No, it was in just front of the fore end. Luckily, I do not "reach" in my shooting style as some do:)

Man, I'm glad to hear that. I hold mine closer to the hinge pin.

Wow, it appears you were fortunate to not have been hurt. Sorry about your gun. I have got to get into the habit of checking my bores on each reload which is hard to do when crows are coming hard and fast.

In my trips to South America, I have found there to be a great variation in the strength of the individual shells they produce down there. Some shells don't fire at all and some are unusually powerful. I wonder if this gun was the victim of an overloaded shell? Like the others say, I am glad no one was hurt.

I have been to Argentina (shooting) 10 times, including some rather lengthy sessions of 1500 shells (with Perazzi not Parker) in Cordoba when I was younger and even more foolish, I have never had an issue with Argentinian shells other than that they tend to be a bit dirty. There was no indication whatsoever by sound or recoil that anything was amiss. As I mentioned, I actually killed a bird with the left barrel after the right had blown. Until that point the gun had fired about 350 rounds that week.- a lot more than it had been fired for many years I suspect. Go figure...#191919's time was up. As Ira G. wrote, "In time, the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble. They're only made of clay..."

And a gun is made by man...

I'd say looking at those photos that if you were a "reacher" Don you might have sustained at the very least a pretty good bruise to your forward hand...

Mr. Kaas,
Thank you for sharing. I like the other guys am glad you were not hurt. Again sorry to hear about your gun.
BTW on a lesser note that gun shur had an interesting serial number.

As I go through this thread again I wonder what if the gun in question had been a Damascus or Twist barreled gun. How much of a buzz would there be on here and maybe on the Doublegun BBS about an inexplicable composite barrel failure. Seems to me a fluid steel barrel ruptures without clear reason and it's glad you weren't hurt, too bad about your gun and life goes on with no buzz of fear of fluid steel barrel failure.

Anyone have access to an industrial xray machine? It would be an interesting experiment to xray as many seemingly sound fluid and composite Parker barrels as possible to see if any had imperfections that might result in failure. Are you out there Sherman????