Re: Out of battery detonation!
You're right, that is an impressive, not lab testing, but it'd be sufficient for me.
9h.. I'm not an EDM nut, I do like the design, have had several of them, they hammered the Barrett POS in the army trials, but the army was either in bed with them, or SOMEONE was. The army dummied down the requirements and basically rewrote the requirements doc so that the Barrett POS was the only gun that could "meet" the standards.
The Blue Grass gun is a strong gun, not all "pipeguns" are necessarily weak.
A pipe gun as I call it is a gun that uses an extruded aluminum reciever with a press fit or screw fit barrel with a barrel extension that the bolt locking lugs interface with. When together, they're strong enough, the design isolates the regidity requirement within the barrel extension, not the reciever.
BUT, if a blowup occurs outside the chamber, pipe guns do not have the strength to hold down the energy, unless the detonating round is well outside the confinements of the chamber.
Also, barrel extensions are not as strong as a reciever that wraps the locking lugs with heavy steel. The EDM design is massive, maybe too much, but when a gun blows, how much is too much, or not enough. I've shot a few shell holder 14.5mm and 20mm rifles here and there, it makes ME nervous to load that monster with a shell holder bolt, but an interlocking safety can prevent dangerous out of the chamber explosions.
Also, for everyone's general info, a live round, firing in mid-air on the face of a bolt is serious, probably not life threatening unless it happens right before your very eyes at close range. This has been tested using electric squibs to fire the cartridge to simulate these events. The bullet goes about 3-5 feet, the case splits, someties creating minor mid-velocity shrapnel.
If a guy shooting a bolt face holding shell holder design DOESN'T turn his face after loading the round while chamber it, he's probably not being prudent to protect himself. Wear good eye armor, load the round, put your face in your armpit and load the round.
Our procedure was for the shooter to hold the bolt face up, the observer loads the round onto the bolt face, the shooter immediately loads the round into the gun with his face averted to prevent injury (which never happened but one time in military history, that i'm aware of anyway). That way, the "hot" round was never too close to someone's face. Also, with the bolt face up, there is less danger of mid-velocity shrapnel travelling in a bad direction. Make sense?
While it's unconventional, i dearly love the falling block design for big heavy cartridges. For the following reasons.
1. VERY safe, hammer striker system that is not going to fail. Just like a revolver, cock the hammer, shoot the gun, by using a over the hammer lever, you can positively lock the hammer back, no sear engagement issues due to light trigger pull requirmenets. A hammer setup is more secure than a standard sear release setup.
2. VERY fast lock time. In a big bore gun, lock time must be as fast as possible. Examples go very fast designs now are any falling block design, or the Gilkes design. Very slow designs are the Barrett triggers, any of them.
3. VERY safe, round outside the gun is safe, the round cannot detonate unless the round is in the chamber, the block is locked, the hammer is cocked (which cannot occur without the operator pulling it back).
4. AS fast as a bolt design, it's all in the training and practice.
Trigger