Post by Big Joe on Jul 25, 2016 13:39:29 GMT -5
Well I am truly home again. Again I wrong buttoned a 30 minute post into oblivion... and with my blazingly slow typing skills I walked away for a bit..
Ok now after cooling off and the café run will try this once more.
I am starting this is for not just the new reloaders but at times us “old guys” just need a jolt of the memory. If you have never had a mishap you are one of the few. The rest of us have seen or had things that didn’t go as planned and it is a learning experience.
Myself, I have witnessed one seriously bad reloading related incident. A friend of mine just got a 45/70 trapdoor. He got a whack a mole Lee set up for it (big thing back in the day) and some bullets from my grand dad, back then we could buy a few ounces of powder from the local supplier in little paper bags. Well grand dad set him down and went over the basics and they even came up with a load for his rifle.
The first batch of reloads worked ok some were a bit tight fitting but still worked fine. Well in his mind it should go faster..... so he went upped the load, “not very much just a few grains”.... Well, he can still point at stuff - with his three fingers. The rifle disintegrated and his hand with it. He would have probably died if grand dad hadn’t been there at 17 I freaked out. I gave up my tee shirt and off they went. Me a few others gathered up all the pieces we could find and just sat around in a numb daze. He still reloads today but I am anal and kept some of the pieces to show people when they ask me to help. He has the ultimate object to scare them into either doing it right or don’t do it at all.
Myself, I have had one instance I still half way claim. I was helping a friend (grown man not a kid) start reloading. He had got a 357 Ruger Blackhawk to play cowboy in the then new CASS. The first time we used my stuff then he got his own. This one I don’t add to the count as I did most of the reloading. I would go set and keep an eye on him when he reloaded for it. It was the only thing he reloaded for at the time. I had been continually telling him all the things I had learned -- keep your bench clear, have only the stuff you are actually using on the bench, IE the bullets, primers, cases and powder. And No interruptions.... He had reloaded three successful batches of 100 before things went south. We started as normal and things went smooth, got the first 50 loaded and our coffee cups were empty so I went to refill them, got back and he was on the phone. He hung it up and picked up the tray and started dropping powder at case #1. Everything looked right to me so I didn’t think to ask if he looked down in them to check the powder. Well he had actually already charged 8 of the cases, so he had 8 double charges. We were using 38 special loads so they were under the 357s normal loading (thankfully) and he finished up, cleaned up and I headed for home.
Just got finished mowing when the phone rang and he was screaming he blew his hand off and mostly un understandable stuff. So jump in the truck and race the 1/4 mile to his house. He was standing there with a rag wrapped around his hand, first we make sure how bad it is.... a good powder burn at his knuckles but that was about it. Get him calmed down enough we can go look at the gun. The cylinder was split in one chamber and spread some. Back inside just as his wife screeches to a stop (he had called her too) and runs in. Sees him standing there in one piece and then she starts in, she didn’t say a word to me but after she finished railing him she looked at me and ask me to make him a check list of things to check every time and calmly told him if he ever did her like this again she would own everything and he would be living at the Y. So we set about trying to figure out what went wrong. I pulled 3 apart and they were normal, pulled the 4th and didn’t need to weight it you could see it was a double. Weighted it and sure enough an exact double charge. Thankfully it was a Ruger or it would have been worse. He sent the run back to Ruger to have them check it out, they send it back with new cylinder and a note saying the frame was unhurt, Also is the bad cylinder, he just hands it to me and doesn’t want to ever see it again. Well that didn’t happen....
The cylinder now hangs above my bench with a lot of other things from mishaps to show people who ask me to help them learn how to reload. My kids know how anal I am and some fear asking but they also know that following my rules I have had no incidents of my own, knock on wood or whatever juju you prefer. I would rather run you off than let you get hurt of hurt someone else. I do at times push the envelope but I do it with the awareness than it could go bad, I have had my face sprayed when a primer let go do to excessive pressure and that is the when I get to the higher side if the charts, I know that the lawyers are in the charts but they are our guidelines. Don’t go off with a Tim Taylor mind set of more power Arg, Arg, Arg. Reloading is safe if you follow the common sense rules and read and reread the books before you start.
Ok Stepping off my soap box.