Catastrophe Strikes The Reloading Room

[USARO4]

I walked out to my reloading/casting/gun/den/workshop this morning and saw to my chagrin that my pine shelves holding my stored ammo had collapsed scattering dozens of boxes of reloads and factory ammo all over my workbench and the floor. Many had burst open and scattered the contents everywhere. It's my own fault ,they were secured to the 2x4 wall studs with nails. I've told my self many times those shelves were getting a lot of weight on them. I've tried to post pictures to show what it used to look like, now it's a mess. I'm talking about thousands of rounds from 22 to 45. What a mess.

[Uncle Grinch]

I hope you are able to salvage the reloads, ie... tell which loads are which.

I keep all my heavy items on the bottom two shelves or either stored in ammo cans in my shop.

Good luck undoing the mess!

[Sundogg1911]

I have 10's of thousands of cast boolits on shelves in my basement. I make them strong enough to hold an elephant! I've had shelves collapse in the past and it's no fun. One of the shelves for the cast boolits is mounted to the underside of the bench that hold my Dillon progressives. when I use the Dillons the bench never even moves enough to put a ripple in my beverage. :-)

[jhalcott]

I USED to take my test loads to the range in 100 round boxes. Each load was in a separate line with a rolled up note telling me what was in THAT line. One morning a fellow club member and his young son were there. The boy knocked my box onto the floor!!! I let the kid shoot the gun for grins (HIS not mine) as he had never fired a rifle before. NOW I take my ammo to the range in little plastic baggies. One weekend my buddy and I decided to make ingots of the lead and WW's on hand. We put the ingots in a 5 gallon bucket to take them to the storage area. When my buddy tried to pick up the bucket, the handle broke. He landed hard but was unhurt. Crap happens. Fred, another friend who sho trap had his grand kids over for a weekend. They got into his supply of shot and spilled it ALL over his basement floor.He landed hard too!

[USARO4]

Well I finally got it all put back together. The shelves are woodscrewed into the studs with heavy duty screws. Here's some pics of my reloading room. A special thanks to Scrounger for the PM on how to post pictures, I've been trying for 6months. All the shelves below the top one with powder had hit the floor or workbench.

[broomhandle]

Hi Usa,

You have a nice setup there! Every thing seems to have a place and is eazy to find! I have a type of orderly disorder. (Smile)

I'm glad you were able to get it back in shape so fast.

Be Well, broomhandle

[mooman76]

I often have nightmares of this happening. I have a shelf screwed to wall full of brass and some cast boolits. I stacked a bunch of cast in plastic milk containers set up like a small shelf. It looked like it would hold but when summer hit the plastic softened and dumped most everything. Luckly most the containers held up or spilt small quantities. Not much loss and what was I could melt again!

[gregg]

Nice very nice.
My place looks like a stick of TnT went off in the area. Aaa Well I don't
think I will post a picture to show you all.

[Edward429451]

I had that happen last year. My nice glass shelving unit that the wife bequeathed to me when she got another one collapsed and dumped over 1000 rounds on the floor, what a mess.

Good reloading notes including how many rounds in each batch allowed me to pain stakingly ID and repackage every single round with no missing rounds or mystery rounds left over.

[454PB]

I bought several of the metal shelving units at Home Depot, then placed swivel casters on sheets of plywood and placed the metal shelves on the "cart" so that the whole thing can be moved or rolled out of the way for cleaning. It works great, but it's amazing how much horspower it takes to move them, even on the casters.

[Lloyd Smale]

i once had one of my cast bullet storage shelves collapse and ended up with two 5 gallon pails of sized and lubed bullets i had to remelt. The floor in the barn is dirt and the all went in the dirt. I know how you feel.

[eka]

Looks like a very nice stress reducing area.

[tommag]

I could have sympathized with you until you posted your pics. It appears that your bench with everyting topsy-turvy might have looked better than mine does without shelf-collapse!
Hopefully you were able to figure it out to the point that you didn't have to pull down much ammo and use the powder for fertilizer!

[smokemjoe]

In 1972 I was working in Denver Col. Stopped at a garage sale, The fellow worked in a well know gov. place, The garage was full of 5 gallon bullets full of 45 acp,loaded and new 45 bullets, 22 Low. Vel., 30-06 loaded and gov. bullets, shotshells and you name it, All mixed up, a real mess. He siad he has a small fire when gone and fire dept came in and put the fire out in the next room, Then they went into the gun room and with the fire hose, hosed it all down to the floor.

