Ricochet damage projectile.

[SpudFarm]

As some of you remember from my time of ignorance, I had a bad ricochet that almost penetrated the wall of a nearby building.
The ammo was a APFSDS round at 170g traveling slightly over the speed of sound as I can remember.
The target was a 1" steel plate wich now turns out to be something awfully hard like armour or tool steel.

Well, my brother bought that house and is now doing renovation. As he was taking the panels of the walls and tearing out the insulation he found what I spent so many hours looking for.
It had penetrated the wall completely sideways and crushed anything in its way before lodging itself in the drywall at the very end. Pretty lucky it didn't penetrate 100% eh?

Thought it might be interesting to see for those who remember, and it goes to show that you should not mess around with spudguns. I learn't my lesson that day.





Edit: This is a very similar projectile before firing.

[JDP12]

Holy cow that's frightening. Impressive, interesting damage to the round itself.

Thanks for sharing.

I'm gonna vote for this to be stickied as a general safety warning to all, especially hybrid users.

[Stolly32123]

wow that must have been "fun". i dont know what that thing in the picture is though. please enlighten me

[JDP12]

That's what left of his round... extremely deformed and destroyed.

[jackssmirkingrevenge]

Fork in hell.

The target was a 1" steel plate which now turns out to be something awfully hard like armour or tool steel.

One should never overestimate the strength of a target, but in this case it seems it was underestimated lucky shot, glad you lived unscathed to learn the lesson

[SpudFarm]

JDP: The damage was quite interesting, when you look at the projectile first hand you can see the stress put on it. The sides is punched in and cracked in various places.
Stolly: It was something like this before firing.

I would certainly like to know the speed it hit the wall with.

JSR: This was one of the reasons I retired the cannon for quite some time, now it is in a safer place.
I am happy it didn't hit me, I imagine it could be quite nasty

[JDP12]

Yea its almost an elliptical cross section now instead of circular. Possibly the round skewed and hit sideways? More likely I think it it hitting point on and all that force being transferred through the projectile on an angle, forcing the steel into all sorts of weird shapes

[ramses]

nice. I had a similar experience with a nail dart and 1/2" steel plate.


my 3/8" APFSDS round didn't deform, but bounced out of the dent and fell just short of me, my friend, my compressor, and my EX-F1.

And the morale of the story is...

[SpudFarm]

skewed and hit sideways?

That is what happened, however I didn't think it would crush the tip of the projectile like that.

[JDP12]

Well judgin by the pictures, it would appear that the tip wasn't so much crushed as ripped off. the damage to it does not look crushed, it looks sheared off. Possibly your metal of the APFSDS was brittle?

[ramses]

It looks more like a tear than a fracture to me.

[SpudFarm]

I think what happened was that the tip was pressed about 1/4" into the steel target and when the rod started bending the front was still stuck so it was torn off as you guys said.

But I have now found some new steel targets that I will be shooting at as soon as I get my new union from Mobile.
Rock plates should be good to stop ricochets.