Too much preasure due to cold........

deerslayer

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Over the holidays I was out of the farm, and felt the need to take the hornet for a walk. Temp outside about -20 and after about an hour a coyote showed himself and when hornet meets coyote, yote ussally does not win. Any way I went to eject the spent case from my single shot and it looked like some one had welded the end of the case into the chamber. After a little effort with a hammer and old cleaning rod the rifle is okay.I shot these loads in the summer with no problems, it is a compressed , max load. Is this due to the cold temp?
 
cold.....

Load as follows, once fired , neck sized, trimed to lenght case, small rifle primer, 13 grs lil gun, fills case to the top, hornady soft point 45gr bullet, crimped with lee factory crimp. Shot this load lots before , no problems. I have about 30 rounds left , it is a good load, I will have to try to recreate the problem again. I was under the impression that extreme cold had an affect of incressing pressure on reloads.
 
Its to do with the temperature of the powder and it actually creates the opposite reaction as others mentioned......Try keeping one round close to your body or in the truck well out of the cold and then shoot it.
 
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I've never heard of cold doing anything but reducing pressure.
However, one very cold day, a young fellow we used to hunt with blew the head off a case.
He was keeping the ammo in the pocket with his handwarmer. It was so hot, it's a wonder it didn't go off by itself.
I think to be on the safe side, you'd best assume you had an error when you made up those rounds. And it might be just those particular ones that seemed hot, the rest, may, or may not, be just fine. Could be the load, could be the case is too long, or something else. Best check it out.
 
I saw this with the old GPMG's on winter Ex's.
Cold bbl, case gets fired, case sweats a bit, cold bbl, simply turns the sweat to ice, and voila a solidly stuck case.
 
Cold weather will NOT increase pressure. If anything pressures will be less due to the colder temp. As mentioned above, best to assume some other problem. Might want to pull a few bullets and double check the powder charge? Good luck.
 
Primer was flattened, case head was black, case itself was okay, little swollen.

Sounds like an overpressure, and I would bet your primer pocket stretched allowing gas to escape around the primer.

I would look at something other than the temp though, are you certain you didn't inadvertently put a different powder in the cases?
 
I've had .308 loads using Varget that were fine in the summer and showed signs of high pressure when it got cold. I've heard of other people reporting this with Varget as well, but no experience with the hornet sorry.
 
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