More on Kentucky Ballistics - Serbu

[D.B. Cooper]

The reality is that the gun wasn't some one-off basement gun. Serbu has made hundreds (maybe even thousands) of them.

Oooooh. "Thousands of guns." Hmm. How many Model 94s are out there? How many Model 70s? How many AR15s? Heck, let's just stick with 50 cal-how many Barrett's are out there? How many Barretts have blown up? (I actually don't know the answer to that question.)

It is very much a "basement" gun. I am astounded at the people here defending the design. It is, in its essence, a PIPE BOMB. It's a steel tube with a threaded on cap. That anyone thought that was a good idea is mind-boggling.

Regarding the ammo: sure, the ammo was probably crap ammo. I remember a few lots of mil-surp M2 ball ammo coming out of Korea that blew up a couple of M1 Garands. Nobody died or suffered life threatening injuries. (At least not to my knowledge) And those were 50+ year-old guns. That's the difference between a well designed, safe, reliable, proven firearm...and a cobbled together high school shop class project.

Threaded cap indeed. smh

 

[D.B. Cooper]

EXACTLY.

NOTE 9/17/22 15:11 CST: The following is my opinion and are not claims I intend as factual - only my opinion.

They did not design the gun with any thought towards:

"when this gun inevitably blows up from an over-pressured chamber - how can me make sure it fails in a manner/direction least dangerous to the shooter?"

Instead of doing this, and instead of doing ANY destructive-testing, Serbu thinks he shouldn't have to worry about it, because it the "bad ammo" caused the failure - and because has a lawyer (I'm not joking, watch his last video unless he deleted it).

NO ONE doubts the ammo caused the failure Mr. Serbu. That we understand.

What is inexcusable is:

LETTING YOUR CUSTOMERS BE THE ONLY ONES ONES TO DO DESTRUCTIVE TESTING OF YOUR FIREARM!

So what happens the next time a customer inevitably gets an over-prsssured round or bore-obstruction. Mark Serbu in his latst video says he not worried about it because he has lawyer, and they say legally in the clear.

ANOTHER OVER-PRESSURED ROUND BARREL-OBSTRUCTION WILL OCCUR - IT IS INEVITABLE.

So even if he is legally covered the next time it happens (I question his legal confidence here) . MORALLY, by not making ANY changes to a design ( a design that is LETHAL when it fails) to protect rhe next person shooting the gun when it fails, and therefor therefor putting the shppter in the direction of ALL the gun's failure-point's shrapnel, is simply EVIL.

I am shocked by the calloud attitude he is taking towards the next one of his loyal customera this happens to.

In his latest, he mocks ForgottenWeapons.com's Ian Mccollum as "gun jesus", and says essentially he shouldnt he listened to.

If you watch the Forgottenweapons.com video, "Why Guns Explode", Mccollum goes over the near-countless things, that other manufacturers do, to prevent situations like this happening (or in the worst case, to fix them after they happen)!

Unlike Serbu, they all seek to design intentional failure points, and destructively test them to ensure the failures happen in as a safe manner as a failure can happen.

Mccollum also discusses what other manufacturers have done when their guns designs have inured people when they fail... unlike Serbu, their policy isn't to do nothing and talk to lawyer when it happens.

You know Serbu's not protecting his customers with an improved design?

Because doing so would be tacit admission of fault, and put him at risk legally for lawsuits. Not to mention, a redesign to improve safety would necessitate a very expensive recall.

SO INSTEAD OF PROTECTING HIS CURRENT AND FUTURE CUSTOMERS FROM DEATH & MAUMING, WHEN DOING SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS ADDING MORE THREADING WOULD HELP, HE WON'T BECAUSE IT COULD COST HIM MONEY.

...but no, just ignore little "gun jesus" and MAKE NO IMPROVEMENTS to your guns failure-points.

