[Terry Peters]

Alright all of you 1911 ologists.

This is from a recent range experience, about two hours ago.

One of my customers recently purchased an Urban Millenium which I stock and had a few fail to fully go in battery and after a whack on the mag the gun went into battery. The buyer was rightfully concerned about the gun.

The shooter and I went to the range and got the gun for a good work out to localize what we figured was wrong.

Gun, mag, operator, or ammo.

Here is the deal.

Ammo with problem. Federal American Eagle. 230 ball or gun with a problem.

This is what we did.

I had about 4 boxes of the Eagle, 6 boxes of Winchester white box (4 of the 230 ball and 2 of the 185 "no power jam-o-matic" target loads and several hundred of my super crud cast bullet of wheel weights with my on casting which is guaranteed to totaly crud a gun in 50 rounds.

To have a start point we fired 5 or 6 mags of my guaranteed to crud a gun reloads so all factors would be the same after that.

No FTF.

Then we shot a box or so of the American Eagle and had several FTF. We also shot a box or so of the Winchester 230 ball white box. No FTF.

Then we shot some of the weak sub powered 185 Winchester white box. No FTF.

Hmmmmmmmm. Is this an ammo problem.

We then mixed the last three hundred of rounds so if there was a FTF we could extract the bullet and see which one.

Remember the gun is very hot, and very dirty.

We shot and reloaded as fast as we could and we were seeing the heat mirage from the slide to the front sight.

Lets just say our one hole groups were not. Operator problem.

Of the 300 or so more rounds 10 FTF. Eight Federal American Eagle, One Whichester 230 ball and one 185 Wimp loads. All of the 50 or so super crud reloads of mine in the mix feed and shot without a problem. About one third of the shooting was done single weak handed to see if there was a chance at the potential for limp wristing. The only FTF were again the Federal American Eagle.

The only varible we saw when examining the ammo was the taper crimp or what ever Federal crimp is was sharper then all of the other ammo.

I then took my own personal demo CQB and shot another hundred of so of the Federal 230 Ball using the same 5 mags and had no FTF.

Problem. 95% ammo and 5% gun. I will send the gun back to Wilson to check the chamber just to be sure but.........

Moral to this way too long post.

Check the taper crimps on your ammo.

Yes, I know I am going to hear that many folk shoot the American Eagle by the train car load without a problem.

All I am trying to get across is check your tamper crimps on the bulk or generic ammos as all of it is not the same.

I hope this helps.

Do your research but you get what you pay for front end or back end.

 

[gyp_c2]

Know what...Anyone that would do that much for anyone of his customers is allright by me...I'll buy my next couple from you...Outstanding...Wish you were livin' up here :wink:
That's alright...I'll bet Fed-Ex knows where you are :wink:

Thanks for the heads up as well...

 

[DougC]

Thanks for the good info and reminder, Terry. My first trip to Chapman Academy was done on "Quality remanufactured Ammunition", since I didnt reload at the time.

Needless to say after refining my tap rack bang procedure, of which I was told I was doing exceptional BTW, Ray and I examined my ammo and ended up on a single stage press in the range building after class applying a taper crimp to the reloads. No burp after that, and that was with a not so tight chamber. One might wonder why I stayed up till O'dark thirty last night watching Fox News running all my reloaded 10mm through a case gauge, only two higher primers than I like out of 1k. Thank you Dillon 1050 with adj primer seater! Have a good one, DougC

 

[MAP]

Terry,

Can you provide the lot number for the Federal ammo that you had problems with?

TIA

Mike

 

[Matt VDW]

What was the crimp measurement on the American Eagle rounds that wouldn't chamber?

 

[John Lawson]

Before taper crimp dies were common, the same problems happened. If it was on handloads, it could usually be cured by removing the neck sizer from the die set and reducing the diameter slightly. Some bullets are .451 and some are .452 (for the .45 acp). The neck sizer is made to accommodate .452, in most cases. Using the proper sizer, we had no problems without the benefit of crimp. This was, of course, with uniform batches of cases.
These days, a reduction of .002" on an empty case will usually crimp tightly enough. If it does not, aother thousandth will do the job. You can test this out on dummy rounds before loading. On factory ammunition, you get what you pay for, if you are really lucky.

 

[Mike Benedict]

I have seen the same problem with S&B and Blazer. In a Kimber neither would feed until I taper crimped them.

Mike