231 in a 45 Colt

pokute

Active Member
Charlie Sisk did the destructive testing, the people at RSI figured out what was going on.

There are essentially only three flavors of smokeless powder, and like Fiver and Ric noted, surface area per unit mass and the usual deterrents are the varying factors. Once you get through the deterrents, it's all essentially Dynamite.

You left out time dependent variation of surface area, reactant ratio, reaction temperature, and pressure. Which accounts, for example, for wads or filler (or even bullets) getting blown partially down a barrel before peak pressure is reached (much later than usual - hence pook ***time delay*** BOOM).

I would love to see the report, unfortunately searching for any combination of Sisk, RSI, SEE. and DDT yield absolutely nothing. I have access to extended searches that cover most university research libraries worldwide (via my Caltech IP address and login credentials), and I can find no relevant documents. Maybe I'm doing the wrong search. I did destructive testing of metal and composite structures for 10 years, and wrote several sections of various Mil HDBK's dealing with destructive testing. I've performed as many as 400 instrumented destructive tests in a single (LONG) day (Stinger missile tube failure (In the hands of Hezbollah fighters in Afghanistan armed by the U.S.) due to greasy fingers of assemblers after lunch in the General Dynamics plant in Israel - I tried and failed to get it called "The Pastrami Effect"), So I tend to doubt destructive effects without obvious causes.