Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Oh my.. Model 24 oops

Not mine, we'll just leave the person involved as nameless.... probably best, since I don't really know their name.

Don't expect to see this happen on a 22LR/410 combo gun. Ouch! No injuries, fortunately..

Thoughts on cause?

Shot into a squib maybe? Except I'd expect damage farther down the barrel with that 🤷‍♂️

Looks like it blew the head off the case. I had the head blew off a 22 mag in a 10-22Mag Ruger. Blew the magazine out the bottom of the rifle in pieces. No injury.

I agree with Rick, you can see the remains of the case in the chamber. Over pressure load and case seperated?

I'm no expert, but that looks like some pretty coarse grain steel. I've never been a fan of the 24 because, frankly, they've always looked like a gun that would blow up in your face.

It’s been in production for 80 or 90 years.. can’t be that dangerous of a gun.

Looks like someone shoehorned a 357 mag in their 22LR! LOL

I agree with Fireball; that chamber looks too big for a .22;, especially an LR. .22 Hornet maybe rechambered to a wildcat like .218 Mashburn Bee? (Having looked more closely, it clearly was a problem with the rifle chamber, not someone putting a rifle ctg in the .410 chamber, which is easy to do but NOT the problem here).

I HATE to see old Savages wrecked!

My guess: an obstruction in the bore right in front of the cartridge. Possibly a cleaning patch forgotten and left there? A stuck bullet? (Sorry, can't call them "squibbs" when the word squibb comes from a Mr. Squibb a long time ago who designed a low velocity cast bullet, said practice/plinking/small game loads were called squibb loads for generations but now all of a sudden it's come to mean a stuck bullet!) But if it were a stuck bullet that close to the chamber from the previous shot there would have been a hellacious amount of gasses bottled up behind the bullet and when he opened the gun the empty case would've popped out with alacrity, alerting him to a f*ckup, so probably not that (at least I hope nobody is dumb enough to stick a fresh cartridge in after something like that happens that is obvious something's wrong). Cartridge with no powder or very little powder would stick a bullet ahead of the chamber too, but again the pent up gasses would "pop" when the breech is opened, alerting the user to a malfunction. I'll stick with a foreign object tightly obstructing the bore right ahead of the chamber.

Severely overloaded cartridge? I doubt it. Wrong cartridge crammed into the chamber? Ditto - you ever try doing that with a .22Mag in a LR chamber? .17 HM2 would probably fit but the .17 bullet in a .22 bore wouldn't bottle up the gasses hardly at all. Powerful nail set blank? They're all too big to fit in a .22 chamber for this very reason.

Note it failed at the extractor cut - sharp corners in the steel conducive to stress risers. Not surprised it peeled away right there. Jeff, the grain structure of the steel looks too fine to be a metallurgical anomaly.

No, I'll stick with foreign object tightly obstructing the bore right ahead of the chamber, raising pressures enormously, and something had to give and it was at the spot of a design flaw (extractor cut in an OMG thin barrel - Jeff I gotta agree with you there).

Sure, 24's have been around for several coon's ages, doesn't mean that they have much of a safety margin in those skinny barrels. Witness the pic above.

Pretty sure it says ".22 Long Rifle" on top of the barrel. Had it been re-chambered to Hornet or Bee the chamber walls would've been paper thin.

There have been a lot of very powerful 22 Long Rifle loads introduced since this gun was made, don't know it that's the problem here or not, but it would be interesting to know just what they were shooting. I think we will see problems now like they had when 22 Hi-Speed became widely available with people shooting high performance loads in guns not designed for them. Since it was a rimfire the one of the only cartridges they could have rechambered for is 22WMR, they are just slightly bigger so the firing pin would still hit the rim. You can see the relief for the firing pin milled at the bottom of the chamber.

A mostly peaceful explosion.

Barn guns can get mud daubers. Maybe that kind of obstruction? Although that would be pretty far back, they are usually within an inch or two of the end of the barrel.

Ammo was white box Winchester-Western 1980's production and was not a full box.

A Savage 24 in .22 Hornet wouldn't have scope mounting grooves on the top barrel.

I have rechambered a couple 24s from .22 LR to .22 MAG without any problems.

I think that the barrel must have been plugged. I'm glad that I wasn't the person who pulled the trigger that time.

When I was young (probably 10 yrs. old) and stupid, (Now I'm old and stupid), I decided to replace the 7.5 shot in a 410 shell with a ball bearing that looked to be small enough to work. Moron that I was, I didn't take into account that the barrel on my Stevens double had a full choke. I fired the round and am still here but I no longer have a full choke in the right barrel. Other than that, the shotgun still shoots fine.

When I look back at the things I did in my youth, I am amazed that I survived. I suspect of lot of you have similar memories.

T.S.

Just my 2x 0.73 cents hypothetical guess- would trying to snap the barrel down on a not fully inserted.22 and striking the rim on a (maybe) protruding 410 firing pin cause this ?
The breech would block most of the backward pressure.