Curl-

My best wishes are that there's some somewhat compelling evidence pointing to this having been a failure of a barrel that had already been on death's doorstep.
For a perfectly good set of barrles -- off a ten pound .465 -- to blow outta nowhere, uuhh... hm. That makes me want to take up knitting or pottery and put the rilfes away.
Nah, no it doesn't, but it does have me wanting to take the barrles off my bore rifle and my 450mag out to have a little check-up.

I do know a fair bit about how to look into the anatomy of a FU'd piece of machinery, and I figured what I'd noted in the way I noted would stand out somehow, hopefully there's a way we can see into this mess and learn something from it.
I do consultation work for engineering firms and from time to time get called in to pick through the wreckage of a system gone to hell as an objective voice. Typically if I need something scoped or magnafluxed or dyed, x-rayed or scnanned or otherwise scrutinized beyond the limit of my field kit, I outsoruce to a specialist or talk to friends at one of the local universities.
I have access to scanning electron microscopes if I want them, it's always good to maintain relationships with good brains who have good equipment.

I gather that this rifle is somewhere down in Texas. I've spent a bit of time down there, but don't know much of the industry in that part of the world. I bet there's someone down in Lubbock at Tech who'd be interested in parking that barrel under a scanning electron microscope. Physical science students are typically absolute sponges for mysteries like this and love real-world problems that relate to thier study.

My sense though is that it wouldn't take magna flux, penetrant dye, or any kind of particle beam or microscopy to see what took this thing out. To really get in there and see the -what's what- of the state of the metal in that barrel, a scanning electron microscope would offer a perspective at the grain of the metal. A test would likely only cost a couple hundred bucks and wouldn't take very long to turn around. Any outfit with a scanning microscope should be able to do it.
At least I can hope there's some more obvious sign of what went wrong in there, barrels popping open on ten pound guns gives me the shivers.

4seventy-

I got a serious belly laugh going when I heard that particular detail of the story too. At eleven thou wall, at least four of that's hardcase of some sort.
Whooo...
One would think that at some time during a restoration the guy would have miked the wall thickness. Really, go figure on that one. It was a smoothbore though, not a rifle, and the barrels weren't that thin everywhere.
The owner of the gun was in a duck blind with a friend when it blew too. Lucky for both of them no one was hurt.

--Tinker