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When Boomstick Booms Wrong

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Elderberry:
Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 5/3/2021

Today I’m doing something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: Take a video I’ve already linked from a LinkSwarm and put it up here, because there are a lot of important lessons to learn.

You should watch all of this:

On April 9, Scott Allen DeShields, Jr. of Kentucky Ballistics was shooting old SLAP rounds through his single-shot Serbu RN 50 when a hot round burst the chamber, shearing the threads off his locking cap and sending pieces of metal flying back at him. Damage included a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood.

Him surviving was a combination of being very lucky, having a father with law enforcement training right there to help slow the bleed, and doing exactly the right things to get him alive and conscious to treatment (the ambulance met them halfway, and then had him life-flighted to Vanderbilt Hospital).

Here, Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons discusses the accident, what went wrong (and right) in the aftermath of the Kentucky Ballistics malfunction, and covers in-battery and out-of-battery failure modes for various firearms.

More: https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=48005


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1449kJKxlMQ

rustynail:
That was a good story.  Thank you.

skeeter:
One lucky sunuvagun. Like having a grenade go off in his face & surviving.

BassWrangler:
Saw this a couple of days ago. Last night I watched a video from another YouTuber in which he points out that you're not supposed to use those sabot rounds in a rifle with a muzzle brake. What happens is some of the polymer that's around the tungsten core will accumulate on the brake with each shot, and eventually it becomes enough of an obstruction to cause catastrophic failure.

 He also shows what the bolt lugs and lock-up system on a more traditional large bore rifle look like (as opposed to the threaded end cap on the rifle Scott was using) and said they are designed to not fail with even 100% over-pressure situation. For traditional 50 Cal round, this would be about 50,000 PSI, so 100% over pressure would be 100,000 PSI. I believe Scott mentions the rifle he was using was designed to withstand up to 85,000 PSI.

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