Unburnt Powder?

[Hombre0321]

Today I was shooting my 30 BR. I had just had this rifle restocked and this was its first trip to the range. I was shooting my standared 30BR load with a Micheal Taylor 118 Grain 9 ogive bullet and 34 grains of H4198 ahead of a BR 450 primer. I had shot 50 bullets and was loading up everything when I noticed that on the left side of the rest was a lot of unburn't powder, by a lot I mean at least 25 grains or so.

As I started typing this post my shooting partner compared the powder on the bench to a fresh can of H4198 here in the shop. There are not the same, not by a long shot. the powder laying on the bench is a cylindrical powder like H4198 but it is larger and also each grain of this powder has a HOLE or a tunnel down the center of it. Anyone got a guess??

The reason I was going to ask a question was to inquire as to what problems could arise from unburnt powder in our loads? That is if it is a problem. I think it's a question I would still like an answer too if anyone would care to comment.

Roland

 

[mwezell]

Who knows what the powder was from, but my guess is SR4759. It's a fairly commonly used powder in smokeless powder muzzle loaders made by Savage.
As to unburned powder in our BR rifles, I'd say the powder is too slow or not enough pressure to make it burn properly, if you get hardly any. FWIW...---Mike Ezell

 

[Larry Elliott]

The only time I've ever seen unburned powder from a centerfire rifle was when a guy was shooting a VERY slow powder (7828 I think) in a .243 Win. He had a lot more enthusiasm than knowledge and was continually looking for the "magic load". Anyway he ended up with a pile of reddish orange stuff right on the ground in front of his rifle's muzzle. The pile was much larger than if he'd just dumped the powder he'd used on the ground, so I wonder if it puffed up like popcorn or puffed rice cereal.

It'd seem that any normal to high pressure load (45 kpsi and up) would pretty much consume all the powder. I doubt that the load mentioned above approached even 45 kpsi.

 

[wsbranham]

Unburned powder in the barrel.

This reminds me of an occurrence about 5 years ago shooting a 6 BR. I don’t remember the powder or the bullet. On one shot, the sound of the rifle seemed “unusual”. This unusual sound recalled an instance during my much younger days (I was a teenager ~ 1966) when I was trying to fire a bullet from my 222 Rem. Magnum with a reduced powder charge. I wanted to recover a bullet that was not deformed, so I loaded a very light load using my $9.96 Lee Loader. When the gun fired the sound was sort of "muffled". There was a puff of smoke at my face, and the hole at the right side of the Model 700 action had soot all around it. Also, there was no hole in the target. A quick look down the barrel showed no daylight…..the bullet was lodged in the barrel having traveled only a few inches. I now know how stupid and lucky I was. But back to the more recent 6 BR incident. After I heard the unusual report I pulled the bolt for a look. The barrel was clear except for a line of unburned powder from the breech to the muzzle; a lot of powder. Now here is the really strange part. The round chronographed just slightly less than the other rounds of the group; probably less than one standard deviation, and the bullet impact was normal. I cleaned the powder from the bore and continued shooting. Never happened again; can’t explain it.

 

[Larry Elliott]

Okay now this has moved into the land of witchcraft. The only thing I can imagine is that somehow a slower powder was somehow used for this one round. Are you sure that your powder measure was empty before adding the powder you intended to charge the cases with? Was the powder from a cannister you were sure didn't have a slower burning powder accidentally added to it? These and similar things are the only things I can imagine could cause what you experienced.

A couple of years ago or so I grabbed a cannister of H4831SC instead of the intended H4895 and loaded a few rounds. These loads gave much lower velocities than I was expecting, and the groups weren't quite what I'd expected either. I'm sure glad that I didn't grab a cannister of H4895 when I wanted H4831SC or things might not have had a happy ending.