I got a 510 GNR in the 510 Hunter package today

It wasn't a pleasant surprise. The young fellow shot some ammo that was commercially loaded using cut down 500 Linebaugh brass. Normally this the way one gets the 510 GNR brass. There are around 100 thousand rounds of new 510 GNR brass out there somewhere. But if a person can't find any of it trimming the 500 Linebaugh brass down is the next best way to get it. Whatever the situation the gun didn't live thru the experience.


Whoever loaded the round apparently tried to make the 510 GNR a round with no recoil. It didn't work. By the looks of things the round was so underloaded that the bullet stuck about halfway down the barrel. In fact it may have been more than one round that stopped halfway down the barrel. Possibly 2 or 3 rounds.

Then the next round hit the stuck bullet or bullets and that was as far as it went.
This is what is left of a really nice 510 Hunter.




In the split barrel you can see a piece of a jacketed bullet sticking out of the split. That tells me that the last round
was blown out of the split barrel. The young man said he didn't feel a lot of recoil at all. That usually means it was way underloaded or he had a couple of bad primers. The bad primers are a possibility but usually if a primer is bad it simply doesn't fire, giving the shooter a dud.

Either way it ended the life of a really nice 510 Hunter. We are slowly taking the gun apart to see how bad the damage is. I don't think it was an overload as the frame doesn't appear to be damaged, just the barrel. The base pin was bent when the barrel blew too. From here we will take the gun apart and see what we can salvage for the
young man.