Once upon a time in Alaska, I let an acquaintance use my reloading setup to prepare some ammo for his upcoming black bear hunt. He was using a .308 with 180-grain Nosler Partition bullets. I watched him assmble the first few rounds using his once-fired brass, and he did it correctly. So I stopped "supervising" and went to do some other chores.

A couple of weeks later, he came in all shook up and announced "I'll never use another damned handloaded round of ammo!!", or words to that effect! Said he'd tried to fire at a bear three times, and all he got was a "click". On the fourth try, the rifle fired, and the bear bit the dust. (He claimedhe'd killed it at point blank range as the bear was about to do him harm!! Not so sureI believed that part of the drama!)

Anyway, he'd brought back several rounds of that "bad handloaded" ammo. I thought perhaps the primers had been bad, or some such, so I pulled the bullets to see if I could figure out what happened. The bases of the bullets were blaaaack as could be from the coating of soot on them from the primers, which had fired quite well, thank you!! The dufus had leftthe powder charges out ofabout half the box of ammo he'd loaded. Well, ammo doesn't function too well without propellant! However, he was one "velly rucky boy"!! The bullets had enough neck tension that NONE of them had escaped the case and lodged in his rifle's bore; plus,the last round in his magazine DID have powder in it. Dead bear!! Moral: always look into your charged cases before seating the bullets to make sure powder is there in each one of them, and the level is about the same in each case. (This helps avoid double-charging, when it is possible to do so.)

IF you hear a pop when shooting, like you did, remove the bolt right now and make sure you can see all the way through the bore before shooting again! Good luck!