Muzzle blast problem!
 

was shooting my IAI Auto mag III pistol the other night. As you can see it throws off a bit of fire! :D Gun is chambered in .30 Carbine and really gets attention at the range.
http://www.georgealarm.com/~dgeorge/fireball2.JPG

Obviously lots of unburned powder from a cartridge designed for an 18 inch barrel fired in about 5 inches of barrel... any idea what muzzle velocity you are achieving with this combination?

P.S. Better check your eyebrows <img border="0" alt="[hiha]" title="" src="graemlins/roflmao.gif" />

I got looks everytime I fired my .22 Hornet T/C Contender. People would be shocked to see that such a small cartridge was producing so much noise and muzzle flash. I tried all sorts of combinations before I got rid of the muzzle flash. Good ol 296 ball powder got rid of the flash. The noise on the other hand stayed as long as I wanted the performance...

Doug, I thought the Auto III felt really good in my hand, have been meaning to pick one up for several years.

Ed

I can top that. I have a Martini action pistol of the Khyber pass variety chambered for .303 British. When I was young, good looking, and foolish I fired the thing with MkVII cordite ammo at dusk. I think most of that spaghetti must have been burning 10 feet out. The blue, purple, orange, yellow flame ball was at least 4 ft in diameter and 10 feet long.

Much the same results come with the same ammo fired in a Rifle No. 5 ("Jungle Carbine") without the flash hider.

Makes one understand that a flash hider is not to conceal the shooter, but to keep him from being totally blinded by his own rifle.

(I am no longer young or that foolish; still good looking, though, or at least I pretend.)

Jim

Doug, you must have taken a lot of exposures to capture that one. The typical “fireball” from a firearm’s muzzle blast is remarkably brief. Even with a 3 frames per second camera the best I’ve ever seen myself, or heard of, is about a 1 in 50 success rate (for seeing the fireball well) at various angles. Some Hollywood blanks are especially made to accentuate this effect. Best I’ve seen are in the movies Total Recall (one of my all time favorites) and Escape from New York. Obnoxiously huge fireballs. If anyone gets a chance to see these movies again, check it out.

Actually, we only took three pictures and these were the two best! My friend who owns a photography shop set his camera on a tri-pod. He was using ASA 800 film and set the shutter to two seconds. He set the auto timer and when the flash went off I pulled the trigger. I am going to try this again to see what results I get. I think that the other thing that helped was that we took the pics at dusk.