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I did read a story about a GI who brought back a 6.5 Arisaka from WWII, and because he couldn't find ammo for it, he took the weapon to a "gunsmith" and had it rechambered for 3-06. Apparently he fired the rifle a few times but wrote into some rifle forum and complained that it "kicked like a mule", sent it to them to investigate what the problem might be.
Turns out the so called smitty did in fact rechamber the rifle to take the 06 ammo and modified the magazine, but didn't have the sense to rebarrel it! The GI told them that they could keep the darned thing, so they tied the rifle to a tire and attached a very long string to the trigger and touched off a round. It did indeed work, but I can only imagine the recoil as that 308 bullet swaged down to a 264 bore.
Then they got crazy with it and decided to test it to destruction, first filling it with a compressed load of rifle powder, all the way to filling a handload full of pistol powder. At that stage, they said that flames erupted from the action, and they had to remove the barrel from the action, and put the bolt into a lathe to remove the case from the bolt face! But surprisingly, the bolt didn't suffer much damage and neither did the locking lugs.
That must have been one really strong action.
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