what's the wildest, craziest, most dangerous reloading tale you guys have heard? here's mine.

a guy i know(i swear it wasn't me i don't mind being the butt of a joke or story but even i wouldn't tell this on myself) had a 264 win mag he wanted to reload for but he was having trouble finding data. being just smart enough to be dangerous( and having zero common sense or judgement), he noticed that the 7 rem mag case was "pretty close" to the same size as the 264 case so he figured, with the same weight bullet(140 grns) he could use the same data. then, not being one to waste time and money working up slowly from the bottom side, he just picked the claimed velocity in the book that he wanted and used that powder charge. as one would expect, the first shot locked the action up so tight that he had to beat the bolt open with a mallet. the letters in the headstamp were just about gone from getting jammed against the boltface so hard. but that's not the scary part...the scary part is that the next 7 shots did the same thing! he's lucky he didn't blow his head off. just talking reloading with him made it physically impossible to drive a sewing needle up my butt with a sledgehammer. he also votes. spooky!

so what horror tales do you guys have?

That is a scary thought! 8 shots before he stopped? Or di he run out of ammo? Any blown primers from that load?

I knew a guy from our club (he has gone back to Australia) who used to deliberately load max+1 grain until he got a stiff bolt lift & then backed off 1 grain and decided that was his personal load for the rifle! Believe it or not, he is actually a Vice president of a Agri chemical company! He is not stupid, just like living on the edge!

In experimenting with 5010, 5020 and duplex loads there were a couple hairy results. Trying to get case loads of the slow burning powders to burn completely fast burning powders were incrementilly added. One old sharp reloader asked " Do you think that once you get it all to burn you might find you got too much? " He was right . The bolt on the Mod 98 was brazed to the case, after beating the bolt open a small chunk of it fell out. The action has severe set back. The primer seemed to be gone and the primer pocket was gaurgantuon. Some of the case was just melted away.
Is this the type story you were looking for? roger

this aint a best.. but its kinda scarey...

a fella telling me ALL ABOUT buck and ball loads.. and how he read one time about the germans experimenting with multi projectile 8mms..

so he took a unknown (to him) 8mm mauser diameter rifle (he didn't know there was 2 differnt ones) and put in X grains of pistol powder.. logic being "well, if it don't blow up a pistol, how could it blow up a REAL gun?".. and tucked in TWO 150 gr bullets into the case.. one in the case, one in the neck...

(for the record, he figured if he didn't get the results he wanted, cuz he could guess the velocity by listening to the report vs impact at 100 yards.. "at least as good as one of them cheap chronies you youngsters use".. no joke... that he thought about adding powder between the bullets... the pressure would make sure it was only on each bullet..)...

he showed a couple of this rattles around the range, and most folks either packed up or tried to tell him it wasn't a great idea...

yeah, he fired it... the guns reaction was funny to see.. weird recoil.. bolt locked shut..

i hammer the bolt open for this genus.. primer flattened and leaking...

he asked me if i thought the next one would stick that gun as much... i sent my kids inside the range office and packed up...


oh, and ANOTHER genus HEARD that the russian 7.62 (really, its a 30 caliber, but bigger, he says) was bigger than a 308 bullet... so he figures a 303 is smaller than 308, but 338 is too big, .. and the closest thing they had was 8mm.. .323... cuz its between a .308 and a .338.. and the 7.62x54 is bigger than a 308.. you get it.. right?

our genus decides that since he could reload 8mm bullets in his 7.62x54... wouldn't pay for the reloadable brass.... he bought a box of 8mm mauser...

i LEFT before i found out the results...

some people shouldn't drink their own moonshine

Not really reloading but, I had two guys set up beside me at the range a few years ago that thought spraying WD40 down the barrel before each shot gave them more velocity. I packed up and left.

quote:

Originally posted by Ed Scarboro:
Not really reloading but, I had two guys set up beside me at the range a few years ago that thought spraying WD40 down the barrel before each shot gave them more velocity. I packed up and left.

makes as much sense as molycoating, dont it?

the same guy as above also let the powder hopper on his loader run dry and loaded up a bunch of 38 special shells with no powder. so he started taking a hammer and brass rod with him to ppound the stuck bullets out of the barrel. he didn't tell his buddy about the situation. the buddy fired a dud, thought it was a misfire and started to fire again with a bullet stuck halfway down the barrel. the original genius caught him in time...luckily.

this guy also decided he wanted to be a pilot. took lessons and got his license. thus was born a whole new series of stories.

dumb and dumber

i actually heard the guy behind the sporting goods counter at walmart tell a customer that the difference between a 30-06 and a 270 is that the 30-06 was for shooting round nose bullets and the 270 is for shooting "the pointy kind".

