As I posted earlier my participation in a USPSA match today was cut short by catastrophic equipment failure. Even having only completed three and zeroing three stages I still didn’t come in dead last:

For some reason they have me listed as being in Open class instead of Limited. I sent them email asking that they correct the error.

They had a very “interesting” stage where you ran about 15 yards to the first five paper targets then ran about another 15 yards to some more paper targets and around the corner there was a Texas Star and three poppers 31 yards away:

A Texas Star is challenging under most any circumstances but 31 yards is almost obscene. Without going to Idaho I don’t have access to a place where I can shoot targets at 31 yards. This was evident in my performance. It took me several shots to discover I needed to hold at the top edge of the plates to hit them. Many people left some and at least one person left all of the plates as misses.

This was another “interesting” stage. The start position was facing up range with your hands on the X’s:

It was very awkward. And the taller you were the more difficult it was.

I went to a USPSA match today and my gun barrel fractured and locked up my gun. This is a cropped version of the picture I tweeted about shortly after the incident:

Robb Allen almost immediately asked the obvious question, “Your own loads or factory?” And of course the answer was they were rounds I had loaded myself. In many situations this would be the end of the story. The shooter had a squib (a round with no or insufficient powder) which resulted in a bullet stuck in the barrel and the next round set off the automatic self-destruct sequence of events. Another way it could have happened was a round got double charged or the wrong powder was used. In any case it is relatively easy and frequent that handloaders blow up their guns through their own carelessness.

But as Ry pointed out the head of the shell casing is still there which probably means there wasn’t an over pressure event involved. I was able to hammer the gun open far enough for the shell casing to drop out and confirmed Ry’s suspicion:

This is a perfectly normal looking piece of brass. Even the primer looks normal so there was no overpressure event involved. I tried putting it in the case gauge and it would only go in about halfway. The chamber of barrel is now, of course, large than spec and the brass expanded just a bit more than normal even though it can’t be seen with the naked eye.

I tried for quite a bit to get the gun open in the hopes that I could remove the barrel but I wasn’t able to get it open any beyond this:

You can’t see it in the photograph but the feed ramp also split.

I finally just closed it up:

I don’t know what the root cause was. I wonder if it wasn’t a timing issue which caused some abnormal stress because I had a broken link with this barrel once before.

Something that is interesting to me is that I had the lugs break on the original STI barrel after about 20,000 rounds and this barrel failed after almost exactly the same number of rounds. I have known the gun was living on borrowed time for nearly six years now so I can’t really complain a lot.

I’m not going to try to get the gun repaired. As Barb, essentially, and Gay_Cynic said, I used the gun up.

Update: I should have said that the shot sounded and felt almost normal to me. The recoil cycle wasn’t quite right but there wasn’t a greater than normal impulse or BOOM!