Cars have crumple zones, and guns have designed failure points as well. Both are products that can KILL you when things INEVITABLY go wrong. SO manufacturers know they MUST design (or redesign) the products in a way, so that when they DO fail, they fail im a DESIGNED way to decrease the chance that the product will KILL you... WELL, UNLESS YOUR MARK SERBU.

This is THE comment of this discussion right here. This sums up the entire issue quite well. I'm pretty sure there is nothing more to add.

 

[JoeTester]

@JoeTester and others, did you watch the video? Guessing not, go back and watch the last two videos posted.

If you're saying that Mark didn't test this gun before offering it for sale, I know you didn't.

Have you fired one? I have, a friend that has his 06 FFL, makes custom ammo, owns one. He's fired hundreds of rounds through his. Not once, with safely made ammo has it ever had an issue.

I've seen guns blow up in people's faces, to the point that the gun was destroyed and they were injured. The fact that KB posted the video, now makes everyone an expert on what happened.

The last 50 BMG that I heard Kaboom was traced back to the shooter. New to reloading, beat the bolt handle down on ammo that wasn't loaded properly...

I was lucky that I wasn't at the range that day as it happened at the range I go to. I think the story went that when the gun blew, the bolt went through the top of his shoulder. Shrapnel tore up his hands and face.

Moral to the story, guns can be dangerous when you don't respect them and the power they produce.

Instead of being snarky and saying "did you even watch the video", I think you should address the points we raise ...Not to mention I quote Serbu in multiple things he says in his video.

The fact that you know of another 50 cal rifle, that had a failure that could killed a shooter, counters nothing of what we have said - it simply means that gun had a dangerous failure too.

And no one needs to be an expert to understand the points we raised; which again, I don't see where you addressed any of the points I raised.

Saying "have you fired one" is absurd and not an argument either. It has nothing to do with the points raised.

So please address the arguments I and others are making. I don't need anecdotes about other guns having failures.

It's like saying,
"Hey it's ok that this Volvo decapitates you in an accident (the accident isn't the car/guns fault!), because I know of other car models that decapitate you in accidents too!".

That is not a good argument.

 

[mgmorden]

Oooooh. "Thousands of guns." Hmm. Heck, let's just stick with 50 cal-how many Barrett's are out there? How many Barretts have blown up? (I actually don't know the answer to that question.)

Funny you should ask. Kentucky Ballastics blew up a Barret with the exact load he used to blow up another RN-50. Calculated pressure 190k psi . . . and the Barret blew all to hell and back too.

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx-cBFsn-p9M6Zma6t_NqShF2bPQIHNut7

 

[JoeTester]

This is THE comment of this discussion right here. This sums up the entire issue quite well. I'm pretty sure there is nothing more to add.

Thanks DB!

 

[JohnKSa]

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a gun to fail in safe manner.

Not only is it reasonable, we see it all the time. How many times have you seen a report of someone blowing up a firearm and coming away with just some injuries to their hands? I gave the example of Mauser's designs which had design features intended to prevent serious injury in the event of failures.

Guns have safety features to deal with failures but they can only go so far.

That's true. There's no way to make a gun completely safe, but it is possible and not even that difficult to dramatically reduce the chances of serious injury. One simple way to do that is to intentionally build failure mechanisms into the gun. Think of them like mechanical fuses--they fail in a relatively safe manner and direct the blast away from the shooter's vital areas rather than letting the pressure build to the point that parts are propelled at high speed towards the shooter's head and torso.

The reality is that the gun wasn't some one-off basement gun. Serbu has made hundreds (maybe even thousands) of them. They're not out there exploding left and right.

I'm not claiming that the gun is a one-off gun or that they are failing at a high rate. The issue is that this was a relatively predictable failure given the design of the firearm and instead of handling it gracefully, the design was such that the incident nearly killed the shooter. That's unacceptable.

You guys talking about “safety features” in the event of a KB, don’t seem to understand the physics of pressure.

I understand it very well. The issue isn't making the gun explosion proof, it's creating a design that handles basic failures without killing the shooter. This type of firearm design criteria has been understood and implemented for well over a century.

