Is the Serbu RN-50 Safe? Mark Serbu Interview
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ส.ค. 2023
- The RN-50 was popularized because it is a cost effective 50 BMG that the common man can actually afford and not have to go on a strict diet of Rahman Noodles. There was an incident a few years ago involving Scott from Kentucky Ballistics, where one of these firearms suffered a catastrophic failure, injuring Scott. Mark Serbu joins me to discuss the findings of the investigation into what actually happened.
Catch up with Mark over on his channel: / @markserbu
If you want to hear the full interview you can listen to it here:
/ @armedandnerded
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One point I keep forgetting to make: Just as all the other SLAP rounds didn't blow up Scott's gun, who's to say one of Scott's leftover SLAP rounds that I have has the wrong powder in it? And even if it does, there's no way to know it's the SAME wrong powder, and that it was loaded the same as the one the blew up the gun.
A spectral analysis can be performed on the accident round's empty case, but I don't think it'll tell you anything more than that it was a nitro-based powder. You certainly would not be able to tell how much powder was in it.
This is a valid point. I’m going to pin it
As Curtis said in the video, 230gr of pistol powder is a VERY big deal.
Any enclosed vessel loaded with that much fast burning powder is no longer an ammunition cartridge, it is a pipe bomb.
@@LeoBaker-ir3vo Absolutely not. You're joking, right?
@@LeoBaker-ir3vo the threads and retention lugs were the path of least resistance for the speed of the detonation, that's why they failed first.
That's what they were talking about in the video, not just potential energy of gunpowder vs explosives like TNT or C4, but the speed at which the energy is "unleashed". Gun powder operates on a curve, whereas explosives operate on a nearly instant spike of massive pressure. Guns are finely tuned to operate on specific curves (and amounts of pressure) which is why you can use something like blue dot in a pistol and not blow yourself up, but blue dot in a rifle is a bomb.
C4 detonated the chamber because it unleashed its energy so fast that the threads and lugs didn't even have time to fail (mechanical/material failure DOES take time) and the chamber walls were the weakest point in the system when accounting for both pressure AND time.
Scott's explosion happened in slow motion when compared to something faster like C4, we can't perceive the difference because it's a difference between milliseconds and microseconds.
Given the fact that Scott was able to recreate his explosion almost exactly, I'd say it was the wrong kind of powder, that's not difficult to recreate and in this case it produced the exact same result.
If you don't have faith in the RN-50 then don't buy one, but how many have exploded? I only know of 3 and two were intentional because they were trying to recreate the first unintentional explosion. A bad round can cause ANY gun to fail regardless of how well it's built. The simple fact is that we're better at breaking things than making things that can't be broken.
I've personally had one of my AR's explode because of an overpressure event and I still shoot AR's, it's just the risk you take.
@@LeoBaker-ir3vo actually no, the charging handle latch failed and it hit me in the face. Stoner WAS a genius, but even a genius can't account for every possible scenario.
I'm not talking about "pushing the envelope" or anything, just stating that if you shoot long enough you're GOING to have something go wrong. The "it's the risk you take" wasn't meaning that we're in uncharted territory or something, but even in well known territory things can go wrong.
I'm not making any excuses for Mr. Serbu, I don't have a horse in this race, I don't own a single one of his firearms, but I DO know about material strengths and stress. And with a .50BMG if you have an "oops" round you CAN'T make it "safe" it's just too much power because of the volume. Volume causes "power" to increase almost exponentially when you're talking about destructive force from overloading a given volume. That's why when a 9mm fires out of battery on something like an SMG it's generally not even going to cause enough damage to take the gun out of the fight, you clear the malfunction and get back to work. On an AR a malfunction isn't likely to significantly harm the user but the gun is done until major repairs can be made (because the increased volume adds more destructive force when it's overloaded). Now when a .50BMG fails it is going to fail spectacularly, there are no exceptions. You overload a case with that much volume and it's not a firearms mishap, it's a bomb.
Thanks for doing this! I appreciated the chance to have a rational discussion about this hot topic.
Mark, you deserve the worst for this situation.
The truly tragic thing is, people in my country all of a sudden fire sale off their RN50's after the Kentucky thing... I just had to buy them... I converted one to 700 HBH and another to 700 APM ....
@@ThatsAmore2142-mz1dj cope
Idiots gonna hate no matter what! Thank you for your time and effort to help the community
I’ve watched Mr. Serbu’s channel for a long time . Especially like his content on the Beretta 70/90 and vz’s . I feel like from a manufacturing and metallurgy standpoint he really knows his stuff. I’m not really interested in 50 bmg, but love his other content. My take on it was watch what you are feeding your guns . As someone who likes AKs I have sent some pretty old/sketchy/unknown crap down the pipe .
I felt like after the incident he handled it really well.
He Didn’t try to run away from it and attacked it with a scientific and professional attitude .Probably why you see a steady interest in the rifle today.
I have an RN50. The price of random surplus ammo has been appealing. But at the end of the day, in my humble opinion, i find the extra cost of reputable and/or name brand ammo to be worth the extra cost to me. Especially as I’m not a “high volume” consumer of the 50bmg round.
