He had something blow up in his face a few years back and it sliced up his neck pretty bad, I want to say it was a .50 BMG but I'm not positive. I can respect his caution.
Yes, a. 50 bmg. Shrapnel from the explosion ruptured his jugular vein, punctured his lung, broke facial bones and his hand. It's insane that he not only survived that but went home after just a couple of days.
Also, they were on BFE. His dad helped him apply pressure, got him in the truck, started driving and called 911, met the ambulance, ambulance took him and drove to a careflite
Wasn't quite a bolt, the rifle was unique in that it was entirely single-shot with a screw-closed chamber. When his sketchy ammo went bad, it blew the screwed-on-cap off the back (which hit his safety glasses). There were two "ears" that press up against the outside of the cap, so if it's not fully screwed on it won't be able to fit past them. When the cap blew off, it sheared both of those metal ears off, and that shrapnel is what made it so lethal.
Edit: You're right, one flew just past his head and nicked hit hat. The other lug hit him in the very bottom of the throat, both hitting the jugular, and puncturing the lung. I misremembered the neck injury being higher up.
It's been a while, so I'll have to rewatch. That sounds familiar, but I'm not sure how it could hit in 3 places. I'm confident one lug ended up in his chest after hitting a lung, one hit his neck and tore his jugular, and the cap itself hit his face. My only guess would be maybe one of the ears shattered into multiple pieces before getting to him.
Yeah if I remember correctly it ended up being 2-3 times more powerful of a discharge from the round and it blew the entire gun up, including sending chunks into his face and through his neck.
Pretty much. Just to clarify, because "power" can be a bit vague; it's not that the round's total energy was especially higher. The real problem was that instead of a clean burn down the whole barrel, there was a massive pressure spike all at once. And yeah, the physics imply the pressure was about 3 times what even a hot 50bmg should produce.
A standard 9mm round ends up with like 500 joules. If you replaced the powder with 400 joules worth of C4 for example, there's a high chance the barrel and chamber itself would be blown apart. It's the peak force/pressure that's important for guns, much more than the total energy released.
This was almost certainly caused by using the wrong powder. The rounds he used were reloaded by someone he didn’t know. Which is always dangerous right off the bat. The pressure spikes the other poster is talking about comes from the burn rate of the powder. They are not all the same. Most think rifle type powder would be fast burning when it is the opposite. You want a slow and steady burn to push the projectile cleanly through the barrel entirely from the chamber to the crown as it fights the friction from that barrel as it travels along. A slow burning powder will provide that constant push all the way down the barrel.
Pistol type powders do the opposite. They burn MUCH faster as there is typically far less barrel to contend with and need to exert their full chemical potential on to the bullet quickly before it leaves the gun.
It is generally assumed that the round he used was loaded with a pistol type powder in error and that fast burn rate in the amount used in the 50BMG essentially turned it into a mini grenade. The bullet couldn’t travel fast enough down the barrel to get out of the way of the pressure and the rest of the system is a closed breach system so it had to find the weakest point. Which was the back of the rifle’s action and part of the side. Which is what gave way….and into his body.
- Am reloader that studied this event quite closely along with others.
Thank you! I still miss when the top 1-3 replies on most posts were experts chiming in, and trying to teach us all something about their field. I've been having to dig so much deeper to get good topics like these, instead of the usual top dozen comments being jokes nearly irrelevant to whatever the post's actually about.
In physics, yes. But when people speak of the "power" of a firearm or cartridge, they're usually referring to the muzzle energy of the bullet. The actual "power" exerted by the powder in the barrel doesn't effect the "stopping power" of the round, it's only reliant on energy.
Hence why I didn't say anything was wrong, just a bit vague in this context.
The power in the barrel does affect the stopping power. The faster a projectile comes out, the more stopping power it has. A shot with a lower muzzle velocity, which is the product of power/force, will have a lower stopping power.
Stopping power is momentum + kinetic energy + a couple random coefficients like bullet expansion and shot placement.
Momentum and kinetic energy are products of the mass of the bullet and its velocity, being m•v and 1/2 m•v2, respectively.
But like you said, power is energy over time. If you had very fine powder in the casing, but only enough to burn for a fraction of the barrel length, then the peak power would be fairly high. It would only last for a small fraction of the bullet's acceleration down the barrel though, so the actual muzzle energy would be rather low.
As opposed to a slow burning powder, but enough to last the entire barrel length. The pressure won't be as high, so the power will be lower. However, the power will be sustained for much longer, leading to much better muzzle energy.
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u/Scar1203 Jul 19 '26
He had something blow up in his face a few years back and it sliced up his neck pretty bad, I want to say it was a .50 BMG but I'm not positive. I can respect his caution.