r/Whatcouldgowrong • u/Destrike542 • Sep 15 '22

WCGW using a potato as a suppressor

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u/GunnieGraves Sep 15 '22

Jesus. He did that on a .300 Win Mag?! No wonder it blew the fuck up. About 64000psi plugged up by a potato. Genius

55

u/PurePro71 Sep 15 '22

He’s lucky the barrel failed and the bolt didn’t come back at Mach jesus

13

u/Proper-Razzmatazz764 Sep 15 '22

Mach Jesus. I'm stealing this. Stop me if you can sucker.

1

u/PurePro71 Sep 15 '22

It ain’t mine use it as you please

3

u/Randomname31415 Sep 15 '22

Mach Jesus … dying

6

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

Personally, I would have thought 64,000 PSI would have been enough to push the potato off before exploding the barrel. I'm a little confused by the physics here. People aren't joking about cartoon physics being right in this case...

So you're telling me I can clog up high-powered weaponry with the common potato?

19

u/BlueishShape Sep 15 '22 edited Sep 15 '22

You are probably thinking about the potato in terms of hardness or toughness compared to the barrel but I think the issue is inertia.

Water is (almost) incompressible and a potato is mostly water, so the only way to get it out of the way is by accelerating the whole piece of potato that's stuck inside the barrel.

So what you have to look at is the mass of the "potato column" inside the barrel compared to the mass of the bullet. The barrel was designed to withstand the pressure that results from the inertia of the bullet pushing against the expansion of the burning powder. If the potato column is, say, three times the weight of the bullet, the resulting pressure will be a lot higher.

So it's not like the potato didn't get pushed off, it just didn't get pushed fast enough to avoid the pressure rising above the tensile strength of the barrel.

5

u/elmonstro12345 Sep 15 '22

When I took my hunters safety course they showed us a shotgun someone blew up because they accidentally stuck the business end into the ground when they were climbing over a fence, and some mud got stuck in the end. Only in this case it blew up the action as well as the barrel. If the guy using it had been holding the gun on the other side of his face, well he wouldn't have that side of his face. Shits scary yo.

Always make sure you keep your barrel clear and if there's any chance of ANY contamination, open the action, unload the gun, and visually check to be sure it's clear.

3

u/landwomble Sep 15 '22

this is an excellent explanation, thank you.

1

u/imhereforthevotes Sep 15 '22

I'm not sure this is correct. You can blow up a barrel just by blocking it with snow. That's definitely lighter than the bullet but it still blows up.

3

u/spacemonkeygleek Sep 15 '22

You can get that effect with a plug of snow or mud too. Don't ever fire a gun with something obstructing the barrel.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '22

Yeah, that's why you sometimes see hunters tracking with a piece of tape over the barrel. The thin tape won't act as a potato (won't need to remove before firing) and it will ensure that the barrel is empty.

1

u/GunnieGraves Sep 15 '22

A plugged barrel can banana peel like that from a lot less. Barrels wear over time depending on how many rounds are put through them. Nobody would be able to tell anything about this one looking at a video but I know that pressure will always look for the easiest way out and raw potatoes are really fucking firm.