Cracked case?

[koehn,jim]

If you look up the story of Mauser, the man who designed the 98 mauser action, you will find he lost an eye to a previous design. So he put a deflector on the bolt body to keep escaping gas from hitting the shooter in the face. Good eye protection and hearing protection should always be worn.

[Whiterabbit]

I have not been able to find a reasonable answer to this question so please help me.
1. What would happen if a Rifle case cracked down the side while shooting?
2. What would happen if the rim seperated while shooting?
3. What would happen if while sorting your brass you missed a cracked case or seperated rim and loaded the case and shot it?
Don't know if it matters but what are the affects of the above questions on a semi auto and a bolt gun? Thank you in advance

I will assume one off, so acute issues, not the long term stuff.

1. The case will seal against the chamber just the same as the mouth. Nothing bad will happen. The case will be sticky to extract, causing you to immediately inspect to see what is going on. The crack will be seen. discard. Ditto shoulder and neck.

2. According to the NRA manual, the most dangerous failure. Doesn't happen often compared to anywhere else. gas vents into the bolt/action. Where it goes from there (harmlessly away, in your face, etc) depends on the action design.

3. See 1 and 2.

4. also see 1 and 2. I cannot speak for semiauto, but for bolts, one of the "marketing features" of pushfeed is rim encapsulation and action vent holes (you will see them on the side of the action barrel) for gas discharge in the event of rim separation. These features are not seen in controlled round feed actions. Every modern semi auto I am aware of is a push feed.

[mark501w]

I've been loading autoloaders since the 70's & I don't accept incipient case seperations as the norm. Win model 100's ,742 Woods Masters ,m14's ,M1's SP1's ,M2's, Mini14's & colt clones that's not normal. You should expect the same kind of results out of you auto loader as your bolt gun.

[promethean_spark]

I also have 7.62x25s that split on about a third of them. I checked that it wasn't among the overpressure batches. They have a weird three dimple crimp on them too, and tend to crack through a dimple.

I guess in soviet russia we don't anneal ammunition, ammunition anneals you!

[sr71brd]

I have not experienced shooting a round that splits the case in the chamber from a semi or a bolt but was told by an experienced reloader that you wouldn't even feel the slightest difference when firing the round. Although the case might jam in the chamber. Might. Load light, meaning load the round slightly under reloading data specs and you should be fine.

Are you suggesting loading a known cracked case?

[stilly]

I have not been able to find a reasonable answer to this question so please help me.
1. What would happen if a Rifle case cracked down the side while shooting?
2. What would happen if the rim seperated while shooting?
3. What would happen if while sorting your brass you missed a cracked case or seperated rim and loaded the case and shot it?
Don't know if it matters but what are the affects of the above questions on a semi auto and a bolt gun? Thank you in advance

Cracked WHILE shooting? Brass is dead. Toss it.

In all honesty, I think that not a LOT would happen. Yeah there are those that proclaim that the sky would fall and you would blow your gun up, but if it was a normal load and brass just cracked then I would think that there would be very little that would happen. Now if it cracked on every shot for 50 rounds, then we are talking about something different. Heck, if it cracked and you noticed the brass was ruptured or whatever and all was fine, I say continue. Many times I have shot brass that ruptured and I could not even tell until I picked it up.