Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Odd little thing I ran across the other day

I've got a bunch of different snap-caps in different cartridges, most of them A-Zoom(they last a lot longer than others I've tried. Couple of days ago I loaded some .380 caps into a magazine to check a pistol I'd cleaned and cycled the slide and oops! Two or three times out of each mag the extractor wouldn't extract; sometimes had to work the slide back & forth several times to get it to grab.

Checked the extractor, couldn't find any problem. Finally, just to check(Note: this is one of those BE DAMN CAREFUL IF YOU DO THIS things) I loaded the mag with ammo and- being very careful where my finger was- cycled the slide. And no problems.

Loaded the snap-caps, problem. Ammo, no problem. I've never had this happen before; apparently the rim or something on the caps is just enough different that this occurs with this pistol. I guess I need to make some dummies with cases and bullets just for testing things like this if they occur in the future.

Updated: took that pistol to the range today, and it worked flawlessly. But it still has the problem with those caps.

4 comments:

GuardDuck said...

Have you mic'd out the snap caps and compared the measurements to an actual round?

Be interesting to know the difference.

Arthur said...

I thought about doing the same thing, leaving the primers and powder out. But you'd have to mark up the case - maybe red magic marker or something - to make it damn obvious they're dummy rounds.

Anonymous said...

I use ammo that somehow didn't get a primer put in it during reloading. Just shake the powder out first.

Firehand said...

No, haven't gotten the mike out yet; need to do that.

I've made dummies before, use a red marker to color the cases and be very careful to put them in their own bag after use. AND always look at the primer before using them; I'm jumpy about such things anymore.

About the only time I run into that is on the Dillon, and happily that's rarely. And most stuff I load for I can't do on the progressive, unfortunately, so I'll just make some dummies up.