc).
So how do I know that we did not load the wrong powder? To answer that, let me give you a brief overview of how we assemble 223 ammo. We have two arsenal style machines that are in-line presses with 21 stations to handle assembly and 12 different quality control checks during the assembly process. Each machine has a powder hopper that holds 5 lbs of powder. The hopper is run down to the 1lb level and then 4 lbs of powder is added back to the fill line. 4 lbs of smp 735 will load over 1000 rounds of 223 ball ammo. Simple logic dictates that if we poured the wrong speed powder into the hopper, we would have produced over 1000 high pressures rounds not 2 out of 15,000. Also we have at this time completed a teardown of over 100 rounds of the 10,000 we recalled from these customers with all powder charges being within specifications. Also after culling out the rounds that we identified as not being ours, (remember we have the bullet, powder, primer and headspace to examine on these loaded rounds) all the remaining rounds in theses two lots were fired with no problems.
The bottom line; I am 100% certain we did not put the wrong powder in these two cases. So, how does Georgia Arms stand behind their products? We paid for repairing the two guns anyway just to prevent anyone from having a basis to run down our reputation. I guess you can see how well that worked out for us.
If I may offer some advice from an old man who has been shooting for over 40 years now. When you are shooting ammunition from several sources, keep them separate!! Shooting with a mixture of ammo in your magazine is about the same as buying your gas from three different gas stations, 1/3 of a tank from each, if you end up with water in your tank whom will you blame? For those of you who took the time to read this whole post, I appreciate your patience, for those of you who buy ammo from us I appreciate you patronage and as Paul Harvey would say “and now you know the rest of the story”! I welcome any question or comments. Till next time I remain, magnum1"
