Ken Mollohan

     Disclaimer: The following is an account of results obtained under specific conditions and using firearms and ammunition that are not likely to be replicated. While it is my personal opinion that the unusual procedures and results described herein were safe with my guns and under my conditions, I cannot assure that they will be safe with your arms and conditions. Accordingly, this account is provided only for your information. No representation of safety is made, and no responsibility or liability will be accepted by the author or the CBA for any attempts to replicate it. Anyone doing so must shoulder the total responsibility for the results of his loads, his rifles and his test conditions, none of which we have any control over. The usual caution to start with low power loads is particularly applicable to such unusual procedures.

An odd note may be of interest to some shooters. When I was trying to determine exactly what caused cast bullets to fail in typical high power loads, I had a real problem trying to examine the bullets to determine what had happened to them in the firing process because they were all damaged to a lesser or greater degree by terminal impacts. Some of it was obvious: Bullets don’t mushroom in the bore, and they don’t get rifling in the dirt. But aside from such obvious facts, I had no way to tell if a given deformation occurred when the bullet was launched or when it was stopped. I needed to recover fired bullets without deformation.

Dr. Mann was the first to do so as far as I know. He found that shooting into oiled sawdust would stop the bullet without apparent damage. But his setup wasn’t too practical for me. I had no place to build or keep a large tank of sawdust, and even if I had, I suspected that the loads I was using (~ 2400 to 3200 fps) might not react the same way as his low velocity bullets. I didn’t know if the higher velocity would make them mushroom anyhow, or if they’d just penetrate far more sawdust. But I looked around for another way to recover bullets.

I also shot into water and swam down to recover the slugs. Results weren’t exactly wonderful: high velocity bullets still tended to shatter on impact.

I had some really strange and unexpected results at times. On one occasion, I was shooting into wet newspapers with a full power .222 Rem load that was rated at 3200 fps (if it had been assembled with a jacketed bullet). Results were about what one would expect: Bullets mostly fragmented into flakes. But as it happened, night fell before I was finished, so I resumed testing the next day. But it had been quite cold that night, and the wet newspapers had frozen into a loose mass. I tried a shot anyhow, expecting to find a crater and nothing more. I was quite surprised to find an apparently intact bullet! It appears that a frozen sheet or two of newspaper wasn’t enough to deform the nose, but penetrating it reduced the velocity a bit before the nose encountered the next sheet of frozen newspaper. As I said, the frozen papers were rather loose, more like layers of cardboard than blocks of ice. At any rate, that was the only explanation I could think of that made any sense.

This led me to try stacks of loose cardboard. And it worked in a way. As you can imagine, it took some rather substantial thicknesses to stop a 30-06 bullet (which may be why cardboard is not generally used for armor plating (BG)). But I could recover bullets with a lot less damage than with any other technique I’d tried to that point. The problem was that I still couldn’t be sure if a rounded edge on a bullet came from gas etching, or if it was from frictional wear from the cardboard.

The NRA published an account of shooting a 30-06 Springfield underwater sometime in the 1950’s or so. It was a standard issue rifle, fired with military ball ammo. While they did find some slightly increased pressure signs because of the extra resistance of the water in the bore, there was no damage to the rifle, and if memory serves, the fired bullets were recovered intact something like six or eight feet away. I was intrigued, but rather hesitant to do the same with my nice deer rifles. I started slow: I got a cheap, used single shot .22 rifle and put on a face mask. I was very careful to make sure the bore was full of water by not loading the gun until it was underwater. It was quite interesting. There was no sharp ‘crack!’ Just a thump and a few bubbles. The bullet didn’t go too far either. I seem to recall about 3 or 4 feet. And it had absolutely no visible damage. It was a ball! I played with it all afternoon, and just annoyed some bluegills to death! The metal-works of the gun suffered no ill effects, but the stock became so waterlogged that it was a real job to dry out and refinish.

I was happy that I hadn’t taken my deer rifle underwater, but I picked up a rusty junker milsurp for subsequent work with a pretty decent bore - worn, but not rusted. It was a Spanish .308 carbine, and worked fine. I could do all sorts of testing with it, and not be too concerned about the stock damage. For that matter, even if I damaged the chamber or rusted the bore, I wouldn’t lose much.

This worked great, and I learned a lot about the progression of bullet upset that I put to use in better guns. That’s all behind me now, but if anyone wants to follow, it may give them something to think about.