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Is it possible to blow up a remington 700 with a varmint contour barrel?

QuickNDirty

QuickNDirty

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I've been looking all over for the aftermath of a bolt action rifle KA-BOOM!!!, but specifically a heavy barrelled Remington 700 chambered in .308 Winchester.

No luck. Found oodles of handguns, revolvers, and semi-auto rifles, but no bolt guns.

I'm wondering what would happen in, say, an AAC-SD...

Would the barrel be blown off the receiver?
Would the bolt lugs fail and send it straight through the shooter's skull?
Is it even possible to blow up an AAC-SD using appropriate rifle powders?
 
As the old saying goes, "stupid should hurt." THAT kind of stupid, however, will kill.
"You feeling lucky, punk?"
 
Using appropriate powder, I don't think you could "blow" it up.

You can only squeeze 48 or 49gr of Varget under a 175smk, and that isn't going to blow the rifle apart. It will be overpressure and it will probably damage something, but I don't think it's going to grenade.

Even with 48 or 49gr Benchmark, I don't think it would grenade.

Fill the case to the brim with H335 (a bit fast but still "appropriate" for a 308) and it might break.

Fill the case with Titegroup, it'll definitely grenade.
 
QuickNDirty said:
I've been looking all over for the aftermath of a bolt action rifle KA-BOOM!!!, but specifically a heavy barrelled Remington 700 chambered in .308 Winchester.

No luck. Found oodles of handguns, revolvers, and semi-auto rifles, but no bolt guns.

I'm wondering what would happen in, say, an AAC-SD...

Would the barrel be blown off the receiver?
Would the bolt lugs fail and send it straight through the shooter's skull?
Is it even possible to blow up an AAC-SD using appropriate rifle powders?
Click to expand...

Type Sako Ka-boom in your Google search engine and you will get tons of pictures from a few years back when Sako had a bad batch of stainless bolt action Finnlights get out to market. Never seen a Rem 700 one yet though....
 
Yep, SAAMI specs for 308 win is 62 000PSI. The manufacturers defintely put a safe zone in there. 90-95000 pei sounds about right
 
Can do easy. Fire a squib load (primer only-forgot the powder), bullet will get stuck in bore. Next, take your "special" round, the one with the compressed bullseye load, and fire,- your rifle will explode. The special load:pour case bull of bullseye, using as long a drop tube as you can find (or make), utilizing a wooden dowel or similar object start compressing down the powder, the more the better, then seat the bullet (completing the compression cycle) with a heavy crimp. Hope this helps, enjoy your exploded 700.
 
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Friend loaded his .25-06 with max load of H4831. Only, he had two bottles of powder on the bench. He picked up the Varget. One shot froze the bolt, face full of gas. Ruined the bolt. Action and barrel seemingly ok.
 
The brass gives up way before the barrel. The remington "three rings of steel" does work, but everything has it's breaking point.
 
Slightly off topic, but slightly not...

Steyr advertises and claims their current SSG rifle in both 308 and 338 can withstand, survive, and remain serviceable if a round is touched off with a squib in the bore.

They claim they test this on randomly-selected rifles during assembly. (unsure if they scrap that rifle or buff it up and sell as "new")
 
I've not seen a blown Remington, but I have seen a few Ruger and Winchester rifles with petaled barrels.
 
Back in the 70"s my Cousin had one split like a Bannana. The only thing we can figure that happened.
It had been snowing a wet sloppy snow and as he was hunting through the Aspens some snow fell in the barrel. Latter on it became real cold and possibly froze inside the barrel. He saw a Deer and the first shot split the barrel and blew part of the forend off. He set his Rifle down and asked my other cousin that was sitting next to him if he could use his rifle and killed the Deer he was shooting at.
Myself I think I would have shit my self if that happened to me.

There was a Rifle hanging on the wall at one of our Basque resturants that had a split barrel also. The Rifle is gone now.
 
Those sound like bore obstructions instead of what I thought the op was asking about. I've never heard that about Steyr, and frankly, would have to see it to believe they can hold up to a live round being fired with another bullet in the bore.
 
Huh..

Well, at least I'm not the only one who hasn't seen it! Thanks for the input, y'all. I'm not particularly concerned that my reloading practices may result in a really expensive grenade, but that question has been gnawing at me since I started seriously learning about reloading.. "Where are all the blown up bolt guns??!!"

Today I shot my first loads that were built based on a combination of what the manuals say, what my rifle has liked so far (the 11th round in this batch of 25 was my 100th round loaded to date!), and what I thought would probably be OK.

