The Project: a discovery and a bit of tuning Updated with picture

The discovery: remember that occasional feeding problem I thought might be a couple of bad magazines?  Well, they're not bad, just different.

At the range yesterday had FTF with two rounds, both when trying to load the first round from the mag.  Looked closely, yes, the round is a bit nose-down.  I noted the number of that mag, then loaded those rounds into another, and they fed with no problem.  Hmmm.

Compared, I found what's going on(pictures to be added later): some of my magazines have longer feed lips than others; the ones with longer lips don't let the round start tipping up as soon, and with this bullet shape(225-grain flat-nose) that's sometimes enough to cause the hangup.
UPdate: here's the pic:

The lower is the 6-round Kimber that came with the pistol, the top is a 7-round ACT-MAG.  Both have worked just fine in the past; I'm guessing the angle of the feed ramp on the new frame may be a fraction different, and that's causing the longer feed lips of the ACT to sometimes not let the handloads with that bullet(at that length, haven't loaded any shorter yet) angle up soon enough.
I need to go through all the mags I've got for this and compare.



On this, I'm going to try something: I need to load some more ammo anyway, so the next batch I'll seat the bullet deeper.  I think that'll let the rounds feed better from all mags.  If not, then I'll have to find the mags that do work with these and set those aside for practice.

The tuning:
Specifically, the ejector.  It worked very well, but it was kicking the empties right and forward, which means I lost a lot of brass that I couldn't reach with a broom or whatever*.  So I did some digging at M1911.org, and found this post.  Did a little shaping on the ejector nose, and it made a world of difference; now the empties do eject far more to the right than forward**.

I think I've got most everything I'm going to mod done.  I still need to get and install a extended thumb safety, and I'm considering the possible virtue of a extended mag release; otherwise, done.  When I've got those pieces, I'll borrow a friend's cabinet and beat-blast the frame and external parts to even up the finish from undercutting the trigger guard.  The slide... well, it's honest wear, so until I can set up to ceracoat it, it'll stay as is.

Not related, but earlier I mentioned scraping a floor.  I need to refnish the wood floor in my bedroom, and it occurred to me that if I could use the scrapers like I did on the guitar project and clean some of the old finish off, there'd be a lot fewer clogged sanding sheets and the sanding should go faster(a good thing when you have to rent the sander).  So the last few days I've been scraping a section at a time.  It works, it's cleaned a LOT of the old finish off(between 1/4 and 1/3 of the floor so far), in spots just about all.  But my elbows hate me, that repeated movement is annoying hell out of them.
But it's getting done.



*Note that if you don't handload and save brass, this isn't a problem.
**Be it noted that they whack into the partition and some of them do then bounce left and some forward, but that's not the ejectors' fault.