A guy showed up at the shop with a .243 model 700 the bolt was locked tight he had broke off the bolt handle. Pulled the barrel and found the action was cracked.
we talked about his reloads 45grs Imr 4350 and a105 vmax. He had worked up the load in that rifle. I tried to convence him that the load was over pressure.
Well a few months later he was seen at another shop with a 243 with the same problem, Guess some are luckier than others.
OH his clam was he was getting better than book velocities.
Imagine that. I wonder if he is still shooting that same load.
Dave

A guy who was keen on my older sister when I was about 12 years old ran out of powder, so he loaded up his 303 Lee Enfield with pistol powder. He was probably about 20 years old at the time.

I know that he did claim to have loaded "less powder", whatever that means. Also being concerned about how this would work (the mind baffles) he continued, but held the rifle in one hand off to the side and turned his head the other way and fired a shot.

It was the last shot that rifle fired.

Miraculously he was not seriously hurt. He dug a few bits of steel out of his forearm and his ear and had some tatooing from burns on his wrist and the inside of his arm.

Fortunately my sister was not as keen on him and the gene pool of our family was preserved!

Actually a nice chap, but...

By the way, I've recently had to re-think my old rule of being the one to shoot over my chrono at the range if a stranger asks to "measure how fast my bullet is going".

I always figured at least I wouldn't hit the screens, but I obliged a while ago and the chaps 338 Win Mag was running 230 grainers at 3150fps or thereabouts. It just made me think that being the guy behind the rifle with unknown ammo was maybe not so smart after all!

The craziest thing I ever hear of is -- reloading as a beginner without an experienced friend/mentor.

I started without an experienced friend/mentor because there wasn't one, but I followed my Lyman manual and never had a problem. That was 50 years ago.

I did too but I was well aware of the old pilot, bold pilot saying and so I was very cautious. Back when I started, there wasn't any internet to help you out and very little information in the sporting mags.

quote:

Originally posted by Ed Scarboro:
Not really reloading but, I had two guys set up beside me at the range a few years ago that thought spraying WD40 down the barrel before each shot gave them more velocity. I packed up and left.

You trying to tell us that WD-40 doesn't increase velocity?

Bear in Fairbanks

A story about wd40. my brotherinlaw had a nice older remington 870 when I first met him it was a britght silvery gray.
after a day of rabbit hunting w were in the garage and he sprays the gun down inside out with WD and wiped it down with a grease rag. Stating that the finish on the shotgun was junk because the blueing had all came off.

Rainy day.

I decided to go ahead and blow out 100 pieces of K Hornet brass. Primed 100 pieces and put em in the shell tray.

Didn't want to put undue stress on the throat (translation- paid too much attention to internet "theory") so I decided to try tissue paper, then reloading wax, etc with a small charge of pistol powder, which progressed to a full case, which didn't work.

Thought to myself piss on it I'm just gonna go ahead and load up some with bullets. Dumped out the fully charged brass and started from scratch.

Got interrupted.

Somehow or another I wound up leaving some fully (pistol powder) filled cases in the tray. When I returned I loaded up some shells and started shooting out my window into the ground.

Well, I vaporized the extractor from my Cooper. Sent the rifle to them, they fluxed it and said the action was shot. Had them rebarrel it to a regular Hornet.

I still have a Kimber of Oregon K Hornet, but haven't shot it since.

Inattentiveness and interruptions are no excuse. Yep, I am the proud owner of a Darwin award. Unfortunately I live the life of a shark and rarely never have the luxury to take my time to do things with ease.......

quote:

Originally posted by Leo L.:
I started without an experienced friend/mentor because there wasn't one, but I followed my Lyman manual and never had a problem. That was 50 years ago.

My parents had no interest in guns and it was only reluctantly and with much nagging that I was allowed to buy a 7X57 Mauser for probably about $25 from Montgomery Ward. That was back in the day you could have your gun shipped to you directly from the Montgomery Ward or Sears catalog.

