I've had cases split from work-hardening over the years and I've had case mouths on 38's split as well. But, I've never had this happen.

These cases have been reloaded twice. The load was recommended to me by the guy at Missouri Bullet Co. It's a 148 gr DEWC over 2.8 gr of Unique.

That is below the book starting level, and I asked him about that and he assured me it was okay and was a 'powder puff" load.

When shooting these loads (4" S&W 686), they were all very soft shooting. They were loaded in a Dillon 550 and were not double charges. Primers were normal and had no signs of pressure. And, again, they were soft shooting.

About 4 of every 6 rounds were splitting like this:

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Notice the perfect holes in the nickel cases? Never seen anything like that.

Could being under the min starting load be the issue? I've been reloading for around 20 years and load 10's of thousands of pistol rounds and have never seen anything like these. Of course, these are the only rounds I have ever loaded below the minimum starting load. I only went with that load as he told me because I was getting quite a bit of leading with standard charges, so I called them and this was the load he recommended.

Any thoughts?

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