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...........