I was fooling around shooting my 280 from the bench this morning. I've been using this load for a few years without any problems. I had fired 3- 3 shot groups everything looked o.k. Fired another round and smoke came out of the receiver vent. The shell ejected a little harder than normal. The primer pocket had a small hole burned through along side the primer and the head was black with soot. When I got home I pressed out the primer and the flash hole was elongated and a channel about 1/64 " was burned into the primer pocket. The primer took normal pressure to punch out. Bad brass or load to hot?

Sounds like a bad piece of brass. I loaded up a bunch of 7 Rem Mag virgin brass casesanumber of years back and, as Murphy would have it, the gun misfired when aiming at an elk. Second shot went off and did its job. Later, I checked the dud round. Good primer dent. Pulled bullet - case full of powder. De-primed and discovered the case (Remington nickel)was made without a flash hole.

Since then, I run each piece of virgin brass through the NSO die to true up the neck; and to make sure the decap pin finds a flash hole in each case.

That's my thought too. This was the third time the brass had been reloaded, it was Rem. brass. I stopped shooting after it happened. Of the 3 groups the best was ..463, that's the best group I've shot in a while.Usually the gun averages about .75.