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Broke my Sig 229 kinda

828 views 4 replies 3 participants last post by  dukalmighty 
#1 ·
I'm not having a good month with guns,First of all the ammo was not overloaded/over pressure,I had a 40 case ruptured while shooting a bag of my reloads,it blew out where my extractor sits on the case,Sigs have fully supported chambers so it wasn't that type of blowout,what happened was when it blew,it blew the extractor off my gun,I had to push the case out and there was a hole about 1/16" in size,I've reloaded thousands of rounds without a problem.The main thing is Eye Protection kept hot gases/brass particles from eyeballs.
Downside is this type of failure in a gun fight will disable your weapon,or turn it into a single shot with you having to manually extract each round fired,which is why people carry BUG's
 
#3 ·
It's very possible that the case may of been fired out of a Glock/unsupported chamber,weakening the case at that area,due to my chamber being fully supported it blew out the bottom of the extractor groove,I have a friend that has had several case failures from reloaded 40 S&W ammo he was shooting out of his Glock,(I think all the brass he was using was once fired off an LEO gun range),enough that we pulled bullets and weighed powder charges and found all the loads were in specs and no way to double charge a case without spillover.I never load a max charge,usually load minimum charge for plinking.
 
#4 ·
This is exactly why I will never own a .40 caliber. It's a round that tries to take advantage of lots of ammo in a mag with the stopping power of the .45 or .10mm. The 10mm would beat the slides to heck and tear the gun apart eventually. Problem with the .40 is that there is absolutely 0 room for margin of error when reloading (or even if you get a factory bad load-you could still be wearing the gun)! You could almost double the powder load in a .45 or even a 9mm without killing yourself...but just a few, and I'm talking maybe 3 grains of powder too much is a blown gun. Know a local LEO that blew two Glocks apart shooting reloads. You have to have a large amount to get the gun to cycle correctly, but not too much to cause it to explode and that margin of error is so small on the .40 that I would deem it too dangerous to even fool around with. The biggest problem is cup pressure inside the shell casing upon ignition. The .45 round produces around 10K, the 9mm about 20k, but the .40 is producing 30+k and when you consider that the breaking point of good steel is around 40k pressure, you are just tempting fate. Look up the reload specs on these if you don't believe me. Just PLEASE BE CAREFUL and always shoot the minimum reload, building it up, double checking your powder loads. Keep in mind that Federal primers produce about 2k cup pressure themselves-they are the hottest of primers and cannot be reloaded using Lee hand loaders (as they could explode the tray). On the .40, if you deviate the overall bullet length you could also cause a problem. If the bullet when hitting the ramp sinks little further into the case, it could cause a problem (use a taper crimp die to prevent this), or if it was loaded 1mm too long, it would allow more room and cause more pressure to build up before the bullet exited the barrel.
 
#5 ·
and I'm talking maybe 3 grains of powder
Actually 3 grains of powder is a lot,but you are right in the basic complaint,my minimum charge is 5.4 grains of AMER Select compressed by minimum OAL,the Max load is 5.7 grains compressed,a matter of 3/10 grain,anything over or shorter OAL and you got a potential for a kaboom.
I just ordered new parts and gonna run right at $65.00 for extractor,spring,roll pin
 
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