Nothing is safe when you have a hot round.
I don't know of any manufacturers that recommend the use of reloaded ammunition. I shoot tons of trap reloads all done by myself. Every time I change recipes, I do a 10-round weigh for average and random after that. Scott showed me a valuable lesson I do not want to repeat. I have seen some blown up shotguns at the range. It does happen. I don't want to be "that guy".
I just yesterday got my notice for the rifle I ordered in April of '22. Not that it was done, but that they were getting to it.
As someone who played with 50 bmg for a time (ArmaLite AR-50) the design of Mark's rifle is sound....even ArmaLite stated the possible hazards of using "Exotic or Second-hand military ammo" in their rifle...so it's "at your own risk" if you do so...
My understanding was the issue was that you do not want to use SLAP rounds in a rifle with a break unless the break is specially made for it, which i dont believe the RN50 is. It creates an overpressure event which is capable of causing....well....what happened to KB. The gun is perfectly fine using regular ammo.
If I recall that explanation was ammo related. Because Scott was using a SLAP round. No he was not using hand loads.
SLAP rounds are restricted to hte M2 .50 because of the sabot, which could get got in the very common muzzle brakes of .50 rifles, not because they have magic explodium
They were not just slap rounds. Scott himself said they were shady Ebay slap rounds that may or may not have been legit.
Can’t buy ammo on eBay
When you decide your new venture is spiking every weapon you can get, the smart guy correctly marks each round and leaves no chance it gets into the mix before you start. This wasn’t hard to figure out.
The design is sound but the reloaded 50calibre rnd was very hot. I would say overloaded well beyond what it was designed for and unfortunately caused a severe malfunction.
The only problem I see with the RN-50 is the lead time lol
I ordered one and am looking at getting a tax stamp for a quiet boy sooner lol
And I'm not mad about the wait, it's a frigging 50 cal that a normie like me can afford, plus I already have an AR 50 bolt gun to keep me satisfied lol
my rn50 ships next week.
The RN-50 is safe...
...as long as it doesn't fail.
You could do everything right and buy only factory ammo from a reputable business like Lucky Gunner, BUT because your box of Winchester white box was defective from the Winchester factory, due to ONE employee's negligence on ONE unfortunate day, your RN-50 rifle blows up and puts shrapnel in your lung and the chamber cap flies back and fractures your skull.
AR-15s and most bolt action .50 caliber rifles do not have the same risk of harm to the shooter if they explode.
This! It boggles my mind how people call this gun safe as long you shoot a safe round lol. Fact is, gun design is flawed because it sends the sharpnel right back at you in case of a failure. This thing shoots a freakin 50cal round and holds the pressure by something you have to screw on.. no thanks
Is it safe under perfect conditions? Sure. Do machines fail? Of course. At the point of failure would the RN50 be safer than an enclosed design like an M99? I doubt it.
I said the same thing on Mark’s video about it when it happened. I’m willing to believe otherwise but someone’s gonna need to send Scott an M99 (or an equivalent enclosed type of design) to test with an equally spicy round. No matter the specs of the threads or prongs, the openness of the RN50 design is what messed Scott up. Every machine can and will eventually fail. The best design is one that makes a failure less impactful. I don’t hate the RN50 because it has a market but there’s a reason it’s so significantly cheaper than it’s competitors.
I think Scott blew up an m107.
@@cams.3102 he did and the dummy didn’t take nearly as much damage since there wasn’t a massive chunk of metal or obliterated prongs flying at it, rather the debris was mostly stopped from reaching the operator likely due to the more enclosed design. I named a bolt gun in the interest of fairness because an auto bleeds off extra pressure and is designed to unlock rather than stay shut which could also benefit the locked design being more resistant to movement. I could see it both ways. An M99 would be as close of an apple to apple comparison I can think of for the RN50.
All of it down to the original cartridge’s pressure is a guess. None of this is really scientific but a simple test like that would help clear its name, or make positions like mine valid. Maybe that’s why they never did it? Serbu has no reason to care if they’re backlogged anyways. There’s always someone willing to give your product a try, especially if it’s the cheapest option on the shelf. I’m gonna keep saving for that M95 myself. 😂
It’s no more open than a bolt failure of any Mauser action derivative
Those locking lugs fail and that bolt is still coming back to fuck you uo
@@MyLonewolf25 I don't think you understand what an M99 is or you didn't read anything I said. You basically proved my point. lol
Exactly.
Most guns, when they do explode, explode in a direction away from the shooter.
The rn-50 does the opposite.
everything eventually fails. the trick is, to get it to break how you want it to break.
That gun could have thicker support behind the barrel. You can't rely on this gun always gonna be used with perfect rounds. Unlike bolt actions, i am pretty sure you can route explosion to sides rather than face of shooter in this weapon.
Perfectly safe design if you're not planning on shooting reloads filling the case to the brim with fast-burning pistol powder topped off with a brittle plastic sabot.
I doubt there was idiocy or malicious intent in it, it was probably somebody who at one time had some pulled Slap sabots and projectiles, and just tossed pistol powder into it so you heard something when you shook it and was intended to sit on a shelf in a cartridge collection and the thought of it being fired never came to someones mind until maybe they passed away and the collection ended up being bought at an auction then being sold at a gunshow, where the round changed hands as a SLAP .50 bmg round, without its origin being known.
