Bulged barrel

[stagpanther]

What isn’t an explosion?

Tim is known for his "alternative" viewpoints.

[K13]

Interesting. I gather that might be a common accurence. Although the word we use “squib” is derived from the small explosive a “squib” or “squib explosive” and everything about a round being fired is a small explosion. I might be digging into it to much. Which I am known for.

[stagpanther]

Interesting. I gather that might be a common accurence. Although the word we use “squib” is derived from the small explosive a “squib” or “squib explosive” and everything about a round being fired is a small explosion. I might be digging into it to much. Which I am known for.

I like you already.

[Jim Watson]

I didn't see where you gave the brand of ammunition.

Low end factory loads and commercial reloads ("remanufactured") are second quality. Range and gun show reloads are third quality. But even name brands have failed one way or another.
I have read of more stuck bullets and other failures since the First Obama Panic, and quality control may not have resumed under Trump.

Most stuck bullets are from powderless cartridges. If the primer flash is enough to drive the bullet past the chamber throat, that was your experience.
Many do not, another round will not chamber and you are in a major malfunction but with no damage to the gun.

A partial powder charge squib is very uncommon. One grain of powder will drive a 9mm or .38 bullet clear of the barrel; I saw that while trying to use small charges of large flake shotgun powder for target pistol loads.

A contaminated powder charge is not unknown, of my two stuck bullets, one was from trying to get some use out of heavily wetted premium ammo. I would not expect a single rain exposure to do it, but maybe so.

You will have to decide what to do going on.
Continue your gunfighting technique and rack out any sort of misfire or malfunction to stay in action. This puts your barrel at continuing risk.
Or apply range protocol and stop to investigate any misfire or malfunction.
You might try to develop the habit of looking to see what comes out when you hastily eject a misfire. Whole round, chamber the next and shoot, empty case when no shot was fired, STOP.

[stagpanther]

You might try to develop the habit of looking to see what comes out when you hastily eject a misfire. Whole round, chamber the next and shoot, empty case when no shot was fired, STOP.

Saw a vid on UT somewhere when a well known tester kaboomed his AR by not noticing a bullet-less cartridge when he cleared his gun and reloaded.

[K13]

S&B, Winchester and Remington 115gr fmj. I think it is semi-unreasonable to expect a person training for defense scenarios to also be 100 percent vigilante in regards to squibs. Thus lies the dilemma of being either affective in defense or range etiquette. Surely human error is to happen even in a person 99.9999% proficient in both. My ultimate takeaway from this is... Is to have a plan for when it happens, because it will. Every other expectation is basically useless concidering human error is 100% guaranteed.

[Jim Watson]

Three brands mixed so you don't know which to avoid?

With your mindset, the only plan to deal with a stuck bullet I can think of is to carry a spare gun.

The plan to deal with a stuck bullet in heavy practice is to have a spare barrel.

[K13]

I buy 1,000 rounds at a time. It is either one of these three brands. I do not mix ammo. The malfunction came from/ during the use of Winchester white box 115gr.

[Jim Watson]

OK, don't buy any more WWB. It has a poor Internet Reputation these days anyhow.

I never had any trouble out of S&B except that it is not waterproof; the red stuff on case mouth and primer pocket is not an effective sealant.

Anecdote Alert: I had the first Glock 19 in town. It was not a fine performer. I sent it in and got it back with a new extractor and ejector. And a note saying "Don't shoot cheap foreign ammo, shoot WWB like we use to test guns here." Apparently Winchester standards have changed.

[TunnelRat]

FWIW I've noticed that Fiocchi is now priced very fairly for their pistol ammo. I order 1000 Rd cases on sgammo. It's super clean and loaded as warm as standard pressure defensive ammo.

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk

[JohnKSa]

I've shot and liked Fiocchi for nearly 30 years. It is loaded hotter than most practice ammo and also seems to be more accurate, as well.

Then again, I've also had good luck with WWB although I would give the nod to Fiocchi if the prices were similar.

[TailGator]

I made my very own squib early in my reloading days. Good learning experience. I believe the folks who say they have had squibs that cycled a pistol, but it would be such a fine line that I don't think I could do it on purpose.

[Blue1]

I think some manufacturer's semi-autos run on-the-light-side springs that make the action easier to cycle, at the expense of beating up the pistol a little bit.

These would be the ones most likely to chamber a fresh round after a squib.

My semi-autos take some effort to cycle (those in .45 ACP), so I don't think any of them would cycle after a squib round.

