Dacaur, Elmer Keith blew up some rifles wildcatting by using too small a starting load. According to him, too small of a powder charge and thus too much empty case space will actually cause a detonation instead of a burn and thus cause an extreme pressure spike for a very short time. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. When I work up loads for a wildcat, I start pretty hot. We developed a wildcat based on the 8mm Rem mag that is slightly edging published loads for .30-378 WBY and doing it with much less case capacity. I'm sure if the reloading manuals got hold of it and published data for it they would knock 300 FPS off it.
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