Old Breaker

Because both hands were not enough--you need three hands.

"You are lucky that it did not explode and hurt."

Now you've done it! By mentioning this, you have now cursed this poor person because it's a well established fact that ignorance of a danger is often the last remaining protection you have against it occurring. Now that he knows, it's all but guaranteed to happen next time. You have stripped away the magic aura that was keeping that disaster at bay.

To illustrate the genesis of this knowledge: I once had a project to commission a very large soft starter on a compressor in a 100+ year old saw mill in Idaho. It was a grueling task in that the available power source was almost too weak to allow this motor to start. But after an entire day of trial and error, I succeeded and became the hero of the day for this sawmill because nobody had been able to do it since the utility refused to approve the service change, effectively shutting them down, for causing too much of a voltage drop (another long story involving a TV/Movie star as to why).

As I was leaving the mill, we walked by a very old "One Armed Bandit", an oil bath manual compensator motor starter. It's an archaic form of an autotransformer starter that had a manual crank on the side to change the transformer taps as you started the motor. The contacts of this manual transfer switch mechanism were in an oil tank on the bottom. The oil tank had a leak and they had a coffee can under it to catch the oil. As we walked by, the maintenance tech saw that the can was almost full, picked it up and poured it back into the tank, sawdust and all! I was in shock and told him that what he was doing was not only horribly foolish but created a serious risk of fire. He said they had been doing it that way for 25 years, no problem. I wrestled with the idea of calling OSHA (the US industrial safety watchdog agency) but my employer pleaded with me not to because they were a good customer.

2 weeks later the starter did in fact catch on fire and the 100+ year old sawmill went up in a cloud of smoke in under an hour. No deaths but they couldn't re-open that mill. 150 lost jobs and total devastation to the small mountain community that it supported. I got a dunk call from that maintenance technician in which he blamed me.

You are a lucky man to be writing this. You could have possibly experienced Arc Flash in a personal way. There are times to reset a breaker, and there are times to leave it to a pro to find out why it faulted and if it is safe to energize again.

Luck was on your side this day.

The answer is in the question: it bounced because <...closed a old 440V oil breaker on a fault....>. The breaker said that it isn't playing.

Eliminate the fault, and have another go. Please make sure all other CR4 subscribers are standing well back before so doing.