Hello,
Wendy forwarded this to me to answer.
I am quite familiar with the pictures of the musket with the burst barrel. It was an accident caused by improper loading. Exactly what went wrong with loading will never be known, due to the nature of how blanks are loaded. The one thing that has been ruled out as a cause of the accident is any sort of defect with the gun. I have a lab report here that says so. If you look closely at the photographs, you will see a bulge about 10"-11" up the barrel from the breech. A bulge happens when there is some sort of obstruction. The obstruction could have been an object that got into the bore somehow, or it could have been a massive overload to the point that the unburned powder at the front acted as an obstruction.
The breech plug did not fail. There is no seam in a modern gun barrel. To anyone how actually knows anything about firearms, it is really obvious that there was some form of obstruction. The bulge in the barrel tells the story.
In any event, there must have been a ridiculous amount of powder involved and not just the single 100gr blank as claimed by the shooter. Think about it, there was enough powder to bulge and split a steel barrel, shatter a stock, and knock down several people around the shooter, and we are supposed to believe that the guy loaded a single blank? 100 grains of black powder just does not have that much energy potential. Personally, I think the guy had fouling in his vent so his charge wasn't going off, but he kept on priming and loading anyway. There were 9 rounds missing from his cartridge box, so potentially there was 900 grains in the thing when it finally went off. 900 grains is more than two ounces of powder, which is what I use in my 3-pdr cannon for a blank.
If your reenactor acquaintances claim that the musket destroyed in this accident burst along a seam, you should immediately question any other "information" that you hear from them. Being a reenactor does not automatically mean they know anything about guns. I hold reenactors to a higher standard than I do other people because the whole point of the hobby is supposedly about learning historical details by practicing them and then teaching them to the public at large. It annoys me to no end to hear reenactors repeating rumors and unfounded facts. We will agonize all winter long over which button is the correct one to use on the cuff of a shirt, yet so many people are willing to believe that there must have been a defect in a gun that was so obviously damaged through improper loading. Living history is supposed to be about "facts" and "research", not just forwarding half-baked claims on the internet. Shame on them!
By looking at the evidence of the accident, it should be obvious that the country of origin of the musket has nothing to do with the cause of the accident. Given the physical evidence, a $600 Indian gun would have burst, but so would a $1100 Italian one or a $3500 custom job.
With the exception of certain "inline" CVA brand deer hunting rifles that were recalled a few years ago for a breechplug issue, I am unaware of a single incident where a burst barrel in a modern built muzzleloader did not turn out to be caused by user error upon investigation by professionals. The photos your friends are talking about are no exception.
These musket barrels are made of drawn steel tubing, just as an other modern barrel. The breechplugs are threaded, and are actually a stronger, beefier breechplug than the originals or anything else out there. Like any other gun, the biggest safety problem is "the loose nut behind the stock". People don't give muzzleloaders the safety considerations they deserve, especially reenactors. Think about it: we shoot at each other! We dump blank rounds down the barrel that are well in excess of the regular service load if we were shooting it with ball. There are so many variables: powder type, powder charge, proper seating of projectiles. Yet most reenactors do not take their guns seriously because they just "fire blanks". You would not believe the near-miss accidents I have seen in the field because of people not taking gun safety seriously. There are several groups that I would not take the field with because of stuff I've seen them do. Yet when somebody screws up, it is the gun that gets blamed.
Thanks,
Pete