That incident was frightening because it could happen to anyone.
Heck id just like to own a slap round. I wouldnt shoot it, i just think it wuld be cool to set next to my 50 cal spotter.
It would be awesome to own an RN50
Make a thumbnail with 50 that blew up and pick a more bombastic title. I bet the video hits.
To Marks question of why would someone load with pistol powder, why would someone put poison in Tylenol capsules? They are evil and want to hurt people.
to be fair, even if it doesnt deserve it, people will associate it with that explosion
I agree and I don’t. I thought he handled it really well. Professional. Yes people will remember the explosion , but serious gun enthusiasts will also remember how Mr. Serbu handled it . The fact that there is a waiting list for the very same model speaks volumes .
A TWIMC round from the BATF.
Those rounds wouldve done massive damage to any 50 with the ammount of over pressure that happened with scott. Yes even a barret the entire recoil system on a barret wouldve been compromised.
Fact is a 50bmg is a very dangerous round if you dont know the background of the load or reload. Pay attention to everything when your shooting a gun the rifle the ammo the sights the screws everything. One weak point and you run the risk of a catastrophic failure
Let's see the powder analysis. At least visual. I bet all of your subscribers and supports would kick in money for a spectral analysis.
No, they won’t.
Why couldnt we just load ammo with micrograms of c4? Super light ammo...
the fact that he didn't test and open up the rounds is concerning
I've heard the claim that some of these guys who do reloaded ammo for a living deliberately include a hot round every X number of rounds for as many different reasons as there are people making the claim.
Now sadly, we all know that there are some very bad and mean people out there so sadly, I can see some idiot thinking it'd be funny to slip a hot round into a batch and even hoping that rather than just giving the shooter an extra bit of recoil, instead, it causing catastrophic damage to the gun/shooter.
Equally sadly, there are even more idiots out there who don't know and scammers who don't care.
So was the round Scott fired intentionally hot, an idiot who didn't know what he was doing or a scammer who simply dumped whatever powder he happened to have access to into it?
We'll never know.
What we do know is that the problem wasn't the firearm as that round was so hot that it likely would have equally nasty results with any other .50 on the market.
Thing is you can get Hot ammo (even dangerous) from standard factory rounds, i think most of us have had at least one...depending on how much you shoot. So To just blame the gun for failure is ridiculous...
The gun design is flawed as it explodes in your direction while other guns explode away from you. I wouldn’t trust something you have to screw on to hold a 50cal back pressure.
From someone that has limited knowledge and all the videos I have seen and believing that the person that loaded those rounds were not loaded with the intention to hurt someone, potentially when they loaded it with a funnel not all the powder from the previous round they loaded went into the cartridge and they loaded their measure with the normal load and the added powder that was still in the funnel. The other plausible thing is someone who doesn’t know how to load ammo
when you're doing some experimental shit, what did you expect? the takeaway here is science! if you're going to do dumb stuff then do it responsibly at your own risk. I highly doubt the rn-50 was design to take higher pressures than a Barrett.
If I was in the market I wouldn't buy one.
In short, the Rifle is Safe.
The AMMO was unsafe.
The loads Scott at Kentucky Ballistics was using was of uncertain provenance. And there's every indication that these rounds were reloaded Just Plain Wrong.
When you run 2-3x the pressure rating of the weapon through, yeah, it's gonna fail!
Mark's product is good.
It's just unsafe if you want to turn it into a pipe bomb. (DUH!)
The two lugs on the lower receiver behide the screw cap and the screw cap it self are bad design/weak point .
That is factually inaccurate. Some guns have one lug. And the thread is the strongest way to do it. It’s just inconvenient.
@@LeoBaker-ir3voyou are out of line!
@@VSO_Gun_Channel they do very little outside of situations like this, and in situations like this they hurt people. How is saying they're a bad design factually inaccurate?
@@kenseavey9165simp
I do believe a relief point could be added to cause an upwards jet/vent (reinforced ring with a thinner spot on the top of the receiver) instead of a thrown cap during rupture. Saying the threads are strong doesn't mean anything, same as quoting bolt lug strength, you make sure it can *vent away from faces* of users if feasible, instead of rocketing bolt or receiver pieces into faces.
I disagree 💯 . I’m not making a comment to be noticed I’m making because the gun is unsafe . It happened 2 times and if he wants to say this comment is bad well he should watch the video. I don’t care who this guy is he should STOP Making Guns and be banned .
the first one was under conditions well never fully know and the second time was with a LITERAL BOMBS worth of powder, designed to fail loaded into the gun. in fact watch KBs other videos of guns blowing up, especially the barrett video.
Why? Because one ShillTuber didn't check the rounds he was using and it blew up due to massive over pressure?
I'm sorry but I don't think the RN 50 is safe this interview was odd
My thought as soon as it happened was I wonder if it was one of those booby trap rounds that they mixed in to ammo in Iraq to blow up insurgents. And it somehow made it here.