Primer catastrophic failure in Tikka T3 CTR 223rem
- Thread starter bearhunter
- Start date
The box of primers used for these loads was from a freshly opened 1000 count box.
I've used magnum pistol primers for mid range velocities in other cartridges, such as 30-30 and 30 M1 carbine, 6.5x55 and 303 Brit, without issue on several occaisions. Not my preferred practice but back during the first primer shortages during the Viet Nam War era, any port in a storm.
It's my theory that there was an issue with this primer that was a "one off"
Since the rifle is very strong, I've been shooting it, since the failure, with the same batch of primers from the same sleeve/box without incident.
If the primer pocket had swelled or if the case head had expanded that would have indicated an excessive charge of powder, which could easily have happened.
For a primer to blow apart into dust like fragments is extremely unusual.
I've had primer blow out around the edges, crater to the point of leaving a black hole around the firing pin, flow enough to completely fill the primer pocket flush.
Once, during a test done by myself and another nimrod at the time, we took a beater 6.5 Arisaka ($5 ea at the time) whose chamber we had recut to 30-06 dimensions and filled it with 2400 to the bottom of a 150 grain bullet and shot it to see what would happen during a catastrophic failure on a rifle that was rumored to be very weak.
We managed to get three shots out of it before a catastrophic Kaboom.
After the last and final shot, the brass from the cartridge became extremely ductile and was force all around the bolt head and into the receiver lug races.
We had to take the barrel out of the receiver to open the bolt.
The primer was still in the mix, pretty much whole but the primer pocket was gaping around it.
We were repeating a test originally done by PO Ackley at the time when lots of surplus rifles in varying conditions were being dumped on civilian markets.
PO ACKLEY proved that the Japanese Arisaka was the strongest of all the milsurps available at the time.
Because of the skyrocketing prices of such firearms, people no longer "play" in this manner, which is likely a good thing.
I always followed a practice not to be to close to any milsurp firearm, rifle/pistol/smg that I wasn't familiar with, when firing it for the first time.
There was an old logging truck tire, filled with concrete that we had inserted a couple of leather covered metal cradles to hold a rifle securely, while using an old tire inner tube, filled with sand to put up against the butt, so we could attach a pull cord to the trigger and fire the new firearm from a remote position and still view the results.
Many of those milsurp receivers had been built under duress/stressful conditions and were often questionable as far as safety went.
This Tikka CTR has had several hundred rounds down the tube, none of the loads have been excessive IMHO.
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