Anyway, I reloaded for it as an unsupervised teenager on the kitchen table with a Lee Loader. I did know how to read the instructions with the Lee Loader and followed them to the letter so never hurt myself.

Life was much better when I was allowed to trade that rifle for a Garand...

quote:

Originally posted by Nakihunter:
That is a scary thought! 8 shots before he stopped? Or di he run out of ammo? Any blown primers from that load?

I knew a guy from our club (he has gone back to Australia) who used to deliberately load max+1 grain until he got a stiff bolt lift & then backed off 1 grain and decided that was his personal load for the rifle! Believe it or not, he is actually a Vice president of a Agri chemical company! He is not stupid, just like living on the edge!

Ashok,
you particularly will enjoy this. Way back in the day, I knew someone in India who had a 22 Savage double rifle, hammers. Dont remember who it was made by but "almost" convinced my father to buy it. Anyway, got to know the guy who owned it..and one day he tells me he had a slight problem with the rifle. "Ammo is difficult to get here, so I asked my wife's cousin's brother in law who has a lathe shop to make me some copper bullets. I bought some .303 cartridges from someone in the Police, and changed the primer on the 22, and filled the case with those little sticks in the 303 case, and then pushed the bullet in." "OMG, what happened?" "Well, I saw a nice cheetal (axis deer) stag and shot it. What happened was that the right barrel hammer went flying past me, making a bit of a hole in my ear and the two barrels now are little bit not together in the front"

So, FMC, I finally hear the whole story on that K-Hornet.

I once opened a fresh loaded case guard box of 223's at the range
and had BLC all over everything. I had loaded all 50 with all the proper
components except the primers!

I knew a guy who reloaded 45acp bullets in a 45 long colt. Wondered why he couldnt hit anything. Ill tell one on me. Somebody talked about WD40 well I used it to wipe down my 1100 mag. all the time after duck hunting and cussed remington because they didnt blue em like they used to.

quote:

My parents had no interest in guns and it was only reluctantly and with much nagging that I was allowed to buy a 7X57 Mauser for probably about $25 from Montgomery Ward. That was back in the day you could have your gun shipped to you directly from the Montgomery Ward or Sears catalog.

Anyway, I reloaded for it as an unsupervised teenager on the kitchen table with a Lee Loader. I did know how to read the instructions with the Lee Loader and followed them to the letter so never hurt myself.

+1 expect mine was a 6.5 Jap carbine my dad had brought back from WWII. All my deer hunting during HS and college were made with that little rifle and my lee handloads. Heck I loaded for my 20ga using a little lee as well. Killed plenty of doves and cotten tails.

quote:

Originally posted by budiceale:
dumb and dumber

i actually heard the guy behind the sporting goods counter at walmart tell a customer that the difference between a 30-06 and a 270 is that the 30-06 was for shooting round nose bullets and the 270 is for shooting "the pointy kind".

So, which was the dumb and which was the dumber? The "pointy bullets" advice or listening to ammunition advice from a Walmart clerk?

Lost Sheep

quote:

Originally posted by ARWL:
By the way, I've recently had to re-think my old rule of being the one to shoot over my chrono at the range if a stranger asks to "measure how fast my bullet is going".

I always figured at least I wouldn't hit the screens, but I obliged a while ago and the chaps 338 Win Mag was running 230 grainers at 3150fps or thereabouts. It just made me think that being the guy behind the rifle with unknown ammo was maybe not so smart after all!

Dear Goodness, i think shooting some random persons ammo over MY Oehler would scare the fricking heck out of me!!

I also started reloading all by my lonesome in the 1960's. Crazy thing is just about every one I knew did it that way. 100 percent of them knew how to read and bought a couple of manuals. I relize that many kids today can't read past the third grade so a mentor may be a requirement. That how ever doesn't always work out as it should. Fella at work wanted to learn how to reload 44 mag rounds for his S&W. He found a guy in another department who said he would show him the ropes.
The teacher shot heavy loads out of his Ruger which seemed fine to him. the student loaded up the same stuff for his Smith went to the range and locked the cylinder up on the first shot.

The moral is some times those books are a lot better to learn to read than ask some yahoo for a lesson.

Al

Mentors etc. not needed if you are a thoughtful, cautious, practical person. However, today's mindset is that you must "push the envelope" due to lawyer-dominated data publishers, chronographs are for developing loads on your own, internet loads are safe enough (and so on). I am proud of those who can "self-teach" using their brains as brains instead of leading with bravado/derring-do/whatever else you'd care to substitute there.

