What happened?

[flydoc]

I want to know if anyone has had this experience or has a theory as to why this event happened. My buddy came over today to site in his CVA .45 Hawkin. He has hunted with it for several years. He had a brand new stainless nipple on it, but nothing else was changed. He later said it was listed as a CVA nipple, and when he installed it , it threaded on smoothly and firmly. I watched him measure 65 grains of pyrodex P , poured it in, carefully tamped in a patched .440 round ball, that inserted with mild resistance, down to the mark on the ramrod, then tamped it a few times more, capped it and fired it. The round went an inch high at 12:00. He swabbed the barrel with a dry brush, repeated the whole process again as before. I watched as he meticulously went through the same process. This time the report was louder. I was sitting on the right of the bench, observing through the spotting scope and saw the round hit over 10 inches higher than the first. We were pondering the result , when he looked at the rifle and saw the nipple was missing, there was a chunk of metal torn from the front of the hammer, and above us, slightly to his right and behind us there was a new hole in the patio umbrella we had overhead. The nipple launched out of the rifle, flew up and backwards through the umbrella to parts unknown. The bolster had torn threads where the nipple used to be. Needless to say we were awestruck and saying our thanks to the Man upstairs. Now I know the powder was 65 grains, was from the same canister the first shot came from, the primers were the same, and he had run a pick through the nipple hole before reloading. The ramrod was seated to the full depth as we both saw the mark on the ramrod at the rifle's muzzle. Anybody see this happen before, any thoughts? Metal fatigue?

[johnson1942]

you didnt do anything,wrong, that i can see from what you wrote. i have a friend that the whole back of his cva came apart with 70 grains of pyrodex, he didnt do anything wrong either. bad gun unless something else is amiss. are you sure the nipple was of the right threads. a few years back a few of the mag spark nipples were made bad and i had one blow apart like a bomb. lucky i wasnt hurt also. cva needs to replace that gun or fix it. im going to watch this post closely as maybe someone has a answer i want to learn from.

[square butte]

Gona bet that the new nipple that your friend installed was not a proper thread match for the drum.

[FrontierMuzzleloading]

could very well have been the wrong size of nipple. Ive shot thousands upon thousands of shots through cva and multiple sidelock brands over the past 15 years and never had anything like that happen until I tried a mag spark adapter and it was a manf. flaw they admitted to.

What conditions the nipple threads " the drum threads, not the nipple itself" are always in question when a nipple blows out. This is actually one reason stopped production was due to blown nipples from rusted/corroded/ poor shape threads after misuse/cleaning.


Right now I am well over 2,000 shots in a cva hawken .58cal barrel I installed 3 years ago. That rifle has shot everything from simple 60gr laods to 120gr loads with no issues BUT I do check my nipple threads often for breakage. This area is probably one of the most important areas to check after each cleaning. I know I have one sidelock in the closet I will not shoot due to the nipple threads being broken towards the bottom.

[SSGOldfart]

Yep wrong nipple if it was a HOT shot nipple,the hole size is larger and the under side is tapered to insure a hotter shot from your cap was the caps the same it can be easy to get them mixed up while shooting during the off season.:shock:

[swathdiver]

CVA thread for the cones are 6mm x 1mm. It could also be corrosion in the cone area and threads that caused the kablewee, especially when messing with that Pyrodex stuff. Folks sell the bolsters on ebay and places like Rightnoor Manufacturing. The hammer can be found on ebay or Deer Creek Products.

Sure that's a Hawken and not a Frontier or Mountain Rifle? I don't remember Hawken's coming in anything smaller than .50.

[Boogieman]

Track of the Wolf has 7-.1mm nipples to replace damaged 6-.1mm the drum must be retaped.

[Omnivore]

It's hard to say, but mismatched or defective threads will certainly do it. If nothing was wrong with the load, I can see both the apparently louder report and the high hit. Apparently louder because more pressure is vented toward your listening position behind the rifle, and a higher hit because that often happens with a lower velocity launch as the gun has more time to jump before the bullet leaves it, meaning the launch angle is higher.

If the thread pitch is slightly off, as in a case where you have a metric and a SAE thread which are very close but not exact, then the load is carried by far less sheer area, so the pressure is concentrated on fewer threads. That part starts to go, and now the pressure is concentrated on some other small area, and that goes, and then Ka-boom.

That all seems very plausible, but then again; stranger things do happen, and what you both think you could have sworn you saw is sometimes not what you saw. That's not an insult. It happens. That's how a certain Mars lander ended up drilling a very large hole in the surface of Mars while all systems were operating nominally, going at hypersonic speed when it was intended to make a soft landing-- Something about feet verses kilometers per second, or other mistaken units of measure.

Not too long ago, someone either on this forum or some other, said he was using a charge of x grams. Well it turned out he meant grains, and mistyped. Right numbers, right practices, right everything else, wrong units. Both start with a "G" and end with an "S" but confusing the two could be deadly. We use grains and Europeans often use grams, and so...

