Our neighbor from Elysburg, PA, Braxton P. sends us a pretty riveting story about his buddy's close call at the range:
I was helping my friend do some load development for his new Remington 700 chambered in 300 RUM (Nightforce base and rings, Vortex Viper PST Gen I 6-24x50).
He had no luck with the 178 grain pills so I decided to have him try some 210's. I brought over my new cartridge comparator tool and got some numbers. We agreed to try out 89 grains of RL-25 (Nosler lists 90.5gr as max) with the bullets seated 0.005" off the lands. So we loaded up 4 rounds and went out back to see what we could do.
Very first shot something didn't seem right, I thought something had sounded a little off. My friend said, " I can't get the bolt up". I walked over to try it myself, and sure enough the bolt was practically frozen. It took him holding the gun down and me using both my hands to get the bolt up. As I slid the bolt back the first thing I noticed was a primer sliding around that was no longer in the case. The case was slightly stuck to the extractor as well. Upon further inspection the case head had a massive extractor mark and the bolt face had the imprint of the case manufacturer on it. The primer pocket was grossly expanded as well.
We went back inside to find out sure enough that he had the powder scale accidentally set to 99 grains instead of 89. 8.5 grains over max book listed charge!!
He was quite lucky there wasn't a catastrophic failure with the case or the gun. I just thought I would share with you guys this incident as its something I have only read about in my 10 years of reloading and is interesting to see (although very scary!) Be careful out there fellow reloaders!
Dang, you hate to hear stories like that, and we're glad that no one was hurt - always be extra careful when reloading.