OK Gary, how do you know? I would like to hear the story. I see there must have been a distressing moment or two involved? RZ.
Haha. It was years ago, back in the dinosaur age - 1969 and 16 years old, I was messing around with subsonic loads in a .30-40 Krag (similar case capacity as .308), not because it was the "in thing" to do rather because I was a cheap/poor kid looking to save money on backyard plinking loads. My standard load was 5 grains Red Dot and a 160 grain plain base cast bullet. (Crap, there's another story about how I made those bullets!) Very quiet, never bothered the next door neighbors. One day I was hankering to do some shooting but had no bullets cast up so I simply grabbed the Old Man's Sierra 170 grain flat nose .30-30 bullets and loaded up a pocket full of them with that same powder charge. Sure as sh*t the second or third one down the tube stuck halfway.
Into the basement I go, and proceeded to wreck a jointed cleaning rod trying to beat it out with a claw hammer. About that time Pop came home, caught me in the act, and after calling me everything but Number One Son, dragged me off to the local gun shop. That's when the
real fun began. The old gunsmith (who had sorta been mentoring me over the years, but evidently not enough) took the Krag and said "wait here, I'll get it out. But I make no guarantees that I won't f*ck up your barrel in the process." An hour later it was done - he pulled the barrel, chucked it into the lathe and drilled the core out of that bullet with a 1/4" gun drill supported by bronze bushings to center it in the bore (evidently it was not his first rodeo). After that it was just "tap tap tap" with a cleaning rod and the hollowed-out jacket popped out. Never so much as as scratched the bore.
I was relieved as hell and stood there and took that old man's abuse gladly. I mean he turned the air blue (and did add greatly to my vocabulary of cuss words) and told me if I "ever did another dumbass trick like that again to take it somewhere else. Oh and by the way that'll be $10 - I wasn't gonna charge you anything but you need to learn a lesson, fork it over."
Never have I dared to "go too low" with jacketed bullets again.
Oh, and I still shoot that same load with that same cast bullet out of Krags. More funner than ass-kicking Joe Biden around the backyard would even be, I should think.