We need a new category... Blunders and miscues?

[Crash_Corrigan]

I'm back with another stupid episode. I moved last summer from my tin trailer into a lovely rental home here in Las Vegas. However for many reasons I have yet to fully unpack my stuff properly.

I fell in love with a Mihec mold recently and bought it. It is supposed to cast 130 gr 9mm boolits without lube grooves. It is designed to allow easy powder coating of the boolit and thereby negate the lube that smokes up so badly.

I got busy and cast about 600 or so of these babies in the 8 cavity mold. They were beautiful. I then PC'd about 500 of them in a nice Bacon Grease color coating. I was proud of myself for doing such a good job. I then set up my new Dillon XL 650 press and proceeded to load 300 or so with a loading of 5.6 Gr of AA #5 and a OAL of 1.075. After I had boxed the last of 6 boxes of new ammo I decided to put one into the chamber of my Browning Hi-Power.

It went in until the last 1/8 of an inch. There it stuck. The boolit was too fat. I had not found my calipers yet. I searched in vain for days in my overflowing garage in the miserable heat of Las Vegas. I finally just ordered a set from FS Reloading and they arrived in two days. My boolits were coming up as anywhere from .362 to .364 in diameter and as such did not fit at all. I looked for my cage gauge in 9MM and my sizing dies in .357. Again no joy and I ordered new ones. While awaiting the arrival of these I put away the Browning and forgot about it.

Some days later I ran across the Browning and noticed that the slide was not in battery. I pushed on it and it was sticking. I was thinking ahead(too much) of having this weapon looked at by a gunsmith and anticipating another expensive repair when I managed to close the slide. Now I then tried to pull it open, without success. Somehow I managed to get the pistol to work.

Yes! That fat boolit worked just fine....the Browning belched out that boolit to my surprise from the business end of the barrel. The round went through the opened door of the room. It made neat little round holes through both sides of the wooden interior door and continued into the adjacent wall.

It made a neat hole in my side of the wall but a nasty hole on the other side of the wall which happened to be my kitchen. It missed the cat relieving himself in the cat box and plowed into the floor about 6 inches from the edge of a built in cabinet. The cat erupted from the toilet facility with a major yowl and hiked himself into the bedroom and was not found for hours and hours.

The boolit was not yet done...it gouged out a 2 inch chunk of the linoleum and concrete floor spattering the kitchen with pieces of lead, flooring and powder coating flakes as far as 8 feet away as it punched into the wooden cabinet at about an 1 inch altitude. It apparently stopped there as nothing exited from the base of the cabinet adjacent to the refrigerator.

Anybody got a decent way to fix the gouge in the floor and camoflauge the damage so I do not have to pay to have the kitchen refloored? The holes in the wall and the door are a easy fix with the right sized corks and spackle and paint. The floor not so much.

Hey at least I missed killing the cat...........

[DerekP Houston]

Yikes!

[MyFlatline]

Dang, now that's a story.

[groundsclown]

First off, glad you & your cat are ok & the only victims are some flooring, cabinets & walls.
Obviously wood putty for the wood work & Spackle for the drywall will take care of those.
The linoleum I'd start by looking behind the fridge against the wall & see if you can cut a small square to fit what you'll need...then simply push the fridge back & hopefully no one will be the wiser.
Cut out the damaged, fill with filler then glue down your newly acquired patch.

Many many years ago when I was young & dumb (now I'm older & wiser) I broke my left arm at the wrist. 2 weeks went by in a cast and I was about 2 weeks away from beginning the police academy. Knowing full well they wouldn't allow me to begin classes with the injury, I cut the cast off...<rolls eyes> & thought it would be a grand idea to see if I could handle the 92f that I planned on using. Dropped the mag but didn't check the chamber...sent a speer gold dot thru the bedroom wall, into the kitchen, downward into the cabinets, thru the Tupperware (unknowingly) and came to rest somewhere on the other side in the exterior wall.
I managed to hide & patch all the damage before my better half came home. Only the dog & I knew what happened & he wasn't going to rat me out...But the damn Tupperware spilled the beans. Frags of gold dot actually. Weeks later my wife went to get a container & asked why a hole & pieces of copper jacket was in her Tupperware....DOH!!!!

[Tom W.]

Gotta watch where you put your fingers...

