I did a bonehead thing while loading a small batch of 45ACP last Friday. I was fooling around with OAL adjustments with my progressive press and stupidly advanced the press without charging one of the cases with powder. When the gun went off on that round I was concentrating pretty good and did get some recoil, and I didn't notice anything wrong. I know we're supposed to hear or feel something odd, but I didn't feel or hear it.
Anyway, the primer went off without powder to burn and the bullet was lodged in the barrel. I thought it was a failure to feed because of bad brass and tried to chamber the next round. Fortunately the case of the discharged round was very sooty and that tipped me off to a problem. I checked the bore and removed the bullet with the dowel I keep in my shooting box.
The root cause of this is that I had allowed myself to be distracted by the press adjustments I was making. This could, at least, have cost me a good gun had I not heeded the warning of the soot. I had seen the sooty cases when, at an earlier date, had deliberately loaded some cartridges without powder just to see what would happen.
This was during a match and others were shooting, so perhaps the odd sound was obscured by other fire. When I shoot I really don't feel recoil, I just see the dot go off the target, and I recover. The primer was enough to partially cycle the action, so my dot moved about as I expected.
By the way, in the 1911 I've found that soft swaged bullets will leave the barrel when there is no powder charge, and hard cast bullets (like common commercial bullets), will be lodged in the bore.
