Savage Arms Company sells the Model 10ML, a bolt-action in-line style rifle based on their fine Model 110 sporter. They advertise this rifle as being suitable for smokeless powder. They are very careful to specify what the exact load that's suitable is, and caution the user not to deviate from it even an iota. The gun shown in these pictures is such a "smokeless powder" muzzle-loader, and quite clearly whoever fired this one deviated from the recommendation considerably!

Smokeless powder is touchy stuff, and there's no way a home experimenter can come up with his own magic formula that will duplicate the recommended loads. Even slight deviations from the safe levels can lead to skyrocketing pressures and catastrophic failures. Even mild loads of smokeless powder develop pressures around 12,000 to 15,000 PSI, roughly twice what black powder does. If this rifle was designed to operate at those pressures, and something went awry in loading it, even a very small thing like substituting another brand of primer, pressures could easily hit twice that much.

The idea that because this was a "bolt action" meant is was stronger than a side-lock or typical in-line is a fallacy. The weak point in any muzzle-loader is the place where the ignition device—in this case a #209 primer—inserts into the breech or the nipple. The bolt doesn't hold in the pressure, the primer does. In a sidelock gun what keeps the gas in the breech and behind the bullet is the soft metal of the cap and the inertia of the hammer. In a 209-primed in-line, it's the friction between the walls of the primer and the hole in the breech plug.

Look at the gun: the bolt is intact, and the breech didn't rupture. What happened was that excess pressure built up, leaked past the primer and blew the stock to splinters. The barrel ruptured when the bullet lodged in it about 10" from the breech, causing excessive pressures that split the barrel apart. The rest of the rifle is intact. Had this been a traditional rifle fired with the same load of smokeless powder exactly the same sort of split-barrel failure would likely have occurred.

Then there is the "idiot factor" that may have come into play. If Joe Idiot doesn't have Powder X, which Savage says he must use, and he's impatient, maybe he looks in a reloading book, finds a load for Powder Y that "looks like it ought to be the same" and uses that instead. Odds are that his wife will be a widow as a result. It's simply astounding how many people think their seat-of-the-pants half-knowledge is better than that of a entire team of professional chemists and ballisticians who are paid huge sums of money to do product R&D, isn't it? I can't imagine how Savage's legal team allowed this one to get past them. Given the innumerable klutzes in this world, and the know-it-alls and wisenheimers who think they have the last word on matters of ballistics, it was inevitable that this would happen, and there's no question at all that it has happened to others, and will happen again. Savage has exposed themselves to a major-caliber lawsuit with this incredibly stupid decision; they should pull this turkey from the market now and recall all outstanding rifles.