A lot depends upon the barrel and its strength in the area of the chamber and threads. A weak barrel that splits or shears will frequently cause a split or actual shattering of the receiver ring. A few years ago a new Sako bolt rifle (long action IIRC) let go, it was quite a shock to the industry at the time. The investigation revealed no fault in the action but rather a longitudinal fault in the barrel steel, allowing the force of the split barrel to destroy the receiver ring.
We saw a photo of a catastrophic blowup of a high wall on another thread here, I believe. In that case it was obvious that the barrel had split on its bottom side and then lifted the top off the receiver ring; the high wall receiver has a somewhat thinner area along the inside bottom portion of the ring and this is where the split began in both barrel and receiver in that case. I'd like to see closeups of this latest blowup to see if it's at all similar.
John Buhmiller didn't have that problem with his high wall blowup attempts but he used barrels made of modern high-strength steel.
Regards, Joe