[USARO4]

Tommag, those pictures are after I cleaned up the mess and made it real pretty so I could post them. It doesnt always look that way. All those white ammo boxes were laying all over the bench and floor. Through process of elimination I was able to salvage 95% of the rounds and get them sorted. The few mystery rounds that I'm not sure of will be shot through Ruger Blackhawks, I never load anything hot enough to blow one of them up.

[1Shirt]

My horror story with ammo was when I shipped over 1500 rds. from Pa. to Alaska on a move. When the crate holding the ammo arrived, I knew that I had a problem because it was not the same crate that I had shipped it in. Had mostly 06, 30-30, 357, 44 Mag, 223, and 243. When I opened the crate, the inside crate was what I had shipped, and it had been busted open and just dumped into the crate outside crate. Took me a few days to figure out what I had, as most were in factory boxes or in plastic ammo boxes, and most of them were opened and the ctgs. spilled out. I was able to seperate and rebox some of them by blt. type and mfg, but not all. After I had gotten through sorting and reboxing what I was sure of, I still had over half of them unidentified by load, and it was easier to shoot them off rather than pull to salvage blts. As close as I could figure, I was missing 60 rounds of 30-30 ammo in the process. Some of those 30-30 loads were quite hot for bolt action, and not for my 94. If as I figure it, some mover/packer in Pa. got them for deer season, hope he was lucky enough not to have the a rifle blow on him!
1Shirt!:coffeecom

[Buckshot]

..........Heh, heh! Talk about a MESS! :groner:. We had a pet Raccoon (Tinker) and at the time he still wasn't too big. Maybe about 15 lbs or so. Teenage size :-). Donna had been after me to get him a cage built outside. I'd give the old, "Okay Honey", thing. Now he was litter box trained and a total gas to fool with, and was about like a dog, except when he wanted to play. You WOULD play! I had a big cage in the utility room for him. It was 2' high, 3' wide and 5' long made of 2x2's and aviary wire, plus a similarly constructed top.

My next younger brother was a doctor in the Army at the time and was flying in after the Persian Gulf war. We were going to pick him up at the airport then go to my folk's place for a BBQ. So Tinker got food and water and put into his cage. I forget now what we put on top of the lid of the cage to kep it on at night and it was never a problem. This time it was. We were gone about 8 hours and I guess it was because the house was so quiet that he got bored. He didn't lift the top off to get out, but slid it enough so he could squeeze out.

So for 8 hours he had free reign in the utility room. Thank God the door to the kitchen had been closed! The utility room was where I did all my gun stuff. He'd gotten up in the cabinets above the counter and had obviously had a gay ole time manuevering around back and forth. Almost everything that had been in them was on the counter or the floor. Cases, primers, tools, boxes of ammo, gun cleaning stuff, etc & etc.

The cabinets below the counter were deeper and he'd dragged out bags of shotgun wads and hulls, my hunting daypack and bunches of magazines (print material). Since it was the utility room, there was a washer and dryer in there. He'd managed to pull down or push out the box of detergent and it was all over along with some other laundry stuff.

I don't know how long it took him to do all that, or if it happened in stages. But what else he managed to do was to peel back about 2 feet of the linoleum from under the kitchen door. The kitchen and utility room were both done in linoleum and there was a seam right under the door. Since the furnace return was in the utility room, the bottom of the door had a grill for airflow, but it was also about an inch short of the floor.

Now if you were bored, but very industrious and had these handy little hands with claws on them, that seam could be inviting. Especially if you were reaching under the door trying somehow to get into the kitchen where the refridgerator is. He knew ALL ABOUT that, and what kind of goodies came out of it. It was a side by side and we'd had to run a coat hanger through the handles as a safety precaution.

You'd be right if you thought that the War Dept was not pleased, and if that I had gotten sailing orders complete with a deadline and ultimatum upon our discovery! Tinker's cage lid got wired down at night from then on, until his outside cage was done [smilie=l:

...............Buckshot

[USARO4]

That story sounds almost as bad as when my sister's pet monkey got loose in our Mom's kitchen while we were away from home. There was'nt a food nor spice container left unopened and its contents randomly ditributed over countertops, walls, ceiling, floor, etc. And then to show his ultimate contempt for his human cousins he added various bodily functions matter over the whole display. He went on to even greater incidents before she finally got rid of him.