Monday, July 04, 2016

Snakebit

I put another Glock 32 range trip in this past Friday. Another hundred rounds of Remington 125gr .357SIG was scheduled to go downrange.

Long about round number seventy or so, the slide travel started to feel funny. Rough. Kinda...graunchy? On round #73, the slide didn't go all the way into battery and so I locked it to the rear to take a look at what might be the problem. The aftermarket Lone Wolf recoil spring guide rod seemed to be missing.

I looked downrange, thinking it would be out there someplace and I'd have to see if they could call the range cold, but it wasn't there. I looked at the floor between my feet, and there it was.

The Lone Wolf rod has a threaded cap on either end, and the rearmost one had backed out, allowing the rod to fall out. Note that, until that one failure to return to battery, the gun had fired most of a magazine with no guide rod in it.

I borrowed a rubber mallet and knocked the slide off, then enlisted the much appreciated help of one of my former coworkers to thread the head back on the guide rod while I held the spring compressed with both hands.

Then I went out to fire off the last couple magazines.

On round #99 of the day, the quality control of Remington's .357SIG FMJ ammo reared its ugly head again. This is the second sideways primer I've seen in five hundred rounds of the stuff. Also, this round failed to feed; I don't know as I can hold that against Remington, though...
 
Should read "99 rds" instead of "50 rds".
For the cherry on the icing of the cake of my day, the guy on lane five managed to put a bullet through my target.

This makes it 1529 total rounds fired since the firearm was last cleaned or lubricated, with five failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126, #748, #1,503*), five failures to feed (#221, #224, #282, #734, #1,529), and one failure to eject (#1,033). 471 rounds left to go.
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