Had the cap been 2, maybe 3 times. as long with the the equivalent extra length in threading…sure it may have held.

Extra threading length doesn't help nearly as much as one might expect because of how conventional threaded connections fail. If the cap had been a plug (threaded into the breech) instead of a cap (threaded over the breech) it might have held due to the much smaller area the pressure had to work against. A good designer could have calculated the failure pressure of the breech and designed the chamber so that it would rupture upwards at a pressure lower than the failure point of the breech. That would have directed the blast away from the shooter.

How many stupid people have blown up or trashed Rugers because "Rugers can handle it".

The question is, how many have been killed or experienced life-threatening injuries doing it. It's not practical to make guns explosion proof, but it is possible and practical to design them so they are extremely unlikely to kill the user when they fail.

 

[JoeTester]

deleted redundant post

 

[JoeTester]

Threaded cap indeed. smh

SMH indeed. We stopped using threads even on sub-guns a long tome ago. Large thick lugs (essentially giant interrupted threads) are far stronger than inumerous threads.

The neccesary shearing forces for the two are incomparable.

 

[JoeTester]

For analysis of the Metallurgy and Physics at play in the Serbu RN-50's failure, THIS VIDEO is a MUST WATCH.

Though he draws no conclusions about the gun in the video (he just does the "science" so to speak), it comes as pretty damning for the RN-50:


"interrupted threads would fix this problem as well, but thats a topic for another video"

 

[JohnKSa]

...the fact that he seems to actually believe his design is not at any fault...

What concerned me most was that he quickly put out a video in which he inadvertently made it clear that he didn't understand the design aspects of the firearm that allowed the failure and allowed it to be as dangerous as it was. He had to quote figures from other sources when talking about the pressure required to fail the threads. That made it difficult for me to put much stock in the rest of what he said.

 

[JoeTester]

What concerned me most was that he quickly put out a video in which he inadvertently made it clear that he didn't understand the design aspects of the firearm that allowed the failure and allowed it to be as dangerous as it was. He had to quote figures from other sources when talking about the pressure required to fail the threads. That made it difficult for me to put much stock in the rest of what he said.

Sorry I deleted my orignal post (it was error-riddled beyond repair), but I had a very similar reaction.

According to Wikipedia Serbu has a Mechanical Engineering degree... but as a graduate of a University's Computing & Engineering school, I can testify that there are plenty of engineers who don't understand, or really just fail to grasp all of the principles at play in most complex systems.

Someone like that designing 50 cal rifles is disconcerting to say the least.

 

[DeepSouth]

Not only is it reasonable, we see it all the time.

The fact that we see it is frankly irrelevant, solely because “There's no way to make a gun completely safe”

I’m just trying to say every gun has a failure point that can be life threatening. That point is absolutely be higher in some guns and the problem here is we still don’t know where that point it, also the “acceptable limit” so to speak, could be different for different people.

I remember when the RN-50 came out, it was a limited time deal for like $800 bucks. I had always wanted a .50 and that was the first one for a price I would realistically spend. The reason I didn’t buy it, I didn’t trust the design. I still want an 50 and I still want buy that one.

But I have to say we still don’t know where the failure point is, we just know it exists but it exists on every gun. I simply don’t believe there is enough evidence to definitively say it is inherently unsafe. Though I do lean that way, I leaned that way the first time I saw the design, it’s the sole reason I don’t own one.

 

[JohnKSa]

The fact that we see it is frankly irrelevant, solely because “There's no way to make a gun completely safe”

We can't make cars completely safe either--so should we just abandon all attempts to make them safer? Of course not. We know there will be failures, we know there will be wrecks. That is just the way life is. So designers do their best to keep the occupants safe in spite of the inevitable.

The exact principle applies here. We can't make guns completely safe, but that is not an excuse to just give up. There are ways to deal with many types of failures at the design stage to either keep the shooter from injury, or to minimize the severity of the injury. And fortunately, most gun designers do just that.

