A video showing the explosion of a 50 cal rifle, and some of the physical damage it did. If it would of happened to me and I had lived thru it, I would not only thank God, I would move into the church. Most of it is on medical wonders that he lived, but some shows that some of the things he did helped as well. The actual explosion is shown at 4 min 30 seconds, but it is all worth watching. Lessons learned, safety can save your life and never use ammo that is an unknown history. He was shooting armor piercing ammo that was made many years ago and didn't know if it had been stored properly or maybe even been reloaded. A very good if a little long discussion on why and what caused the failure and examples of others. Well worth reading for the examples of how Mr. Mauser and Mr Browning in their designs tried their best to save both your life and body parts. A little technical, but at least to me a very good view. While it doesn't openly mention the rifle that blew up, not due to a failure in the design, it does indicate that Mr Mauser in his design tried to minimize such a failure. We often forget that the materials available to the really great designers in the past were by today's standards very substandard and the machining of that material left much to desire. They had to design for when it failed, not if it failed.
If you read this earlier, after a couple more hours down the rabbit hole, I added a section on designing for a failure well worth reading.
WHOA! Talk about a lucky guy! Not much else to say but I bet he won't ever shoot unknown ammo again...neither will I.
Serbu screw on breech cap vs Barrett big ass locking lugs, outcome would have been way better with the latter.
Another big safety factor is firing sabot rounds through a muzzle break. Barret rifles have their muzzle breaks machined to allow for the use of sabots
You don't shoot sabot rounds through a muzzle break! That rifle design doesn't allow for venting in over pressure situations. It is possible the powder didn't age well, or was reloaded. That incident was mainly due to ignorance.
This is just proof of the adage "You get what you pay for". I've owned and been shooting .50 cals for a couple of decades now. When they first starting gaining popularity in the late 90's they were very expensive. A lot of companies then and since have tried to come out with "more affordable" ones. In other words, cheaper made. This led to a string of failures like in the video. The .50 cal shooters boards were filled with warnings about the different, dangerous, and junk guns on the market. .50's are a safe and extremely fun to shoot rifle but the chamber pressures are nothing to take lightly. It doesn't matter what ammo you shoot in them, if they are cheaply made you are taking your life in your hands. I have shot a lot of milsurp, including AP, API, and APIT. Those rounds were made for the M2 machine gun and like all machine gun ammo the powder load can vary somewhat from round to round. That variant usually is not enough to make much of a difference except in ballistics. But it is possible to get an extremely hot round that could possibly damage a quality firearm and almost certainly damage or even destroy a cheap one. I have a lot of milsurp I use for practice, especially the API as it makes it easier for the spotter to see the hit with it. But for competition I only shoot quality, expensive, factory ammo. So yes, it is true, you do get what you pay for. Especially in something as powerful as a .50 cal, spend the extra money now and you might well save the hospital and or funeral costs later. "The Serbu RN-50 was put out so cheap it’s allowed anyone to be able to afford a 50 caliber rifle. However one of the ways costs were kept down was by skipping out on some key safety features that are present in most firearms" Serbu RN-50 Found this, part of a video that Mark Serbu came out with to respond to this. Sounds like some CYA to me. "Mark Serbu, the designer of the rifle that exploded, also released a video to “assure people that the RN-50 is a safe gun … regardless of, yeah, it blew up and almost killed a guy.” “Guns blow up every day, but it’s not talked about a lot,” Serbu said, saying the detonation of a “screwy” round “would have blown up any gun.”"
50bmg only runs at 55,000 to 60,000 psi depending on the testing standard, same as a 5.56. But the 50 is loaded with something like 250 gr of powder.
His 50 cal blew up with a load in the 120,000 psi range, methinks he got a homemade SLAP round and it damned near killed him.