I started with a Ruger GP100, a Lee anniversary set and a nosler load manual. No mentors in sight. Worst thing I ever did was stick a .270 win factory load in my '06. I still don't know how it got in with my handloads because I did not own a .270 rifle, dies or bullets at the time.

Way back in the day, I knew someone in India who had a 22 Savage double rifle, hammers. Dont remember who it was made by but "almost" convinced my father to buy it. Anyway, got to know the guy who owned it..and one day he tells me he had a slight problem with the rifle. "Ammo is difficult to get here, so I asked my wife's cousin's brother in law who has a lathe shop to make me some copper bullets. I bought some .303 cartridges from someone in the Police, and changed the primer on the 22, and filled the case with those little sticks in the 303 case, and then pushed the bullet in." "OMG, what happened?" "Well, I saw a nice cheetal (axis deer) stag and shot it. What happened was that the right barrel hammer went flying past me, making a bit of a hole in my ear and the two barrels now are little bit not together in the front"[/QUOTE]

This has my vote for the funniest reloading story. The others are downright scary but this one had me belly-laughing!

I liked the one about the guy weho came into our local little shop back in the 80's and said he was new at reloading, but he really liked it and was doing OK. He just wanted to know how to "speed up the process." Seems that charging his .30/06 cases was taking forever. He wanted to know how he might " count out the 59 grains of 4350 faster." The shop owner showed him that 59 grains was a weight, not a count, and sold him a scale...

A co-worker of mine cast his first bullets with pure lead no lube and a maximun charge for his 44 mag. He spent 3 nights with a bronze brush and his black hawk. Years later he brought some factory ammo to shoot in my 44 super red hawk and was shooting a 3 foot group with what turned out to be 41 magnum ammo. My sister in-law could not get her 270 sighted in with 243 ammo. And I stuck a 440 grain bullet in my 500 magnum and didnt check because it made no noise. When i pulled the trigger on the next round the gun went above my head but I held on, no damage.

Not as weird as some of the above accounts, but dumb nevertheless. Years (many) ago I loaned my reloading tools to a friend, gave him some instruction and a manual. He was loading for a M700 243. He accidentally bent the wire that holds the platform for the pan on my Lyman-Ohaus balance beam scale, so that the pan and support hit the table top that the scale was on. He had to beat the bolt open with a rock after shooting at a deer.

He brought me the rifle and I told him to send it to Remington. Believe it or not, Rem sent him a new barreled action. Needless to say, I never, ever loan reloading equipment anymore.

A testimony to Ruger.
My first revolver was a Ruger 357 Blackhawk.
I used to buy a box of Norma 158gr bullets on a saturday and have some fun at the range. Then ammo went to about a $1.50 a box, outrageous! So I bought a Lee loader and components from our local gunshop, and a set of moulds to cast my own.
I was, to put it bluntly, a total novice, and read the manual carefully. I cast and lubed the bullets using a cookie cutter from Lee.
I loaded up a batch of 50 rounds using their scoop. Proceeded to the range and proudly let rip. The recoil and noise was noticeably different and the groups were not something I would want to discuss on a public forum. Getting the cases out of the chambers was also an adventure.
Short story, being a complete novice, I did not know that there were different types of powder, and the gunshop had supplied me with a local Somchem powder, and I was happily carefully loading a levelled scoop into my cases. it turned out to be about a 35% overload. Fortunately, the bullets I cast were almost pure zinc - another story, and were sufficiently lighter than they were supposed to be.
35 years later and wiser, I still look back at that and shake my head, at my naivete and the gunshop owner who had some reloading experience not bothering to give a bit of advice.

quote:

Originally posted by 45otto:
Worst thing I ever did was stick a .270 win factory load in my '06. I still don't know how it got in with my handloads because I did not own a .270 rifle, dies or bullets at the time.

Way back in the mists of time, I heard you could shoot 270 cartridges in a 30/06 chamber. Somehow from somewhere I got a single 270 Winchester cartridge and, being a curious young lad, decided to test it in my Garand.

