I'm a 32 year veteran of law enforcement. The recent postings by Ballistix on his failure reminded me of classes I attended a long time ago.
As a class project, we shot types of zip guns made to fire shotgun shells. One was made of iron pipes (can't remember the diameter) but it was a "slam fire" gun. It had been shot hundreds of times when I shot it. It was held in both hands and slammed. The point was to illustrate the falacy of guncontrol, or to show what could be done with a little ingenuity. In the Phillipines in WW II, they used gas pipes to make these guns.
The other IIRC was a 20 ga. fired with PVC as a barrel and chamber. These, I think, were made on site and were perhaps fired 30 or 40 times, but then discarded.
Point is either shotgun shells aren't over-pressured, or there has to be a catasthropic failure somewhere to cause a barrel to explode. These zippers were clean in the bore, but I have come to suspect bore obstruction as a main cause for failure.
I hope so. My Parker is probably unsafe to shoot (pitting) but I shot it 50 times already, and so far it's OK. God willing, I'll continue to shoot it.
Last edited by Genelang; 07/29/11 08:26 PM.
