Henry Rifle Forums

My handloads. 357mag with V N340 and a 125gr tcfp. It seems I must have had a moment of inattention. I always tell the wife and daughter to please stay out when Im loading but guess what, it dont work.
My prodecure and process all but eleminates the possibility of this if adhered to. I always use a single stage press because thats all I have so it wasnt an automation problem. Primed cases are only transfered to loading block once they receive powder and bullet.
Regardless, it was an uneventful situation thankfully. I was shooting my 586 no- and I would have cried if it had been damaged. Firing a cylinder I had 4 down and then pffft. I knew immediately what had happened so I unloaded the remaining round and spent brass, broke out my lottle Otis kit thats about the best tool kit going, assembled the short brass rod and added the end, and using a small brass peen hammer tapped the lodged bullet out. It wasnt too hard. Im just glad I tend to shoot slowly.
Anyway, be careful folks, it can happen to us all.

Glad you had to presents of mind to check, before you tried to fire another round. You did save yourself a large expense and possibly injury. I had this happen to me in the middle of an action pistol match. My entire focus was on keeping my time to a minimum and the next target. I immediately did a tap, rack, bang drill, that I've practiced many times. The only saving grace was my Glock 27 wouldn't go into battery. That was when I realized I had a squib and the bullet lodge just into the forcing cone and wouldn't allow a new round to chamber. That was the end of my match for that day.

Paul

I've seen plenty of times when someone missed putting powder into a case. Shot in a revolver league for years and usually the wadcutters get stuck when they hit the forcing cone, which locks the cylinder, and prevents it from rotating. The benefits of a very long bullet I guess. Lots of guys had a brass or wood range rod, and they'd just push that bullet back into the cylinder, and into that piece of brass, and just continue on with no issue.
I've also seen guys stick a bullet in their 1911 shooting bullseye, and like Headhog mentioned, it usually prevents the next round from fully chambering....thankfully.
Best is to get that bullet out ASAP too. One buddy had a round stick in his 1911 barrel, and he just put it away that night, and didn't clear it until the next day. The bullet must have expanded or something, cause you could feel where it was when pushing a patch down that barrel. It was a definite loose zone. I've heard that can happen, and I felt it on his barrel. It still shot OK, but the next year he had it checked by the armorers at Perry, and they threw it in the trash and gave him a new barrel.

Like you Bill I had my first and only so far squib load a few years ago. Shooting a Ruger Single Seven in 327 fed mag at the range I had a shot that just didn’t sound right. Looked at my target and it was missing one hole per number of shots I had fired. Took a look at my revolver and bingo, there was the bullet sticking out of the muzzle. Due to the location of the bullet I think that had I fired another shot I probably would have been okay but I’m glad I’ll never know. Stuck the bullet in my bench vise and it pulled right out. It now sits front and center on the shelf above my loading bench as a reminder.

Bill.68 wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 16, 2025 6:10 pm

My procedure and process all but eliminates the possibility of this if adhered to. I always use a single stage press because that's all I have so it wasn't an automation problem. Primed cases are only transferred to loading block once they receive powder and bullet.

I once handloaded a squib, too. And, like you, I was lucky.

Also, I use the very same procedure you do, including using a single-stage press and avoiding music, tv, and other distractions. But, after that squib (several years ago), I added one more step. Silly as it sounds, after I add powder (whether using a dipper or the powder measure), I literally look inside each case to confirm it has powder before I top it with a bullet.

Glad yours had a good outcome, too.

Good to know you realized it and there was no harm.
I have had one squib with my Walther PPKS using Fiocchi factory ammo. Startled the snot out of me as the blast from the cartridge blew out through the ejection port. Big ball of fire from the wrong place got my attention. The gun is a solid little beast with no harm to it and I have shot it with other brands of ammunition since. But I have three boxes of the Fiocchi still sitting on the shelf not willing to see if there are any more surprise rounds in the batch.
This reminds me that it is way past time to take that pretty little gun back to the range for some gunpowder therapy.

OK, here's a good story since we're talking about squibs:
Way back in the early 1980s, I bought a Dan Wesson 744VH. It's the big heavy .44 Magnum in the Pistol Pack that came with both a 6" and an 8" barrel. The barrels on these revolvers are easily swapped for another, and they provide the feeler gauge for barrel/cylinder gap, and the wrench to tighten the nut at the muzzle end to tension the barrel once installed. They're amazingly accurate revolvers.

