The ammo is from 2003 best I can figure, got it with Doug's stuff. Anyway, I was having some mis-fires, a few hang fires when firing it through my Tracker 17 revolver... but nothing serious enough to merit concern until my buddy shooting the 17 HMR Volquartsen next to me had the magazine explode, and I mean explode. Cut his hand and he had plastic (or powder?) burns all over his hand.
He's fine, if a bit shaken up and had to dig a little plastic out of the hand.
Anyway, the bullet pancaked on the firing pin end of the casing, and the bullet left the gun but the casing stuck in the chamber. From what it looked like, the primer exploded out the sides, pancaking the section of the case where the firing pin strikes, but also the casing near the nose of the bullet split vertically open.
I took a look at the casings from when I had been firing the tracker, and noticed those also had splits ... that looked like the one I posted at the bottom of this thread.
I fired through another box of 17 HMR I bought yesterday, with no problems in the same guns after the fact.
What do you guys think?
1) User error (I'm new to 17 HMR)
2) Ammo batch failure
3) Gun failure (17 tracker & Volquartsen custom rifle)
Gun Porn / Examples:
Custom Volquartsen HMR Rifle:
My tracker 17
Ammo I was using
split example (not mine, but similar)
