Will

Why did George stand behind the rifle because he is a stand up guy who knew the handloads had been done properly and that they were not the fault of the failure.

Tinker

I appreciate your information, George has the rifle at his shop in Oklahoma and is in the process of sending the metal off for analysis. The blow out showed some blackening at the start of the blow out, closest to the forend, and the rest was clean metal and of the proper thickness. What we need to do is find out if there is a correlation between the steel used in barrels in the 1908 vintage, or perhaps before WW1, possibly made in Birmingham, and barrel failure. If we can isolate the failures to a specific time period we will know what to avoid.

CFA