I've been reloading (handgun cartridges) for about seven years and was with my son at the club range with my 686 revolver and experienced a squib with one of my handloads. It was a .357 Magnum round with a 125 grain fmj.

The sound was off (not the sharp bark of a 1309 fps-tested round) as was the recoil. The round stuck about an inch into the barrel. When I got home, I tapped it (firmly) back out the chamber side. Bullet was in good shape.

In a strange way, I was glad it happened...and that it didn't happen while my son was shooting. He is a pretty sharp young man, and probably would have stopped shooting (he was watching me shoot when it happened). When I stopped and looked at the gun, he said he noticed the sound as well and said he didn't see a round hit the target (not uncommon with me, lol).

I explained to him what I thought it was and then confirmed it, so the experience was a confirmation of my training and a learning experience for my son.

I have shot approximately 6000 of my own handloads over the years and this is the first squib. The rounds are loaded on a Lee turret press, which is pretty much foolproof, so I guess I was distracted while loading and cycled over the load stroke, so the round fired with only the force of the primer.

Also it is important to note that it seems semi-autos squibs may be a little less likely to blow-up and fragment, injuring the shooter or onlookers. A .357 Magnum has considerably more pressure than any semi-auto round (with maybe the exception of 10mm), and I think a cylinder or forcing cone would be destroyed, while a semi auto may just bulge the barrel and/or blast the magazine out of the pistol.

I almost never rapid-shoot my revolvers in double-action, and this has made me question that practice even more. I don't know if I would have not fired the next round if I was doing a cylinder dump.

Lesson with all of this is that our avocation is not risk-free; powerful forces are at work and even if the four safety rules are followed, stuff can still happen.

Be careful out there.

Blue

[44 AMP]

I think it is semi-unreasonable to expect a person training for defense scenarios to also be 100 percent vigilante in regards to squibs.

It might be semi-unreasonable, but there is also such a thing as being TOO focused in training. Sure, there are several things to focus on in as stressful a situation as can exist (gunfight), but not having a part of you aware of what your gun is, and especially isn't doing can negate the essential focus on the rest of things at the worst possible time.

One of the "classic" failures to be aware of what the gun is telling you is someone shooting to slide lock (gun EMPTY) and doing the tap, rack, bang drill, (and there have been cases of people doing it 3 times!) before realizing the gun wasn't jammed, it wasn't a bad round, it was out of ammo!

There is always a line between safety and "training as real as it gets", and a risk to be run. Firearm safety training teaches that any time your gun doesn't act exactly the same as it did the round before, you STOP and figure out why. Combat/defense training focuses on keeping going (able to shoot) with as little delay as possible, and with good reason. It teaches a fast "automatic" response that will clear most stoppages and get your gun back in action in the minimum amount of time.

However, when that failure drill is the wrong response, and doesn't fix the problem, the next round fired might result in an inoperable firearm. And then, if its not training, as the old joke goes, "you'll have the rest of your life to decide" if your decision was the right one.

As far as I'm concerned, its a good thing to train in stoppage clearance, but these should be planned events, and when a serious unplanned malfunction happens, training is OVER, right then.

A bulged barrel in training costs money. In a real fight it could cost a lot more than just money.

[K13]

44 AMP.

Good thinking. And a prime example of overtraining/unaware of your firearm is that individual with the empty firearm continually “clearing” the issue. Funny actually. Not sure if you read everything but this thread IMO went from me asking about replacement barrel options after my incident, to trying to validate why I “allowed” or was unable to detect it in the first place. I fully understand everyone’s point of view. My mistake is clear. I treated a squib as light primer strike or unloaded/failed to feed or otherwise. I’m simply trying to establish that it wasn’t an obvious issue in my case and at the time it accured I was training in a way that would be even harder to detect than if I was just shooting. I have gotten a few suggestions, but for the most part it has been a mild patronizing session. Classic forum etiquette really. My attempt to justify will be washed into the previous posts I have made. Once my KKM barrel shows up I’ll report back it’s reliability. Already have nearly 1,000 rounds through the new OEM barrel I got shortly after creating this post. Again thanks for everyone’s input.