I’m just trying to say every gun has a failure point that can be life threatening.

That is true--but again, just because there are extreme failure modes that are really impossible to plan for doesn't mean we should just give up trying to plan for any types of failures.

It would be like a car designer saying: "There's no way to keep a driver safe if the car hits a bridge abutment at 120mph, so we're going to do away with airbags, seatbelts and crumple-zones. If we can't absolutely guarantee safety, then why bother with any of it." The fact is that most accidents don't involve that kind of extreme speed or hitting something that doesn't give at all. Airbags, seatbelts and crumple-zones may not save people when the car hits a solid object at triple digits, but still save a lot of lives when cars collide at 40-50mph.

This design allowed gas pressure from a case failure to act on a relatively large surface area. Some simple calculations indicate that even normal operating pressure (if the gas can act against the inner surface of the breechcap) provides enough force to blow the breech cap off the gun. That means that's a failure that the designer needs to deal with safely. It's an easily predictable point of failure and therefore something should be done to protect the shooter if it happens. Now, if there's enough pressure to literally "grenade" the gun, then the designer can't really do much about that. But that's not what happened here.

 

[JoeTester]

We can't make cars completely safe either--so should we just abandon all attempts to make them safer?

Exaclty, how people can excuse Serbu making a 50 Cal with ZERO effort put into directing failures away from the shooter, is inexcusable. It has to just be fanboy-ism causing people to defend a design that lacks basic design features of respectable firearms - intentional failure points. The RN-50 shows a complete lack of basic firearm fail-safe design integration.

Again, there are ZERO features in this design to induce safer failures - I can't say that enough. Making a gun sturdy is not enough Serbu, that was his only attempt at a safety... clearly when it gets a bad round, its not safe. Just undeniably.

Sorry, that is not how things works in gun design. All forearms can and will have catastrophic failures - thats why need to engineer failures to occur in a way WE, the designers, want. We want the failures to occur in planned manner as much as possible, and as safely as we can design failures to happen. SADLY there are ZERO zero safe-failure mechnism in Serbu's design. His policy is,

"its strong enough, failure from bad ammo arn't my fault, so I shouldn't have to worry about how shoots tje bolt, cap, and other shrapnel, STRAIGHT BACK at the shooter. If he good anmo it wouldn't have happened..."

That is cold hearted and not guns are engineered by any respectable designers l. They know the gun will blow up, and they try account for that - Serbu did NOTHING to account for that, nor fix it after it happened.

We keep pointing these things out. But his supporters keep saying", but others have hurt people!". Again I refer to my previous quote:
---
It's like saying, "Hey it's ok that this Volvo decapitates you in an bad accident (the accident isn't the car/guns fault!), because I know of other car models that decapitate you in car accidents too!".
---
The lack an ANY design on the RN-50 to induce failure in a manner less likely to kill the shooter is inexcusable in designing a firearm. They is nothing on this gun to release pressure in any safe direction - watch the video I posted above from an actual firearms engineer.

They did not design the gun with any thought towards:

"when this gun inevitably blows up from an over-pressured chamber - how can we make sure it fails in a manner/direction least dangerous to the shooter?"

Everyone should watch this video that Serbu mocks. Serbu thinks he knows better than every reputable gun designer in modern histor. And he mocks Mccollum as "gun jesus"


WATCH THIS VIDEO


Instead of doing whatall the manufacturers did in Mccollum's examples, and instead of doing ANY destructive-testing, Serbu thinks he shouldn't have to worry about it, because it's the "bad ammo" that caused the failure - and because he has a lawyer (I'm not joking, watch his last video unless he deleted it, he says he's fine because he has lawyers. Not joking at all).

God help the next person that that this inevitably happens to again with an RN-50.

If you think its ok to leave the gun as it is - I don't think you realize how heartless you are being. Every other manufacturer would step and change the design so this can't happebln.

