I’ve been thinking about doing this anyway:

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Maybe now is the time to go through one of the classes I took nearly 20 years ago. I’m thinking maybe Intensive Handgun Skills.

As I reported last month the barrel in my STI Eagle attempted to spontaneously disassemble. I couldn’t get the slide open and figured I would just put the gun on the shelf that way. But Jacob said he was interested in doing a professional metallurgical evaluation of it. So I put some effort into extracting the barrel from the gun.

First I used a punch and drove the slide stop out far enough to get a finishing nail partially under it so that it was exposed:

Then brother Doug used an air powered cutoff tool to cut the slide stop almost in two and then pried the slide stop out:

The slide then easily came off. I then used a hammer (and other tools) to tap on the barrel to remove it from the slide.

The end result is that I was able to discover the barrel split about three fourths of its length:

As I looked at this barrel I remembered something. That flat spot on the bottom of the barrel was not there when it came from the factory. That was machined by an STI gunsmith so that a Recoil Master would fit. This would have weakened the barrel.

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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!

Yesterday I went to Whidbey Island for a steel match at Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club. It was a beautiful day to be on the island:

The match was run the same as Steel Challenge but none of the stages were the classifier stages.

The stages were the most interesting steel stages I have shot. In each of the pictures below you shoot the white plates in any order then shoot the yellow stop plate last.

You had to be careful on this one. It was undefined what happened if one of your shots hit both the yellow and white plate. Our squad gave the shooter credit for whichever plate gave him the best result.

One guy in our squad called this stage “Saw tooth”.

They called this stage “Train crossing”.

I don’t recall there being a name for this stage.

They called this stage “Drag race”. Obviously it was a very fast stage.

“Drag race” was the last stage our squad shot and I was “getting into the zone”. As per Steel Challenge rules we shot each stage five times and threw out the slowest time and summed the remaining four times. My cumulative time for the four best strings was 11.87 seconds (an average of 2.9675 seconds for the draw and five hits). One string was 2.83 seconds. When I finished a guy on our squad told me, “Fancy shooting!” I’m not sure “Fancy” was the appropriate term but I was very pleased with the results. Although I’m nearly certain there are a lot of shooters could do it in under two seconds.

The overall results are as follows. Most people shot more than one gun in different classes. The class definitions (IIRC) are:

RF-RI-O: Rim Fire Rifle Optics
RF-O: Rim Fire Pistol Optics
CF-I: Center Fire Iron
CF-RV-O: Center Fire Revolver Optics
CF-RV: Center Fire Revolver
CF-LR: ??

It wasn’t a big field of competitors in my class but I did win by a pretty wide margin.

I’m thinking this is on Ry’s wish list for Boomershoot clean up:

H/T to Say Uncle.