If you shoot a cartridge…
no, I did not say a bullet. Where was I? Oh, yes.
If you shoot a cartridge- say, like a steel cased Silver Bear 7.62 x 39 that you happen to have had stuck in a target, and you manage to hit the primer, from, say, 50 yards distant, with a really accurate match rifle, it does not explode, as you’d think it would, it merely blows the primer out, and the powder burns as it exits the primer holes, and the bullet might try to move out of the case a bit, and the exiting gasses push it forward kind of like the round from a Gyrojet. And the end result looks like this:
Also: High desnity polyurethane foam is a GREAT target base for 22’s. You can shot the hell out of it, and it sort of self-heals up to a point. Not cheap, but if you can lay your hands on some surplus stuff like I did, free, you can stretch it out on your target uprights and staple or pin targets to it easily.
Update- We have a ruling:
”
A cartridge is the whole kit and caboodle – case, powder, primer, bullet. Technically, you take a 120mm tank round, that’s a cartridge. Take a semi-separate loading round like the 105mm artillery rounds, and those are cartridges, too.
Shell, like clip, has morphed over time. While the M1 Garand and the WWII GI are where clip morphed into magazine, artillery is where shell morphed into cartridge…
Originally, it applied to explosive artillery rounds. “Shot and shell.” Where shot was solid, and shell’s exploded.
Then we developed breechloading guns that used cartridges, but because they fired shells… the terms morphed, just like clip meaning magazine, and for the same reason, really.”
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Some years back the NRA did some very interesting tests on what happens to loaded ammunition in a fire. More or less the same thing. As I remember, they tested .22LR, .38Spec and .30-06. All responded similarly when exposed to exterior heat as would happen if cartridges were dropped into a campfire. We’ve all seen the rescuing cowboy drop a handful of .44-40’s into the fire at the villain’s camp, the others escaping in the confusion as the shells explode, usually hitting several baddies in the black hats. Black Powder does that to some extent, causing a pretty good POP! and a puff of smoke, with almost no movement of the case or bullet, they end up inches apart, but smokeless loads not so much.
When the powder goes off, the bullet barely slides out of the cartridge case, the case moves back less than its own length and the primer may or may not go……POP!
For real danger in a fire, try aerosol cans. Insecticide, paint, cooking spray, lubricants, hair spray all use propane, butane, hexane, or other volatiles for propellants and any of several flammable liquids for solvents. When heated above a certain point, easily reached in a residential fire, canisters burst releasing propellant gasses and highly flammable solvents as a mist. These are mini fuel-air bombs and can be lethal all by themselves. I watched the house across the street when it had a fire in the garage about ten years ago. Half a dozen cans of spray paint exploded, blowing the side and back walls out of the first floor garage, causing the second story bedrooms above to crash to the ground. The polyethylene gasoline cans for the outboard motorboat and lawnmower never did catch fire. Only the aerosol paint cans.
Much insurance company hilarity ensued.
Gerry N.
Our club uses chicken wire and clothes pins on the backers. Needs replacement every few weeks when shooting is heavy, but it’s easy and cheap.
As for stuff blowing up in a camp fire… I have found butane lighters to make for an exciting moment… and a hand full of non-dairy creamer can really astound your friends and neighbors if correctly deployed (GG).
But-but-but the cartidges exploded in the bar fire in Shaun of the Dead! If we can’t trust British zombie rom-coms, what can we trust? What can we trust?!
“Psst! Call ’em ‘shells’.”
Joanna: Shotguns shoot shells. Rifles and pistols usually shoot cartridges which are a combination of casing, primer, powder, and projectile.
The two terms have sort of become interchangeable, but I believe that “cartridges” refer to the round used in a small arm and “Shells” refer to the rounds used in artillery. I will be checking with the extra-H arrghhh to get a ruling on this.
It’s a line from the movie. They’re discussing a Winchester rifle, and Nick Frost’s character insists on calling the cartridges “shells” because he thinks it sounds cooler than “bullets”. (Also they’re British and don’t really know from guns.)
C’mon, give me a little credit here. My sister was convinced the Winchester was a shotgun because she saw Simon Pegg working the lever action and thought he was racking the slide. (And she claims to be “really into guns”.)
*racking the slide
Or whatever it is you do with shotguns; I’m not up on all the terminology, but at least I can tell one on sight.
No worries. Just a point of order- I’m not absolutly sure of the correct terminology myself.
If in doubt, it’s a shoulder thing that goes up. That one covers a multitude of sins.
Updated, we have a ruling from the german judge. A sort of a non-ruling, actually, as he states the original is “shot, solid, shell, exploding”
Beer bottles can also make a rather starting kaboom- but not always.
Probably depends on where on the bottle the heat was most intense, or how fast it heats up (on the edge of the fire or deep in the coals covered by firewood); sometimes the cap just comes off, or the bottom breaks, and sometimes the bottle explodes enough to send chunks of burning wood flying about.
What,now I’m German? Just because I was born there? Hey, “Germaness” passes through the mother. As my mother was born in Denver, Colorado, as far as the Germans are concerned, I’m no more German than a Turkish gastarbeiter.
So there.
I prefer cartridge myself, but then, I’m the guy who gets pedantic about clip vs magazine, too.
You could as much not be German as I could start being a Llama.