I once stood next to a guy at the range who had very meticulously calibrated his scales, and then carefully measured and double checked his powder charge. Twice, thus double charging a pistol case with smokeless powder. Everything was exactly as it should have been. He had assured me, and himself, that since he was so careful in measuring, everything was fine. Except that the powder had been put in the case twice instead of the prescribed once. He got respectable 44 Magnum energy too...from a 40 S&W Glock. I had set up my chronograph to clock his hand loads. There wasn't a whole lot of blood, but the gun was history. Very impressive though. His wounds healed up fairly well.

[Fly]

CVA makes a very good side fire muzzle loader. I been shooting them for many years & never seen that happen.
Was that a preowned gun. It sounds as the others said the wrong nipple or if it was preowned the threads may have been stripped.

Fly

[flydoc]

The nipple was the first thing I suspected, and he thought it was a standard CVA 6mm thread and felt it threaded on appropriately, and snug. I will ask if it was a Hot Shot . This was only the second nipple on the gun. I'm just grateful it didn't hit one of us. I'll check to see if it was pre-owned.

[Omnivore]

Sorry to belabor the point, but one's eyes and brains can and do work together to deceive you. A fellow on another forum recently showed a photograph of what was labeled, new, as a Remington revolver parts kit. Inside were Colt parts, but nonetheless he saw fit to display the photo to see what the rest of us thought. Now, he would have been able to tell you, without the label, the difference between a Colt hammer and a Remington hammer without much thought, but the label had him confused.

One night driving home in a snowstorm with my family aboard, my eyes and brain conspired to tell me that a stopped car was on the right-hand side of the road ahead. I therefore aimed my five thousand pound vehicle, with its four occupants, to the stopped car's left. In fact the stopped car, with more people in it, was on the left, so I was aiming my family and I off the road. Snow over sheet ice, with little room for any correction after I had realized my mistake. Multiple deaths were very, VERY narrowly avoided that night.

[johnson1942]

just a thought, is he sure the ball was all the way down the bore and resting on the powder. check and see if the barrel is ringed. just a thought

[FrontierMuzzleloading]

theres a video of someone showing you what can happen with a sidelock muzzy and smokeless powder. After it finally blew up, the cva kentuckys breech plug and nipple were still intact. Its a strong system, so I'd suspect either incorrect nipple size or damaged threads in the first place. You just never know when something goes wrong. Inspect, inspect, inspect.

[Maven]

Very glad you and your friend weren't injured, flydoc!

[flydoc]

Talked to my buddy and he said the rifle was pre-owned, so the possibility of a prior nipple change with the wrong thread size is a possibility. The nipple he installed was standard, not a Hot Shot. Time for a new bolster and hammer. As far as the seating depth goes, I watched him tamp it down several times and check the seating-depth mark on the ramrod. so that was probably not the issue.

[Tackleberry41]

Those nipples can be hard to buy for even those who know a little bit. I bought I don't know how many trying to find one that fit my old CVA kit rifle. And yes were some that almost fit.

Guess I need one for my Lyman, it fires it cuts out a little disc that blocks the nipple. Plus its good to have extra or 2. Might be easier to send of to ask them. Its an older 70s era rifle, but made over seas so may or may not be metric.

[pietro]

.


I'm glad that nobody hurt anyhing more than their feelings.

YMMV, but I would never use Pyrodex-P (pistol) powder in a rifle because AFAIK it burns faster than Pyrodex-R (rifle).

.

[Boogieman]

there are 2 metric nipple threads ,CVA use a 6-.1mm Lyman use 6-.75mm . I would guess the previous owner put in a Lyman nipple and damaged thw threads. Older CVA guns could be a standard thread.

[oldracer]

Some things to think about along with the other posts. Hodgdon's web site says to measure Pyrodex loads by VOLUME (their caps, not mine) due to the increased power of Pyrodex over black powder. I noted on the Possibleshop's web site there are several 6 mm nipples available and 6 x 1 and 6 x .75 are pretty darn close to the same and if the rifle's threads are worn then either will fit. I bought a metric thread gauge checker and it was hard to find one with 6 x .75 mm gauge. I check the nipples I use as my CVA's all are 6 x 1 mm and all the others are 1/4 x 28. I bought some extra nipples for my rifles and keep them in small labeled zip lock bags just to be sure after checking to see what they were.

One of the shops in the San Diego area has a box with probably 100+ nipples in it and they are all loose and if you want one you have to have your own measure since they do not? They also have some on little card board backers but the owner said when he gets and order, they are all in one bag!

[fouronesix]

According to Lyman data, a 65gr charge of Pyrodex P under a PRB should generate about 12000 psi which should be well within the operating range of the rifle. And FYI, 65 gr of Pyrodex P is about the equivalent of 86 gr GOEX FFF for volume load.

Probably never know the cause but my money would be on partially stripped or cross-threaded threads in the nipple seat either from screwing in nipple incorrectly or using nipple of wrong size or wrong pitch. The threads in the bolster/drum finally gave way.

[FrontierMuzzleloading]

pyro p is fine, ive used it in my 58cal with no issues. Its 3fg grade and thats ok.