The dumbest reloading thing I'd ever done survey.

O.K Let me set this up. First I am A twenty-year Vet. Of a twenty-year Vet. So to put kindly I have a colorful language. Now I also have a grandson that has been loading with me since he was three so I installed a curse jar in the loading room and every curse word cost me $5.00.

Now the day in question I had a used press on my maintenance bench that the previous owner stated that he was not able to prim on it for two years. Now at the time, my grandson was known as the safety officer when we were in the loading room. He was dressed in his Bob The Builder hard hat, Safty vest, eye protection and dust mask carrying around his fire extinguisher pretending to put out fires while I worked on the press.

Now, I had just finished timing the press and had started loading primers. On the third primer that little -CENSORED--CENSORED--CENSORED--CENSORED- shot that damn fire extinguisher right up my ass. I thought I was dead and let out a line of curse words. I then looked back at my grandson to make sure he was O.K. and I saw the little digits on his hands just flying out. He is COUNTING CURSE WORDS. We settled on $100.00 because it was his fault. But he wasn't going to settle on less because I did curse.

That day he lost the name "Saftey Officer".
 
When I was a kid I had access to my father’s extensive reloading room, and used to help him all the time.

As a teenager I did all sorts of incredibly stupid things. I was a menace. He loaded quite a bit of black, and I made several large bombs. I would load all sorts of things into 12ga shells: pennies (make a crazy sound), jacks, magnets, marbles, etc. I’d hot load cartridges (hot even by the standards of the ‘70s) and shoot them in his guns without permission. It is amazing I have all my fingers and both eyes.

I took a long hiatus after college, and when I took possession of all his stuff, I approached it vastly differently only then understanding how fortunate I was to have miraculously never destroyed a firearm and myself.
 
Many years ago I owned a gun shop and one customer was a bit strange....to say the least, but I got to know him quite well. Actually well enough that no way would I ever fire one of his reloads.
One day he was reading some article about how to make the .25 auto into a manstopper, but pulling the bullets on factory ammo, drilling hollowpoints on them and reseating the bullets.
He managed to get the process done, and tried one in his Raven .25 which wouldn't work because he hadn't gotten it properly crimped and still had a small flare in the case. It was stuck in the chamber and he couldn't get it out, so he attempted to pull the slide off the pistol to remove the stuck cartridge.
Well...the hammer was actually in a cocked position, so when he lifted up on the slide, it fired.......and very nicely sliced his appendix off in the process.
He spent about a week in the hospital and told me all about the shock to his system after he shot himself and the pain involved.
Not that long afterward, he was talking about getting even with someone by greasing the tires on the guy's car. Luckily he made a move to one of the northern states and I didn't have to deal with him anymore.
 
Smoke, that roofing story is great. I have one too.

My brother in law, who is a real piece of work, bought a dumpy house south of town. It had been built by a not too smart farmer. Long story short, I put months into working on it with him, including new roofing.

Oh, he insisted on taking off each of the four layers one at a time. He also insisted that the dumpster be left at the street, so we would carry the waste about 100 feet on tarps. He refused to set his nailer to the same shoe setting as mine, so there was about an inch of discrepancy between his end and my end before he noticed it, and of course it was because my nailer was wrong. Should have heard him. He wanted to prime the paint, but not top coat it. He sawed off his has gas line because someone at the gas company had made him mad and he went full electric with service that was nowhere near as heavily rated as the load that he wanted for it.

Well, after all of that time and work, he quit his job to be with a woman. The house was repossessed about two years after we worked on it. In 2011 an EF5 tornado hit that end of town and his sweet little mansion vanished. Nothing left but the cellar.

That was a weird place. A lady who I visited nearby showed me a cute little flower bed in her back yard, I had the privilege of telling her that it was a grave. She was so shocked. Then she said that it explained the hand carved headstone in the crawlspace under the house. I can't remember the name on the stone, it was a lady, buried some time after 1900. That house will be gone too.
 
@Smoke&recoil. I wet tumble, mostly. Well upon getting my caliber change kit for my 650 I was excited to load a bunch of 38 being I had nice shiney cases and some good looking PC bullets. Well in my haste I forget to dry the cases WELL.
 
I was loading .41 Rem Mag. I had charged, and seated the bullets. I notice powder on my bench top. I wonder if my powder measure is leaking. I look and check. Find out it not leaking any more the wee bit of a tiny amount that it normally does. So I turn the rounds over in the loading tray to start putting them into the flip top box for storage. I now see where the powder had come from. All 12 had no primers in them at all. :eek:
 
Well my worst is the blown up gun variety. Firing a .30 carbine, a round with no powder stuck a bullet in the barrel but didn't notice the reduced sound due to others firing at the same time. The next round of course did its thing and the stock and receiver dismantled into about seven pieces, all projecting forward. Nothing or no one hurt and the best part no one saw it happen. After gathering up and hiding the pieces, a quick trip was made to the gun room to purchase another carbine.
 