See the video I posted before from engineer talking about the RN-50 - there so many easy foxes for this, but doing would be admitting fault, would force a recall, and would cost much money...

...Instead Serbu would rather gamble with his customer's lives, versus implementing any number of possible fixes, so the bext bad-round doesn't KILL SOMEONE - But that is to financially burdensome for Serbu.

Worse yet, and horrifyingly, Serbu believes his own BS, that is gun is adequately engineered to be safe. It DEMONSTRABLY is not. An overloaded round should not kill you in any firearm. Kentucky Ballistics was so lucky this unsafe gun didn't kill him when it blew up.

If Ian Mccollum, a insanely knowledge firearms historian, is giving you advice - take it, don't mock him as "gun jesus" in your video Serbu. Just pathetic.

 

[JoeTester]

note: when I say, "we as gun designers" - I am using to refer to gun-designers as a group of people and their job. I am not trying claim I am gun designer.

 

[mgmorden]

don't mock him as "gun jesus" in your video Serbu. Just pathetic.

Um, Ian completely accepts the whole "gun Jesus" moniker - it's not an insult. Ian has literally had "gun Jesus" merchandise that he's sold himself. Eg, its sold out at the moment but he had this poster available:

 

[Goosey]

Sorry, that is not how things works in gun design. All forearms can and will have catastrophic failures - thats why need to engineer failures to occur in a way WE, the designers, want.

The idea everything is down to the ammo and/or the user, and there are no real or potential problems with the inherent design of the rifle, is similar to the idea that "cars should not have to pass crash tests because people shouldn't crash".

 

[DeepSouth]

We can't make cars completely safe either--so should we just abandon all attempts to make them safer? Of course not. We know there will be failures, we know there will be wrecks. That is just the way life is. So designers do their best to keep the occupants safe in spite of the inevitable.

The exact principle applies here. We can't make guns completely safe, but that is not an excuse to just give up. There are ways to deal with many types of failures at the design stage to either keep the shooter from injury, or to minimize the severity of the injury. And fortunately, most gun designers do just that. That is true--but again, just because there are extreme failure modes that are really impossible to plan for doesn't mean we should just give up trying to plan for any types of failures.

It would be like a car designer saying: "There's no way to keep a driver safe if the car hits a bridge abutment at 120mph, so we're going to do away with airbags, seatbelts and crumple-zones. If we can't absolutely guarantee safety, then why bother with any of it." The fact is that most accidents don't involve that kind of extreme speed or hitting something that doesn't give at all. Airbags, seatbelts and crumple-zones may not save people when the car hits a solid object at triple digits, but still save a lot of lives when cars collide at 40-50mph.

I don’t disagree with a word of that, other than some possible implications that I, in some way, don’t think we should bother with safety features on guns.

This design allowed gas pressure from a case failure to act on a relatively large surface area. Some simple calculations indicate that even normal operating pressure (if the gas can act against the inner surface of the breechcap) provides enough force to blow the breech cap off the gun. That means that's a failure that the designer needs to deal with safely. It's an easily predictable point of failure and therefore something should be done to protect the shooter if it happens. Now, if there's enough pressure to literally "grenade" the gun, then the designer can't really do much about that. But that's not what happened here.

My problem is I suck at math like you would not believe. Not only do I not care enough to do the “simple” calculations, I probably couldn’t if I wanted, and then my trust of the math would come into play. I much prefer real world testing, which hasn’t been done, at least not that I know of, this is after all the entire point of proofs.

I look at it much more like if we fill the Mauser in your example with low volume pistol powder, Could it inflect life threatening injuries, I certainly think that’s possible. Not that I’m saying that’s what happened here, we have no idea what happened here which is the problem.

On the one hand without the real world tests, I’ll try to give him the benefit of doubt, so I’m really a lost cause. But not enough benefit to buy one and put my face behind it.

