Exploading Rifle Question
I have a quick question and hope that I can explain it well enough. A close friend was out shooting in the rain when one of the rounds failed to exit the barrel. When he opened the bolt the pressure of the round forced the bolt from the rifle with enough force to puncture his abdomen. I have been told that it is possible for water to build up around the front of the bullet and not letting it release from the casing causing the pressure to build and blowing the bolt out. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so how that small amount of water could cause this?
Hatcher's Notebook has info on this, - - - but
Hatcher's Notebook has info on this, - - - but - - -
Don't be too quick to totally condemn the story, although the rain water has nothing to do with what happened; rain was very likely just an unrelated incident and not the cause.
In his definitive book, General Julian S. Hatcher wrote about a plugged barrel incident where a rifle, probably an 03A3 Springfield or an Enfield P17, had been fired but the bullet had not exited the bore. The bolt was jammed too tight to open manually, so an armorer carefully tapped the bolt handle with a mallet to get it open. When the locking lugs cleared, the bolt blew open and the cartridge was expelled by gas pressure that had been trapped in the barrel, making a noise similar to a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle. Hatcher surmised that the brass cartridge had effectively sealed the breech and the projectile had also formed a gas-tight seal in the barrel, and the space between the two acted as the pressure "tank" that had stored the pressurized gas for several hours.
Such incidents are exceedingly rare since very, very precise conditions have to be met in order for this kind of condition to exist. The most critical part of this is for BOTH the brass cartridge and bullet to make perfectly gas-tight seals that will hold gas under quite a bit of pressure WITHOUT SLOWLY LEAKING DOWN, but not enough pressure to expel the bullet.
If you consider that millions of cartridges get fired every month, and with all the wars that have been fought, billions of cartridges have been fired. If the odds of this happening are 100,000,000 to 1 (that's 100 million to one), then in reality it is possible for this to happen once in awhile. I seem to recall that the incident Hatcher wrote about was when a soldier got a cotton cleaning wad stuck in his rifle barrel and decided to shoot it out by pulling the bullet and dumping most of the powder out of a cartridge before firing the small charge. It obviously didn't work. At least he was smart enough not to use an as-issued full-powered cartridge! Hatcher wrote that a soldier firing a full power cartridge to "shoot out" a stuck cleaning jag or wad in the .30-06 service rifle also happened once-in-awhile, too, and doing that always resulted in the barrel getting blown apart where the plug was.
rl717