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I shake them in a tray so that they sit base down and I can see both the diameter of the shells and their relative heights.
Click to expand...

And if you covered the cases with a plate you could flip the cases and then sort by head stamp.

F. Guffey
 
This is not so much a reloading story as a dumb gun story.

My buddy and I were asked to do some work in a rental house for a friend. We had to put in a new flue for the furnace. Well, we were wondering the best (and of course quickest) way to make sure the holes we made in the floor, ceiling and roof all lined up.

"I've got an idea!" I say. Always a bad sign.

I went to my truck and grabbed my A-bolt chambered in 7mm Rem Mag and a fence-post level. Gleefully I took it into the basement and proceeded to make it plumb while the butt was on the concrete floor. It was plumb, I pulled the trigger, and could see the nice round hole it made in the ceiling of the basement.

I went upstairs and all was not well. The hole in the floor lifted a few floor tiles. When it went through the plaster and lath ceiling I guess the shock was a little heavy and it dropped a 3' area of plaster. We went into the attic to check things and it blew a fist-sized hole through the roof (which was good), but lifted up a whole sheet of plywood (which was bad).

As is the case with a lot of you I am sure, I'm amazed I've lived this long.
 
I use a thin Cigar box, guffy. It's easy enough to find a .38, but sorting out your 9mm isn't so simple. I stack it up in the tray and sort out the wrong ones,then pick them out a few at a time to sort out the unwanted headstamp. I pick them up about ten at a time. Cigar boxes are very useful. Not as strong as plastic.
 
I don't know if 11.5grn Unique under a 215grn .41 bullet qualifies, but my mad lust for FPS momentarily eclipsed my normal reasonable nature. The pistol, a Smith 57, didn't blow up, but it needs a serious tuneup, that's for sure.
 
OK, so I got distracted while I was reloading some -06 rounds. I missed charging 10 cases but didn't catch it. Seated the bullets and felt good about getting the job done. Nothing too stupid until I tell you that my buddy shoots nothing but my reloads for hunting whitetail. Well, he lined up on a beautiful buck and all the gun did was burp. Knowing that wasn't right, he let the deer go and checked the gun. Took him a while to clear the squib. He didn't get the deer and lost a day of hunting to boot. He was pretty hot when he called me that night about it. Funny thing is, he still uses my reloads, but he always shakes them before he tries to use them. (Thankfully, I learned a lesson that didn't hurt anybody!)
 
10-96, you can't tell stories like that! I'm an old man, dammit! I almost peed myself I was laughing so hard! :D

My biggest adventure in reloading was learning how to load black powder cartridges. What lube you use matters. I took my newly loaded paper-patched black powder cartridges out to shoot, but within just a few shots the fouling was so hard and thick I could not insert a cartridge in the chamber. Took the rifle home and fought that stuff for an hour. It was like tar!
 
OK, I'll play. First rifle, Marlin 336 (.30-30), shooting factory ammo until I discover reloading. First rounds were made not with jacketed bullets, but yes, lead. Managed to squib (count 'em) two rounds before I figured out something was wrong (no bullet leaving the muzzle was my first clue). I was later told I was lucky, and it may be a testament to the quality of the barrel, that I didn't blow the gun up. Don't recall the propellant or amount used, but I ended up selling the rifle to a gunsmith for a pittance, and have ever since made sure I knew up from down on any load I put together. Not a single issue since. Live and learn...

Oh, and one other: after loading primed .223 cases, I use my flashlight and trusty eyesight to ensure each case has the same amount of powder. Sure enough, one just looks too full. "Hmmm.." I say as I pull it out of the tray. Then I dump the "powder" into the scale tray to re-weigh it, and half of it is walnut media! Apparently, it became trapped in the case during tumbling, and stayed there through the priming process. Now there is a hand-written addendum to the "10 Rules" that hang over my bench: "Check for trapped media!!"
 
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Dumbest thing was running out of components one time a while back in the middle of reloading. Thankfully the local drug store had a great gun and reloading section.
 
Was invited to go shooting the following weekend and needed to load some ammo as I was running low. As life always…the week turned into the week from hell at work and I didn’t have time to load until Friday night. Run downstairs, grab my note book with all my loads in it (remember that…ALL MY LOADS), find the load I’m looking for (40 S&W 155gr RN), grab the powder, bullets and primers and go to town…500 rounds later I’m finished. Go to the range the next day and three of the four 40’s I took would not eject the spent case…WTH? Figured out when I got home as I was reading the load information I crossed lines between the 40 and 45…wound up WAY light on the charge to; as mentioned the guns would not eject the spent case; the only gun that did was the USP…some of the casings were rolling down the back of my hand. Learned a couple things and changed how I keep my notes. The USP will eat anything…ANYTHING and now I have a separate note book for each caliber. It could have been worse, could have over charged…
 
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