Thursday, June 11, 2009

"Jeezis! "

The title of this post is a verbatim quote of what I said when I saw this.

A few months back MV and I were shooting his .357 Magnum revolver and carbine, and had a generally uneventful shoot (aside from flying concrete fragments when the target gave way).

Today, I noticed this:

Split Case .357 Magnum

That's a split case my friends. Right down the side, almost exactly half the length of the casing torn apart. There is another 1/4 length of casing with visible bulging and some funny texture in the grain of the metal right where the split begins.

I inspected a few more of the spent shells and none have any obvious bulging. This is likely one of the reloaded cartridges MV had on hand that he wanted to get rid of (by shooting). As it turns out, he might have been better-advised to get rid of them by dumping them in a fire with a remote control robot or something. This could have ended up with one or both of us perforated in various unpleasant ways and a gun all KB'd to heck and gone.

I'm going to give him a heads-up and hope he takes his guns to a 'smith for inspection. It *could* have been a bad reload or a too-old case. But maybe not.

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