I'm sure the bullet rattled around a bit going down the bore but no harm was done and I was left with a 270 headstamped case that looked a lot like a 30/06 case.

quote:

Originally posted by Grumulkin:

quote:

Originally posted by 45otto:
Worst thing I ever did was stick a .270 win factory load in my '06. I still don't know how it got in with my handloads because I did not own a .270 rifle, dies or bullets at the time.

Way back in the mists of time, I heard you could shoot 270 cartridges in a 30/06 chamber. Somehow from somewhere I got a single 270 Winchester cartridge and, being a curious young lad, decided to test it in my Garand.

I'm sure the bullet rattled around a bit going down the bore but no harm was done and I was left with a 270 headstamped case that looked a lot like a 30/06 case.

I stuck a 270 in a 7mm RM in the not to distant past while at the range sighting in my rifles. It went bang but something didnt seem quite right (obvioulsy. I opened the bolt and when the case didnt eject, I realized what I did. No damage was done, but I keep the big swelled up 270 case as a reminder to be careful.

When I was 14, I bought my first center fire rifle, a mod. 92 carbine in 38-40 Win. Budget was badly bent with the purchase of the rifle, so I set out to reload for it using a Lyman 310.

Can't remember exact details, but for some reason I decided to "unload" a number of rounds, saving the components to reuse at a later date.

My loading was done on a small workbench in the garage and, being unable to find a clean, temporary receptacle for the powder in the garage, I stepped into the adjacent kitchen and found the perfect solution, one of dad's clean ashtrays sitting on the cabinet.

Well, something more important came up and I left the ashtray, half full of #6 pistol powder on the workbench. For those younger reloaders not familiar with #6 pistol powder, to the casual observer, it has a somewhat similar appearance to....well, to cigarette ash.

Dad wasn't too happy with me, and I guess reminding him that smoking was not healthy anyway, was really the worst reloading mistake I ever made.

Regards,
hm

quote:

Originally posted by budiceale:
the same guy as above also let the powder hopper on his loader run dry and loaded up a bunch of 38 special shells with no powder. so he started taking a hammer and brass rod with him to ppound the stuck bullets out of the barrel. he didn't tell his buddy about the situation. the buddy fired a dud, thought it was a misfire and started to fire again with a bullet stuck halfway down the barrel. the original genius caught him in time...luckily.

this guy also decided he wanted to be a pilot. took lessons and got his license. thus was born a whole new series of stories.

This is one reason why I do not prefer automatic presses. I like to do each step at a time checking and eye ball all cases before I seat the bullet

quote:

Originally posted by adamhunter:

I stuck a 270 in a 7mm RM in the not to distant past while at the range sighting in my rifles. It went bang but something didnt seem quite right (obvioulsy. I opened the bolt and when the case didnt eject, I realized what I did. No damage was done, but I keep the big swelled up 270 case as a reminder to be careful.

Friend from work did that and blew his rifle up. Your angel was nearby! (His saved his eyes and ears, etc. but not his face -- speckled.)

My brother was experimenting with case annealing, long story short...he picked up a culled 243 case he failed to un-prime. Just after he dropped the case from the socket on the drill onto the reloading table, the primer ignited and "shot" into the fleshy part of the base of his thumb on the inside of his hand & lodged about 1 1/2" into the flesh. U can bet he'll never anneal another case before running every piece through the depriming die.

Back in the '50's, I was in my friend and gunsmith's shop, when a fellow came in carrying a very dilapidated SMLE.

He said that he had heard about reloading ammunition and resolved to try it. He had somehow obtained a supply of bullets and primers and the needed tools, but no powder.

No problem! He had a supply of .30-'06 blanks, from which he could remove the powder (not knowing that blank powder is the same material used to fill hand grenades of the pineapple variety). Not only did he use blank powder, having no powder scale or measure, he simply dipped the case full and levelled the powder off with a knife blade before seating the bullet.

Whatever angel looks out for fools and drunks was working overtime, since the rifle action remained intacy, although the magazine and stock were sadly damaged.

My respect for the strength of the SMLE action soared.

NOt reloading but stupid...used to work at Intermountain Outdoors in Idaho (Rich may remember the Sweets) and a guy brought a 300 RUM in because he said it fired when the bolt closed. So my genius friend takes the gun out back, walks past the bullet trap, drops a round in, closes the bolt and BOOM...one dead A/C unit on a ladies house 200 yards away on the edge of a subdivision... that was ugly...and a hard one to explain to the cops...I think the hole is still in the fence there...