Interesting find in range bucket

[5shot]

Being a 7/08 fan I'm always watching for brass and these caught my eye. Not 7/08 but .308 Lapua brass that show case head separation about to happen with gas leakage and then there it is....one that actually did completely separate.

Brass.jpg

I may never hear the story of what happened but this sure does raise a few questions. Obviously either a rifle with grossly excessive headspace (maybe AR10 style) or a handloader who resized cases too short? The brass appears to be new and Lapua brass is top quality so a manufacturing flaw is unlikely. I don't know if Lapua makes loaded ammo so I assume this was handloads? How could anyone shoot this many rounds and not notice a gas leakage? Does anyone have any ideas of what might have happened here?

One thing I pretty much convinced of....after the complete separation a change of under garments may have been called for!

[rickhem]

I had one of those back when I first started Service Rifle. I didn't have a lot of brass and would reload for a match a few days before. After not too long, my stash of brass had a bunch of those cycles on it. May even have been Federal, as I didn't know about avoiding that back then.
Was shooting a prone rapid stage and the bolt never returned to battery during the string, and the rifle wouldn't fire. Didn't feel any different though. I called an alibi but wasn't sure what happened. One of the ROs came over to verify the alibi and knew right away. He pointed out the base of the separated case on the ground next to me. Another guy had a special tool that looked like a .223 with a barbed end that I chambered and then retracted the bolt, and out came the top part of that case. Took care of the whole thing in a couple of minutes, and I even fired my alibi. They laughed and asked how many loadings I had on that brass, and suggested I dispose of it after the match, which I did.