doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Barrel bulge

Chuck;
I do not know for absolute certainty the condition I described can in fact actually occur. It does however seem to have some validity to it & does indeed seem to be a possibility. It does seem to be verified that in the early days of smokeless a goodly number of guns did blow their bbls a few inches down the bore. This led to the statement that smokeless produced its max pressure further down the bbl than did black. This has of course been proven to be totally false. This phenomenon would explain those bursts & that they also had nothing at all to do with the bbls being Damascus.
I do have enough belief in that it can happen I don't want to prove it the hard way. I thus no longer load low pressure loads with slow burning powders & particularly if they are known to be temperature sensitive.
Incidently another member of the board here first mentioned this. I cannot recall now just who or if they still post. I do recall that at the time it was someone of whom I had great respect for their knowledge. I thus sort of put the thoughts into storage in the gray matter, but don't recollect who presented them.

Some years ago I had an incident of delayed ignition while shooting skeet with a gun in 28 ga. I was shooting a 12ga. gun with Briley subgauge tubes, and the shells were reloads in Remington cases. The powder was WW540. I called for the target, and upon pulling the trigger, got a click-bang hangfire. When I removed the tubes after the round, I found a bulge and split at the forward end of the stainless steel chamber portion of the tube. I sent the tube to Briley for repair, and they replaced the chamber portion of the tube with a longer than standard chamber piece.
I don't know what caused the hangfire, but I suspect that it was a hull that I had previously fired in the rain that still had a drop of water in it when I reloaded it. The primer had enough force to start the shot and wad out of the hull, then the powder ignited, causing a pressure spike. There was no damage to the gun, and I continued to use the repaired tube for several years.

Piper and I rarely agree ,but in this case I think he is correct in his hypothesis. Had I had a similar barrel bulge I would have suggested that it was ,a, a hang fire,delayed detonation, the primer had pushed the charge and shot load out of the case before full ignition.Or,b, The gun had been shot with the barrels heavily oiled . As the gun was being used I would summise the former. However when shooting you rarely notice the different sound of a cartridge detonation ,or should I say you do not nesseseraly differentiate. One last piont ,that unless you did notice a specific difference in sound and unles you inspect after each shot ,you will not know when the damage actualy coccured.

I'm glad I got into the habit of peeking down the bores before reloading after every shot
franc

I have made some calls to knowledgeable people. This is only happening with one brand of sabots and I am told it is a combination of a slightly over sized sabot that is also made of a material that is not very slick and a solid cooper slug. The theory is that its building up heat as it goes down the tube. The molds for making sabots can be a lot amount of money, guess they figure it is cheaper to replace the occasional barrel than pay for a new mold. Same theory as the Pinto gas tank.