I remember talking to a gunsmith back in the 1990s. He said, “Business has been slow for a number of years. But lately it has picked up, thanks to the Dremel.”
I asked him what he meant by that. He said, “More and more people are buying Dremel tools. Many of them are gun owners, and they use the tool to do their own ‘gunsmithing’ in an effort to ‘improve’ the gun. They usually end up doing more harm than good, and then they give it to me to fix their screwups.”
Clean is one thing. Try overlubing it. It will be a little messy, but if that works then it’s not the ammo. If it works then wipe off the lube and try again.
See, I’ve made modifications to my gun. But they were modifications meant to be done by owners, using kits and instructions provided by manufacturers. No MacGyver crap from me.
And when I got new sights, I let a gunsmith do the installation, because there was no way I wasn’t going to screw that up.
Heh-heh. I hadn’t considered that. In the old days, guys would work on “improving” the triggers on their revolvers and semiautos using “stones.” What that usually translated to was having to replace a lot of sears and other parts. I don’t know why they wanted 1.5 lb. triggers.
Yea. It had been cleaned, and then shot once. Maybe 50 rounds. I did not clean it that night, the next day we bought that new ammo and it did not like it.
Yeah; keep polishing the sliding areas until you wore or rounded off the notches and ridges that need to engage for sure 100% of the time.
But when it counts you want to have that extra 0.02 of a second of faster first shot! /s
Lots of cheap ammo that is almost always Berdan-primed (e.g. not worth trying to keep and reload in most cases) and many steel cased owe their lineage to Tula Arms in Russia. In some cases not made by them anymore, often the different names mean different construction materials. They go bang reliably but can be dirty.
Fiocchi is a very old, very large Italian company. They’re reliable.
A few comments that may or may not be of any value to you:
I owned and shot a Shield EZ for a couple of years. They’re nice guns and indeed easy to work with. I could recommend them.
Fiocchi ammo is generally good stuff.
Another .380 semi-auto that has been recommended to me as being ‘soft shooting’ is Ruger’s Security 380. I’ve never owned or even shot one, but I believe the person who recommended it. I own other Rugers and their designs are often somewhat lacking but they almost always work.
Why would the gun range care about the casing materials? I assume it is because they resell the cases that folks don’t take and you “can’t” reload aluminum casings.
I’ve shot a ton of Wolf 223, 7.62x39, 9mm, and 40. No issues.
In a former life, I shot a ton of steel and action pistol. Nearly everyone used the 1911 platform but in the 2011 format (double-stack mag). There was also some revolver and Glock shooters (I did both from time to time). Most folks paid a lot for their 2011s and they freaking worked. I didn’t pay that much for mine (Para Ordnance out of Canada) and it freaking worked. I shot many, many thousands of my own rolled ammo from a Dillon progressive press. From what I saw over a lot of years of shooting multiple times per month, with lots of people is the 1911 platform is pretty dang reliable. We weren’t gathering on a cold January morning to grouse about our guns being at the gunsmith.
If you’re using a magnet to find aluminum casings, well…
Because it’s an indoor range that doesn’t allow steel core, and they’re either ignorant of the difference between steel core and steel case, or don’t want to bother differentiating the two as a magnet gets either.
Totally misread and completely missed the ferrous metals implication. STEEL, not aluminum. DOH!
I have shot plenty of steel and aluminum cased ammo. But, I don’t shoot at indoor ranges so no one has ever magnet’d my ammo.
Good to know. Never heard of them. I’ll shoot those… If I get my gun back from my wife. I think she likes it.
Also good to know. I saw online some place had a deal that came with 4 extra mags and a bag made for it.
I looked at one in the store I bought the new ammo at. I know my wife is nervous about the class. I only loaded 8 in a 9 round mag. Well, 6 mags. That may help the feed problem, that and different ammo.
She has to shoot for this class. She should be good to go.
I think the concern is a steel bullet. Or a copper cased steel projectile. Ricochet is all I can think of. They don’t care about the shell. They just touch the tip of the round (the bullet) with a magnet.
For other European brands, I highly recommend Sellier & Bellot (Czech Republic) and Prvi Partizan (Serbia). They both make some obscure calibers too. And at least for 9mm, S&B boxes pack the smallest of any brand I’ve seen.
I buy what I can get. I bought 4 boxes of .380 today. I cleaned them out. This is a big outdoor outfitter. .380 is a little scarce.
I’d pick that up because I like Ruger. But it has that double trigger that I am firmly against on principle. It’s stupid.
About 20 years ago I bought a Taurus .357 revolver. My wife was having a hard time squeezing the trigger, so I installed a “softer” trigger spring in it. The trigger pull was lighter as a result, but every other round was a failure-to-fire! I reinstalled the OEM spring. It was dumb of me to second-guess the designers of the gun…
I just did a spring upgrade to my Taurus 85CH for this same issue. And I was quite prepared to go to the range and have problems. (The Galloway spring kit includes both trigger and hammer springs.) Thankfully, I had 100% function and the trigger probably improved by 30% to 40%. But you’re right that the designers usually chose springs and related parts for good reasons.