How and why Guns explode.

[ithacaartist]

My former wife worked at Ithacagun in the early 70s while I attended Ithaca College. I'd drop her off each morning, go up the hill to classes or to my part-time job, and pick her up at the end of the day. If I arrived earlier than her quitting time, I'd hang out in the service dept's waiting area, which afforded eavesdropping on company scuttlebutt, and sometimes let me witness the arrival of customers -- sometimes they were irate.

A common malady was burst barrels. It was policy to have all such guns independently tested to establish the cause and assign liability for the failure. Burst barrels were invariably found to have had obstructions. It doesn't take as much as one might think to catastrophically obstruct a barrel, so if a bit of a sabot remained...