Catastrophic catastrophes - Handloading: sage advice from the handloading guru

Any handloader who tells you he hasn't had an "awshit" is either the luckiest so-and-so in the valley, hasn't loaded much or might be a tad guilty of fudging the truth a little. It's simply human nature to make mistakes now and then and we usually go away from them sadder but wiser. In handloading there are two kinds of goofs--minor and catastrophic. To me a catastrophic failure is one having the potential to destroy the gun or shooter. Anyone who hangs around firearms long enough is going to see the result of a catastrophic failure. Often they're on walls at gunshops and, for me, they are valuable learning aids.

One of the real problems when it comes to investigating an accident is the cause is long gone. The huge majority of catastrophic failures are caused by ammunition, and usually it's a handload. If you ask the handloader why his gun blew up he will swear up, down, sideways and back and forth he did nothing wrong. We'll hear about detonation, secondary explosion effects, metal fatigue or misalignment of the planets. Could any of that be true? Probably not, although the planet thing, plus gremlins, remains a distinct possibility.

Detonation is the most common excuse but there's a tiny fly in that soup. Nobody has ever been able to duplicate it in the laboratory. The reason is the quantities of powder used in sporting cartridges is really small. Without going overboard on technicalities we just have to understand even though there is a loud bang when we pull the trigger, nothing actually exploded except the primer. Humans lack the ability to differentiate times in the millionth of a second range where these shooting events happen, but if you look at an instrument showing us time in graphic form, lots of complex events happen beyond our ability to perceive. Detonation is a right now thing, but the instruments would show us the act of a gun going bang actually takes awhile.

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group