Home Forums Reloading Reloading Software Here's one for you. What caused this.

I've been reloading for almost 50 years. I've loaded tens of thousands of rifle, pistol and shotgun shells. Then today I get a call from a friend who I'd loaded some .500 S&W shells for. He shot 3 shots from his .500 and on the 4th shot, it just went pop. The bullet left the case and stopped just as it entered the barrel to the point where it was hard to open the cylinder. When the cylinder was opened all the powder came out of the case. When he first told me this, I thought I'd missed putting powder in the case. I'm alway checking to see that I've charged all the cases. What the heck happened? I'd just loaded some .500s for this guy a couple of weeks ago, and we'd shot about 20 of them with no problem. The primer went off. It takes a large rifle primer, which is what I had. I checked that. If it had enough power to push the bullet out, why didn't the powder ignite??? I can 99.9% rule out any moister/ water/ oil in the case to damage the powder. I've NEVER had, or heard of anything like this before. Any input as to what could of caused this would be appreciated. I tumbled the cases and always take a small allen wrench to pop out any material that may of gotten in the flash holes from the tumbling process. Even if there were some material in the flash hole, the primer ignited and pushed the bullet out, so the fire did get past the flash hole. Any ideas????? Thanks.

It's one of the things you've already ruled out.

I had a problem with H110 in a 357 mag years ago. It did the same thing the charge was right so the only thing I could figure was the powder was bad in someway.


Cal30

If you saved the powder, you could put it in an ashtray or on omething dry and toss a match to it. If the powder is dry, it will light(flash). Make sure you do this outside. Sometimes I see people reloading and they have soda, water or coffee nearby while they work. Possibly a splash of water got into a case. Have you pulled any of the bullets to check others? Sometimes you can beat yourself up over these problems.

Shot in the dark but did you have plenty of crimp? Maybe the bullet moved forward enough to lower the powder density to where it wouldn't ignite. H110/296 and other powders in that range are notoriously tough to ignite.

Tough to figure out, but if you are going to have reloading issues this is the kind to have. Going the otherway and blowing cylinders up is obviously way worse

My guess is that recoil broke the crimp and moved the bullet forward enough to lower starting pressure to low to burn the slow burning powder.

I can assure you that the bullets DIDN'T move out of the crimp while firing. When I loaded for this .500, that was my main concern, and I watched after every shot to see if the slug was moving forward at all, and it wasn't. I once had that happen with some lead cast .44 mag. loads. Crimp wasn't enough and slug moved forward to point where the cylinder wouldn't rotate. I just had to crimp them more. Because of that happening with the .44 mag. I was watching the .500 very close, and the bullets didn't move at all. It had a stiff charge of 41.0 gr. of H110, and it filled the cast up pretty well.
I've almost concluded, even though I can NEVER be certain, that is was a bad primer. It is my thought that the primer just went off enough to create enough pressure to pop the bullet out, but still not ignite the powder. I know that's a long shot, but that is the direction I'm leaning most strongly towards. The only thing that's for sure, is that I'll NEVER know for sure what it was. One can kick it around forever, and we'll never be sure. I don't like that conclusion, but that's the reality of it all.

one variable that we seldom think of is the variations in primers from lot to lot.

I have seen many "good" primers fail to ignite loads, usually in small rifle primers, but also have seen it in Rifle loads also.

I always suspected that someone that was running the maching making primers, went out on break and smoked a joint or was drinking prior to or during work...it happens.

Also, if you live in a warm moist climate, then humidity over time can degrade primer integrity if they are left on an open shelf.

I would throw away the rest of that brick of primers first and foremost.