Yesterday, I picked up my Gen 4 Glock 21 to go shoot a USPSA classifier match; I figured I’d have some fun and see if I could make Master in Production with my major PF loads. Skipping to the end of the story, I didn’t, because I shot like crap. Why did I shoot like crap? Because on the second stage, I lost my mental game completely. Why did I lose my mental game completely? Because this happened.
See how that round is sitting there, not where it’s supposed to be? Yeah, that will tie up a gun pretty bad. You can even see it happen on video. So I dug through most of my mags to see if I could replicate the issue and sure enough I was able to replicate it consistently with random mags pulled out of my bag. The ammo in the magazine is Hornady Steel Match, which had been perfectly fine up until that point in time. We’ll get in to the possible causes later in the post, but the smart money is on “my mags are filthy” as being a huge part of the culprit.
I am pretty sure that's not supposed to happen
Digging deeper into the magazine, I found the root cause of the issue as you’ll see here. Looking at the image on the left, you can see that the two rounds are tying up the rest of the magazine. Sorry for the crappy image quality, all I had was a cell phone camera to make due with. Several theories present themselves:
- Steel has more friction than brass.
- It was also cold out initially, around 34F, which could have(?) caused the mag to contract slightly.
- My mags are filthy
For the duration of the match, I switched my rounds to brass cased ammo, which fed and ran successfully through the gun, with the exception of one light primer strike. After getting home from the match, I posted pictures and video on my Facebook page and after some discussion I tried something crazy: cleaning my magazines. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that shooting 5k+ rounds through my guns using all manner of crappy ammo might make my mags filthy enough that the greater friction of steel cased ammo would cause them to bind.
After cleaning two of the “problem” mags, I was unable to replicate the malfunction when loading and stripping rounds by hand. During the match, I had been easily able to manually replicate the malfunction. Unfortunately, I’ve not had the chance in live fire to test my theory, however early results in dry fire indicate that cleaning my mags is the solution.
However, I am still going to count this as an ammo-induced malfunction. The logic behind this decision is pretty straightforward to me. Because the brass cased ammo fed flawlessly, the failure was related in part to the steel cases. The Steel Cased Ammo Test will continue after I clean all my mags.
No comments:
Post a Comment