[stagpanther]

44 AMP.

Good thinking. And a prime example of overtraining/unaware of your firearm is that individual with the empty firearm continually “clearing” the issue. Funny actually. Not sure if you read everything but this thread IMO went from me asking about replacement barrel options after my incident, to trying to validate why I “allowed” or was unable to detect it in the first place. I fully understand everyone’s point of view. My mistake is clear. I treated a squib as light primer strike or unloaded/failed to feed or otherwise. I’m simply trying to establish that it wasn’t an obvious issue in my case and at the time it accured I was training in a way that would be even harder to detect than if I was just shooting. I have gotten a few suggestions, but for the most part it has been a mild patronizing session. Classic forum etiquette really. My attempt to justify will be washed into the previous posts I have made. Once my KKM barrel shows up I’ll report back it’s reliability. Already have nearly 1,000 rounds through the new OEM barrel I got shortly after creating this post. Again thanks for everyone’s input.

One thing I now do with ALL my barrels, no matter who makes them, is that with each new ammo--no matter who makes it--I'll do the "easy-in, easy out" drop test to make sure it chambers correctly. I once dropped some factory ammo into a new barrel--and it wouldn't fire, upon racking the slide all came out was a loose case, loose powder and a left-behind bullet.

[tallball]

I've never shot a squid before, but I was very tempted when I saw a large catfish near the bank last year (I resisted temptation).

Some years back my buddy asked me if I had a handgun that would shoot S&W 32 "short" ammo. I told him yeah, my little old NEF (H&R) revolver would shoot it just fine. He said that he had some of that ammo and that we should go shoot it sometime. So a few weeks later we were at the range and he handed me some ammo. We started shooting it, and I had the weird optical illusion that I could actually see some of the bullets flying through the air. Finally one of them actually bounced off the plywood backboard that the target was stapled to! I asked my buddy how old that ammo was. He shrugged his shoulders and said he wasn't sure. He'd found it in some of his dad's old stuff. Well, I knew for a fact that his dad had passed on at least 20 years before that. Anyway, that was the end of us shooting that particular batch of ammo. Thinking about it later, I was kind of impressed that all of it actually went bang, since it could easily have been 30 or 40 years old.

[stagpanther]

What are friends for, after all.

[JohnKSa]

A .357 Magnum has considerably more pressure than any semi-auto round (with maybe the exception of 10mm)...

Believe it or not, the .357Magnum has the same pressure as the 9mm and .40S&W.

In fact, the following semi-auto rounds have SAAMI pressure that are higher than the .357Magnum: 9mm +P, 10mm, .38Super, and 50AE.

[Jim Watson]

Only when read on pizeo transducer.
Old fashioned crusher gauge shows .357 Magnum much hotter.
It is very unusual for a cartridge to show higher numbers on the crusher gauge than the transducer but the Magnum does.

[JohnKSa]

Jim,

Back when pressure was measured in CUP, the .357Mag was rated 46,000 CUP which corresponded to roughly 43,500 PSI.

About the same time SAAMI switched the .357Mag standard PSI from CUP, they also lowered the pressure of the .357Mag considerably. The current standard is 35,000 PSI.

If this discussion were taking place prior to 1995, then the statement I responded to would be correct and I would be wrong. However, that was more than 2 decades ago; as things currently stand, the post I made is correct.

I don't really know what comparing the various cartridges using current CUP measurements would show, but it's precisely anomalies like the one you mentioned that led SAAMI to switch over to the more accurate PSI measurement system.

[Jim Watson]

It is easy to compare current CUP specifications. They are tabulated in the 2015 material, right before the pizeo numbers. So why does SAAMI maintain CUP specifications?

And why do you think .357 shows a higher numerical CUP reading than Ppsi?

[JohnKSa]

And why do you think .357 shows a higher numerical CUP reading than Ppsi?

The CUP reading is a single value representing the effect of the entire pressure curve on a copper pellet while the PSI reading is a true peak pressure figure taken from the time vs pressure curve produced by the transducer.

Given two curves with the same peak pressure, the CUP figure would be higher for the one where the peak pressure was maintained longer (since applying the pressure for longer to the pellet would crush it more) while the PSI reading would accurately reflect the actual peak pressure in both cases.

There isn't anything misleading or inaccurate about comparing cartridge pressures using transducer/PSI values.

[K13]

New OEM barrel is preforming as it should. Had some of the dirtiest Remington ammo ever though. By the 500th round the trigger group/striker was so dirty the trigger was hard to squeeze. A deep clean fixed it. I wore out a bore brush trying to get all the carbon buildup out of the rifling. It was bad. I’ll never buy Remington UMC again. S&B really has been the best value I’ve found. KKM barrel still hasn’t shown up.

[Jim Watson]

KKM is good quality but be sure it will always chamber your chosen ammo.
"Minimum match chamber" and all that nonsense.