i will be proofing some guns on jan 1st :rotf:

Good idea George :)

July 27 1895 Sporting Life
Call for a Government Proof House
http://www.la84foundation.org/Sports.../SL2518019.pdf

To my knowlege Paul Harm is the only one on this board with personal, first-hand, experience with failure of a damascus barrel and, I remember the facts correctly, that was due to a re-load that would probably have blown-up just about any barrel; fluid, twist or damascus. Paul, you out there?

Paul earlier said it was an inadvertant substitution of smokeless for black, PB I think it was. That is a well known blower-upper.

You are correct, Bruce. I shot with Paul a few weeks after the incident. Nasty wounds, indeed, but he was not missing a hand nor were ay bones broken. It certainly did not effect his abiliy to clobber clay birds, that's for sure.

You would think it could make a guy flinch a little !!!!:shock:

Well, I blew one up years ago. Yesiree, 'bout 17 years old (back about '58) and got tired of cleaning all that old black powder residue outta my Belgium muzzleloader. Decided those old men didn't know all the stuff claimed. So I jest poured 'bout the same amount of Red Dot down that sucker. Dove came whistling by 'n that's 'bout all I remember. Never did find the breech area. Never have heard high frequencies again (kept me outta Vietnam). Never do THAT again.

Most of the guns I shoot are damascus and I have complete faith in them. Guess they'd stand a whole lot more pressure but as mentioned earlier I keep a 7,500 psi or less cap on it. Only benefit of going to higher pressures is to cycle automatics--sure don't gain anything else.

If I remember correctly, Paul's handload was PB instead of BP and he had shot the gun three times using those shells until the fourth shell which did the trick, and I think he said that pressure was around 28,000 to 30,000 psi. Now that friends is a Hot Load.....! Eric

Joe, what, a person taking personal responsibility for something foolish he did! Should have known a Texan would cowboy up and admit it.

How is that G 16ga working out for you, Joe? Only two more months of quail season down there.

Eric, that's about 2 times the Parker proof load for the gun.

Got a bunch of us going hunting in SW KS next week. Picking up east coasters at Wichita. Annual Friends of Charlie ( "FOC'ers") event. I saw clouds of pheasants last month when I was there and hope to put all the FOC'ers on birds again, never seen so many in Kansas as last month and rivaled anything I had ever seen in SoDak even in the 70's. Last year was highs of 10 and 12 inches of snow, looks a lot better this year with this global warming thing working out so well.

PB or BP? It's tough to be as reloader if your are dyslexic