Bore Obstruction--Close call
 

I'm posting this in general discussions as a public service safety awareness about the potential for bore obstructions & how easily they can occur.

A buddy of mine had a close call yesterday while shooting sporting clays. He was shooting his 28ga reloads using his Guerini O/U and had a hull separate on his first shot on a true pair. He noticed this when only the brass & about a quarter of an inch of the hull was extracted from the bottom barrel. The rest of the hull was heat fusion stuck to the bore about two inches down the bore. It took us about a half hour using two different cleaning rods to finally get the case un-stuck from the bore, the plastic was that melted & stuck to the bore wall.

I'm just thankful that my buddy had the awareness to look down the bore when the partial case was extracted, along with being glad he wasn't shooting a semi-auto. This occurred on the first shot on a true pair, the shot sounded normal and broke the clay and this stuck case might not have been noticed before the next shot was fired with an auto-shucker.

This was close one--Please be careful out there!

I've had case failures many times in the 28ga with the Federal Hull but it has always cleared the barrels. That's why I've developed the habit of blowing the smoke out of the barrels and seeing that they are clear on EVERY shot with every gun and gauge. I'm glad it wasn't a bad situation with your friend and his gun.

I'm bad about not doing that on my SBT's; need to get into the habit! It's easy to take a quick peek down the barrel on those.

Just make it part of your shot routine and it becomes automatic.

An elderly man i shot with was shooting a 12 ga. 1100 and on a double the first shell ''shot off'' and the plastic stuck about middle of the forend. The next blew the gun up injuring his left hand badly and peppering his face with shrapnel. Thankfully his glasses held. No part of the wood from the forearm was found. We gathered up the pieces and mounted them on a board in the skeet house as a teaching tool.
He lost part of one finger and had to have reconstructive surgery 3 times to regain some use of the hand.
The use of single barrel guns dropped to zero for a long while. I look at every case as i take it out of my guns to make sure the plastic is all there.

I had the exact same experience years ago shooting skeet with a minty 28 ga. Remington 11-48 skeet gun. Shooting doubles at station 7, the first round just did not sound right and as the gun cycled I saw the brass head go flying out of the ejection port so I lowered the gun, unloaded it and removed the barrel and checked the bore. The plastic case had gone about a third of the way up the barrel and "welded" itself to the bore. Like Paul's OP, we worked for about 20 minutes to finally free the remains of the hull. This was using factory ammo, long ago enough now I don't recall the brand.

Over the years I've seen a bunch of stuff happen. Things like squib loads, an occasional hang fire and at least one other case separation. Because of this I always try to pay attention to the sound of the shot being fired both when I'm shooting and when others with me are shooting. All of my main shooting friends reload and even though it doesn't happen often a squib does happen every now & then.

Because of this I always carry a three-piece wooden cleaning rod in my shooting bag to dislodge stuck wads & so-on. The thing that surprised me with this one was how the case was like Kevin mentioned, it was welded to the bore wall, in all my years of shooting, I've never seen anything quite like this.

Due to some of the stuff encountered over the years I've adopted some simple safety procedures for myself. One is always look down the bores when you step-up to shoot before dropping a load in. Two, when trapping or scoring, I try to position myself slightly behind & off to the side of the shooter so if a barrel burst were to happen, I might not be in the line of fire from the shrapnel. The main thing is to keep your head in the game all the time when you're shooting or close to the firing line.

An item I didn't mention in my original post was something my buddy said when we were dealing with the stuck case. My friend is in his mid-seventies and is a very experienced shooter & I was shocked when he out of the blue said "Maybe I could shoot the stuck case-out" I immediately told him no-way is he going to try that and I won't let you do it! I flashed back to all of the burst barrel threads I've seen over the years and now I know how one can happen.

This incident caught my attention and reenforced how important safety is all the time when shooting.

After a friend on this forum had a bad experience a few years ago, I have become a lot better checking the bores (although not perfect). I really don't like shooting autos and pumps where you can't check the bore after a shot.

I had a friend who blew up a model 21 Winchester from the same cause. He was shooting a flurry and quickly reloaded and the first shot after reloading separated the barrels, split the forend in half,and cracked the frame. He had burns on his forehead but no other injuries. Just very lucky he was not seriously hurt.

I shot a flurry one time. Never again. It overheated the barrels and the receiver and my hand. That can't be good for the gun.

My 20 ga. Beretta 687 SPII Sporting can handle all the flurries you can throw at it. It's done Argentina doves twice, averaging a shot every 20 seconds for three hours at a time, with nary a problem. It might be worthwhile to find out how their barrels and ribs are joined.

I wonder what temperature it becomes unsafe to load a shell in a hot gun. We know it melts and welds.

I've had the barrels so hot on Argentina dove shoots you couldn't touch them. One of the more experienced guys on my first time down there wore a welder's glove on his forearm hand. I wounded a parakeet that landed in a nearby tree & my bird boy wanted me to finish him off, the gun was so hot that when I tried to sight down the barrels to aim at the bird, the heat mirage coming off the barrels was so bad that I couldn't see the bird. In all of the two-barreled guns I've seen on my eight trips down there, I've never seen a rib separation and several of those guns had been on multiple trips & survived without a hitch.

The only time I've experienced melted/welded plastic in a bore other than on my buddy's gun the other day was in screw chokes on Argentine dove shoots, the only way I could remove the plastic was to carve it out with a pocketknife. On that particular hunt the shooting was so fast & furious I had to clean the choke tubes at lunch & then again after the evening shoot.

Plastic hulls out the barrel
 

When we were kids, 18 or so and invincible, a few of us had Belgian Browning Auto-5s in 3" Mag. When we were waiting for the Canada geese to come in we would get bored. So, someone wanted to see if they could cut a standalone fence post down with their Winchester XX Magnum lead loads. That morphed into someone having the bright idea of taking out their pocketknife and scoring the shell about 1/2" above the brass. When the load was shot it cut that fence post in half at about 10 yards. Nothing came out of the gun except the brass. We all did it a few times with no negative results. But, now that I know I'm not invincible I would never try that stunt again.:eek:

Cut shells, a couple buddies and I shot an ancient apple tree down once.

This past weekend I had a powderless reload, a pheasant got up and I saw the shot go about 10 feet down range. The wad was stuck and a lung full of air blew it out and back to hunting the ol VH went.

Remember the Peter's Blue Magic? Can't think of how many of those burned through and became slugs on the trap range years ago.
Come to think of it I cannot remember the last time I saw a hull part ways.