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Posted: 6/11/2009 12:53:15 PM EDT
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I picked up a 500 round can of 5.56 Canned Heat (Factory Loaded) from Georgia Arms at a recent gun show. It was my first time purchasing through them so I have no history with their ammunition from a reliability perspective. Anyhow I took a couple of my ARs out to the range today and ran about 200 rds through one of my new rifles before I had a failure to feed. I didn't notice anything unusual about the recoil on the last shot but when I check the ejection port I noticed what appeared to be a partial case wedged to the inside of the upper receiver by the round being chambered. I glanced down at the table and noticed the upper half of a case laying just to my right. After I cleared the partial case I was able to pull the now bent partially chambered round out of the chamber. It appears that the bullet from the split case made it out of the barrel.
I hadn't noticed anything unusual from a random sampling of the cases fired prior to this event and the rifle appears to be fine. I'm trying to determine if this was a head space issue.. or a bad case. I am not the best photographer but I tried to get a picture of the primer as it appears to be flattened out a bit and pushed back. 
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I was feeling a bit ill when I tilted the rifle to check the ejection port and saw the goat rope going on inside.
| Thanks for the comparison photo... I'm going to wait until tomorrow morning (when it doesn't feel like I'm standing on the face of the Sun while in my garage) and give the rifle a thorough going over to verify it's still in good shape. I didn't get a chance to shoot it anymore during the range trip and honestly wasn't comfortable with the idea even though initial inspection didn't indicate any damage to the rifle. |
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Headspace issues are really rare, especially with new rifles
I guarantee it was just a weak case wall. When I assembled my SBR i never even checked the headspacing. It still shoots great, and after about 4 -5k of ammo my case head seperation was the 2nd jam the rifle has ever had(first being mag related) As long as this doesn't happen again with good ammo I would cough it up to be just a bad casing. If it happens again with different ammo I would take it to a gunsmith immediately. |
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Quoted:
Machine gun brass................ Nah. M249s don't do what old M60s used to do to cases. If it had been originally fired in a 249, you might see scratches from the links and gouges in the rim, but the Army is actually funded well enough to replace barrels before they're hosed, unlike 20 years ago or so when they'd run M60s forever with shot-out barrels. |
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