I'll bet the cat looks at you somewhat askance now.....or maybe just glares......

[runfiverun]

cat'll never use the litter box again either..

the best your gonna do with the linoleum is to cut a patch from somewhere else, match it in and glue the whole area down nice and smooth.

[308Jeff]

Yeah, that linoleum isn't hard to do, just takes patience to make it look good.

[308Jeff]

Oh yeah, I assume that username was earned.

[frkelly74]

Replace the floor make your repairs. It's called tuition.

[samari46]

Wife dropped a hot frying pan on the kitchen floor. We had those peel and stick tiles on the floor. Used a box cutter to cut out the melted areas and since I had extra tiles cleaned off the old glue with acetone and made a patch out of one of the spare tiles. came out almost invisible as far as matching up the pattern. Frank

[Tom W.]

cat'll never use the litter box again either..


Probably won't need to for a while......

[Crash_Corrigan]

The poor cat's name is Sir George. I am thinking about changing it to Sir George III. I would say it as Sir George da turd. He still won't look at me!

[Thundarstick]

I have a friend who, while preparing to clean his 380, put a HP round through his left hand!

[kungfustyle]

well at least the cat was in the right spot when you scared the **** out of it. I bet you had to change your shorts too.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Cats have it too easy. If you are generous enough to want your landlord to remain serene and untroubled, you could carve a hard knot out of a similar piece of wood. Drill the bullet hole a little smaller, ream it with some kind of blunt rotary... er... thing, to make the grain swirl around the hole, hammer the knot in tightly with a little glue, and finish off flush.

In the early 1990s I had a couple of interesting experiences with the Portuguese Guedes, which has a hammer with fixed striker inside the breechblock. In my relatively youthful innocence I used a small charge of slow powder, because slow sounded safer. One or two shots showed very modest pressure indications, but then a small piece blew out of the centre of the primer, which I can only think was due to a very brief hangfire allowing the hammer to bounce. The hammer broke the fiendishly complex mainspring, so now I know I can carve and heat-treat a replacement from a piece of truck spring.

I later worked up a very reassuring load with Reloder 7, but that still went nowhere near filling the case. My standard practice was to use a kapok filler, from cigarette filter tips, which I still think was the right one. But kapok positions the powder, and doesn't influence the volumetric ratio. So I thought "What about a denser filler which burns away on its way down the bore?" So I filled up the case with some really bad black powder which was available in the UK then. I reasoned that a feeble load plus part of a feeble load wouldn't add up to more than a moderate load, and indeed the primer and case deformation, and chronographed velocity, agreed with that.

But... With the first and only two shots I fired, the case necks, made from modern .348 Winchester, were wrenched off and carried down the bore with the bullet. This was an almost excessively interesting experience. Dr. Franklin Mann, in 1910, obtained the same result by the experimental use of sand, presumably in a condemned barrel. It is known that dry sandbags will stop a bullet in less distance than damp ones, into which it is harder to poke your finger at finger velocity. I suppose that in the absence of lubricating moisture, it has more of a tendency to momentarily lock together, and into brass.

We live and learn. Both, preferably.

[OS OK]

I have a friend who, while preparing to clean his 380, put a HP round through his left hand!

Did he get good expansion?

Yep, have a friend up country from me...took the little and ring fingers off the left hand, 1911.
There is a procedure for handling weapons especially a semi auto pistol...you break it, well...
You have to handle an auto like your handling rattle snakes...elsewize, the day is coming and your gonna get got!

[bedbugbilly]

Just two words . . . . "dummy round"

And I don't think there would be enough server space of the forum you suggest . . . .

Glad no one got hurt but the cat only has 8 lives left now.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I have a friend who, while preparing to clean his 380, put a HP round through his left hand!

If a man can't put a bullet through his own hand, whose can he? Unless it hit solid enough bone for a fragment-extracting session (What fun!), I doubt if the hollow point made any difference.

[runfiverun]

I think Crash just wants to see me get another 5-K posts telling about the dumb stuff I have done.

[popper]

I suppose the thread would be limited to gun stuff - else the 'forgot to put the drain plug in' and 'flying W' stuff will show up too. I did take out a chunk on floor with a 308W cast from 6". Never found any sign of boolit. Got some concrete splatters though. AR10 will slam fire.