 

[JohnKSa]

Not only do I not care enough to do the “simple” calculations, I probably couldn’t if I wanted, and then my trust of the math would come into play. I much prefer real world testing, which hasn’t been done, at least not that I know of, this is after all the entire point of proofs.

If the ability to do real-world testing on a variety of predictable failures exists, that's a great option to take. I don't know if this designer has/had the capability to do enough real-world destruction testing to nail down issues like this. In situations where it is not possible/feasible then engineering principles and math can provide a lot of useful information. And, sometimes even when real-world testing can be done, they can help focus the testing to minimize the cost and time expended.

...how people can excuse Serbu making a 50 Cal with ZERO effort put into directing failures away from the shooter...

To be fair, I think they did put some effort into it. I think that the two "ears" behind breech cap were intended to do that. Unfortunately they weren't strong enough and ended up breaking off and turning into projectiles instead of blocking/deflecting the breech cap sufficiently to prevent it from hitting the shooter.

 

[792mauser]

I had a complete case head separation in a 7.62 Mauser firing steel cased wolf.
Blew all the gas straight back out. Had to pound the bullet about a ¼inch outta the lead of the barrel.

Extractor ripped in two. Front claw broken into several pieces. Firing pin bent and tip sheared off.
The magazine follower, spring and base plate were ripped off. The base plate and the spring were destroyed. The follower could be pounded back into shape.

But the designs gas mitigation gave my just a damaged hat and some very light gas to the face. My glasses protected my face.
The gas was vented up, down and to the side and very slightly back, protecting me almost completely.

You can design a firearm to fail in a safe-ish manner.

 

[Jim Watson]

Funny you should ask. Kentucky Ballastics blew up a Barret with the exact load he used to blow up another RN-50. Calculated pressure 190k psi . . . and the Barret blew all to hell and back too.

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx-cBFsn-p9M6Zma6t_NqShF2bPQIHNut7

I am confused. As I understand it:
KB blew up the first Serbu with spooky SLAP ammo, and repeated the exercise out of of that box after he healed up.

Now he says "the exact same load" at 190000 psi blows up a Barrett.
Where did that load come from? What connection with the first incident? Did he still have some of the defective/sabotaged ammo?
If so, why has it not been dissected and inspected instead of making loud videos?

Is it intentionally fresh loaded with a fast burning powder to generate triple pressures? Did he blow up a third Serbu with such a concoction?

 

[D.B. Cooper]

If so, why has it not been dissected and inspected instead of making loud videos?

Because blowing stuff up gets clicks, and clicks equals cash.

 

[Varminterror]

It is, in its essence, a PIPE BOMB.

No moreso, by design, than any of hundreds if not thousands of other firearm designs.

 

[Elkins45]

I had a complete case head separation in a 7.62 Mauser firing steel cased wolf.
Blew all the gas straight back out. Had to pound the bullet about a ¼inch outta the lead of the barrel.

Extractor ripped in two. Front claw broken into several pieces. Firing pin bent and tip sheared off.
The magazine follower, spring and base plate were ripped off. The base plate and the spring were destroyed. The follower could be pounded back into shape.

But the designs gas mitigation gave my just a damaged hat and some very light gas to the face. My glasses protected my face.
The gas was vented up, down and to the side and very slightly back, protecting me almost completely.

You can design a firearm to fail in a safe-ish manner.

I had a case failure in a Savage 270. The jet of gas that vented out of the receiver relief hole was powerful enough to blow a 50 round box of rifle ammo off the top of the (fortunately unoccupied) bench next to me. The extractor was blown out and my supporting hand got a slight burn from the gas that didn’t go out the hole. I’m a lefty and thankfully so was the gun. I suspect I might be missing a thumb otherwise.

Design matters.

 

[The Glockodile]

You can design a firearm to fail in a safe-ish manner.

Keep your finger off the trigger -

Assume that it's loaded and always point it in a safe direction -

Don't drop or otherwise jar it -

Design matters.

Guaranteed to not accidentally fire by design, with the above provisos!