Friday, October 10, 2008

Gun Stuff

I have a Springfield Armory 1911 9mm pistol which takes 9 round mags, this puts me at a slight disadvantage in IPSC, where everyone else is shooting 10 round mags. (Australia's firearms legislation limits mags to 10 rounds).

To get around this problem I purchased and use Chip McCormick 38super 10 round mags. These fit fine in my gun, but I did have some feed problems when I started using them. To solve this problem I have reloaded my rounds slightly longer (as per various articles on the web) and now they feed fine.

However, I am now having ejecting problems. Not sure if it is due to under-powered loads, too heavy recoil spring or bad technique on my part. The ejecting problems are reduced when I use 3.8 to 3.9 grains of AP70N powder (with a 125 lead projectile) but they still happen.

So today I purchased another recoil spring (Wolff 16.5lb) and will give that a go in the gun tomorrow. Unfortunately I do not know what the weight of the current recoil spring is (and I couldn't find the information when I did some searching earlier). I'm hoping this spring is lighter, or if not, I will get a friend to help me cut it down.

Will report after the range trip tomorrow. I'm not sure if I will shoot an IPSC match tomorrow or just monkey around with the gun. Hopefully my new mag well will also go on the gun tomorrow as I am interested to see how that will improve my mag changes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not an expert on SA, and my 2 1911s are Colt (WWII prod and a Series-80 Commander) but in other guns where I've seen ejection issues, it often was an extractor problem.

(Do you have an internal or external extractor on those?)

Pull it, clean it, clean the spring, and possibly replacing the extractor spring might be the problem (A friend's CZ-75's extraction problems went away immediately after putting in a Wolff extractor spring).

Julie said...

thanks for the feedback, unix-jedi .. it's being extracted from the chamber okay (according to my friend who knows heaps more than me), it's just not being ejected cleanly. However, after 100 rounds without problem yesterday and only a few problems today (mainly due to me not holding the gun firmly enough) I think the new recoil spring has solved the problem. Now I've just got to get in the habit of holding the gun FIRMLY all the time ....