okiegtrider
Member
Geez, that must have been scary as heck!
Glad you are mostly ok. Thanks for sharing this, ugly as it is.

Weigh the remaining cartridges just for the exercise but you are plumb crazy if you don’t disassemble each and every cartridge. Whatever failed once could very well have failed more than once.
Yes, there is such thing as a bad day at the range. My beautiful 629-4 was blown up by a hand load today. I figure I must have got a double charge somehow. I use a Hornady progressive press and can't understand how I could get a double charge.
I caught a piece of shell casing in my left cheek and it bled A LOT! Docs are just going to leave it in there. A souvenir I guess.
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True, if you load slow powders to magnum levels you won't have a problem, but what if you want a mid-range load? Trail Boss is a solution but outside of that even medium burning powders suitable for lower-power loads are going to leave room for a double charge.
What do you do? Load .44 Russian brass? Give up on the caliber? What about the .45 Colt? Is Trail Boss the only real solution outside of "process improvement"? I just don't think that "load something that fills the case" is always a practical solution.
I’ll double down on precisely this comment. If it were Alliant 2400, AA#9 or H-110, no possible way to double charge. As a matter of fact, you could go way over book and make an unsafe load with the right powder but there isn’t enough space in the case to do this damage when using any of the three I listed.