Left dot was shot off with 10 rounds of 37.5gr VV-N140 contained in CBC brass and propelling a 200 grain SMK seated at 2.82" COAL @ 100 yards.
Right dot was shot with 10 rounds of 37.0gr VV-N140 contained in CBC brass and propelling a 200 grain SMK seated at 2.82" COAL @ 100 yards.

The first five shots were steps of .2gr from 36.7gr to 37.5gr. When I tried 39gr in the CBC brass with 180gr SGK seated at 2.80" COAL, the group sucked and the bolt stuck on one of the rounds, so I got skeered. Oddly enough, that 5 shot group was better than the other two @ 5 shots, but my buddy shot up that target trying to sight in his AR, so I didn't take a picture.

Conditions were windy, and my shooting platform was a little awkward, but I'm very pleased with the results.

2013-05-20 23.33.06.jpg2013-05-20 23.33.22.jpg

[MENTION=9756]PCR[/MENTION] - That's wicked. I've heard of that kind of issue. It's why I've carried my rifle muzzle-up since I was a kid. If it's nasty out, then a piece of electrical tape on the muzzle takes care of that.
 
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Yes.

The only catastrophic failure of an M700 (or any other design) I ever actually witnessed did not involve the barrel, and was not caused by an overload. A case was overlong, jammed in the chamber neck, ruptured very convincingly, and locked up the bolt lugs permanently. The action was ruined, and the barrel/chamber end was expanded beyond repair/recovery. The shooter had proper protection and avoided injury. She was a beginning shooter, using her companion's rifle and handloads. Everyone involved was far luckier and unluckier than is the norm in such situations. When luck becomes a factor, you're doing something very wrong.

Catastrophic failures are more subtle than most believe. Most are the result of cumulative metal fatigue, and often occur with otherwise perfectly safe ammunition. The underlying cause is a stress insult to the system, where repetitive excessive pressures stress the system to the point where the mean time between failure, normally engineered to be so long as to be highly unlikely, becomes shorter and shorter, more and more likely. Eventually, one pressure cycle too many germinates the latent failure. At that point, any load can be the trigger event, and need not be an excessive one.

Greg
 
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Nothing is fool proof to a sufficently talented fool.
 
a booster of merc fulminate over a charge of RDX shoved into a casing. Would do interesting things.
 
The safety margin on actions and barrels is not as high as you might think if you're willing to add some stupid. A lot of what makes them reliable is due multiple inherent roadblocks - case capacity, using sane powders, that the brass fails first, etc. It's tough to get to kaboom without being really dumb about it.
 
turbo54 said:
Using appropriate powder, I don't think you could "blow" it up.

You can only squeeze 48 or 49gr of Varget under a 175smk, and that isn't going to blow the rifle apart. It will be overpressure and it will probably damage something, but I don't think it's going to grenade.

Even with 48 or 49gr Benchmark, I don't think it would grenade.

Fill the case to the brim with H335 (a bit fast but still "appropriate" for a 308) and it might break.

Fill the case with Titegroup, it'll definitely grenade.
Click to expand...

What about if there was an obstruction in the barrel? I blew up a Glock 22 performing fire-lapping on a new KKM barrel. Directions? Who needs Directions. I neglected to reduce the charge when firing lapping bullets. The increased friction caused it to KABOOM. Still have all my fingers and both eyes though, so I guess it was a cheap lesson. They say that any airplane crash you can walk away from is a good landing.
 
I'm with the OP on this one too. All these theoretical recipes... Can you blow up a Remington 700 action with a proper bullet and no barrel obstruction? Clearly serious damage can be done and ruin a rifle this way, but I have yet to see a pic of an action completely failed due only to load. Maybe because there would be too much blood involved. But honestly I just don't see how the "three rings of steel" could fail from the pressure pulse before the bullet exits the barrel.

Sure your bolt can jam, get some gas in the face and cause real injury, and the gun is for all intents ruined. But is it possible to truly explode an R700 action with nothing but the wrong powder? I find it hard to buy.

Now combine the wrong powder with too long of a trim length and MAYBE. But that still means that some lead, copper and brass withstood more pressure without failing than thick action steel.

Obviously RDX and a blocked barrel would hurt. But once again, why aren't there pics of people's actions gone TRULY kaboom after just grabbing the wrong powder? I don't think they exist.
 
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I think that's fair - the bolt action in general is a brilliant design, and they're really tough to blow up unless you're trying. That said, if you google a bit, you will find some blown up bolt guns. A quick search turned up a few. Usually, it's something like a duplex load or a barrel obstruction, but it of course *can* be done.
 
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