So I was having some issues with my revolver's timing, and the shop where I bought it sent it back to DW for me. It came back after a couple weeks, all fixed up, but the frame had some scratches on it, which I showed the sales guy, and he apologized, but not much he could do. Didn't really bother me all that much, but they were obvious as soon as you opened the case. A month or so later, while visiting that shop, the same sales guy asked me to bring my revolver in that weekend. He said that they were going to have some reps from Dan Wesson in the store, and he wanted to see what they'd say about the scratches on my revolver.

That Saturday I brought in my pistol pack, and showed them the scratches. They were great, offered to take it back and repolish it for me, so I let them. Here's where the squib story starts. They brought with them a couple of .357 barrels, one a 6 inch, and one an 8 inch. Both of these barrels were milled in half lengthwise, and both were filled with jacketed bullets, stacked nose to tail, for the full length of the barrels. They said they kept these to show just how tough their barrels and the mounting system was. I remember one of the reps, when we were all talking about those barrels, say that the 8 inch barrel had 15 bullets in it, and that meant that someone loaded that cylinder three separate times and never noticed that there weren't any holes in the target. It's finally locked up when one got stuck between the forcing cone and cylinder.

I wonder if they still have those barrels on someone's desk there.

I go with some others in that I size ,prime and expand all my cases and then add powder, bullet and seat and crimp, ONE ROUND at a time. So there is very little chance of a mistake. This has worked for me since I started loading in 1969.

Heck of a story about those barrels. DW revolvers always held an intriguing place in my mind. Never owned one but I wouldnt pass one up if it presented itself. Especially one of the 44 pistol packs. They were surely beautifully made.

As to the reloading procedure, I have done it the same way since I began, just seemed the safest way to do things. I apparently just really screwed up. I cant blame anyone else.
I think the way us here do it is best, at least safest. I know Ive been catching alot of cases with split mouths in my 44spl brass. I load and shoot those alot. 44mag the same but not quite as many. Thankfully I have bags of 500 brand new shiney ☆- cases for both. Time to dip into them I thinks.

I was shooting a Ruger Blackhawk Convertible 45 with the .45 ACP cylinder in it, and was shooting wadcutter rounds. From my perspective, I didn't hear anything different, just the normal bang. And shooting at bowling pins, not paper, I could only tell that I hadn't hit a pin with that shot. I had actually cocked the gun for the next shot when a friend stopped me before I could shoot the next round. From behind and off to the side, the shot had sounded differently to him. Sure enough, when we pulled the cylinder the back of the wadcutter was a quarter inch from the back of the barrel. Somehow managed to miss powder on that one. Added a powder cop die to the Dillon after that.

Regarding the DW barrels, many years ago on a rock quarry plinking trip, my barber was shooting my S&W Model 66-2. The rounds were some plated 158gr round nose bullets, over a slightly more than minimum charge. We'd been shooting a bit already, and when I loaded the cylinder I had to push most of them in the last eighth inch or so. I assumed it was because the cylinder was getting dirty. Nope.

The first round missed the tin can, and I saw it hit the dirt. The next five I didn't see where they hit. Fortunately we were done after that, so put everything away and went home.

The next day, I pulled the 66 out to clean it and "Whoa! There's a bullet stuck at the end of the barrel." I knocked it back a little bit, then pulled out a 1/8" drill bit and tried to drill it out. Nah. By hand, wasn't happening. After a half hour of trying I quit. Decided to take it to a pro. When I turned it around to close the cylinder I saw a glint of copper. Plated bullets, remember? There was another bullet stuck just past the forcing cone!!

Short story already too long, there were five bullets stuck in the barrel. All had had powder behind them, but that tightness in the cylinder was due to oversize bullets. Combined with the slightly more than minimum powder charges, bullet #2 stuck at the end, and the other four stacked behind it. In the picture, that's the jacket only from one of them, the next two stuck together with a 1/4" hole through them, and the last two which have the remnants of a 1/8" drill broken off. I don't remember doing that, but it was 35+ years ago. The barrel does have a slight gouge in the rifling from the 1/8" bit (and I DO remember doing that), but it still shoots as accurate as it always did.

I do always plunk every round I create now. If it doesn't drop in and out, it gets pulled apart and redone.