Starting Out with a Bang

After the previous week's anticlimax, I didn't know what to expect from the second test-firing attempt. Feeding tests with dummy reloads showed that the feeding issue had been fixed by widening the breech face, but what other unanticipated snafus lurked beneath the gun's innocently parkerized exterior?

There was only one way to find out.

This time, the gun chambered perfectly and fired well, ejecting its single case just like a good semi-auto should. The hole it put into the target was also reasonably close to the point of aim, although any discrepencies there could be laid at my feet, as I was nervous at first. The ejected casing showed no deformation, though, and inaccuracy due to nerves slowly gave way to inaccuracy due to excitement.

Transitioning to two rounds showed no doubling. As horribly heavy and creepy as the trigger was, the firing mechanism was at least safe. I switched to full magazines and continued to test-fire, looking for hammer-follow, doubling, bulged cases, or any other safety hazard, none of which surfaced. However, cases turned out a bit lopsided near the mouth due to the void in the chamber.

As I was testing for safety, I noticed a minor ejection problem. Although most rounds were being extracted to a point roughly four feet behind me and two to the right, the occasional shell would get thrown forward or straight to the side. It wasn't stovepiping, but it was still irritating and left brass flecks on the front corner of the ejection port. Either my extractor hook was too deep or my slide wasn't coming back with enough force to let the ejecter do its thing. Given that the slide had never been lapped to the frame, I was betting on the latter.

I also had one failure to feed with ball ammo, a three-point jam that occurred roughly halfway through my 100 testing rounds and didn't reappear. It may have been a break-in fluke, but I made note of it and resolved to keep my eyes open for any clue as to what caused the problem when performing the post-test examination of the gun.

As I mentioned above, the gun's accuracy suffered from being shot by yours truly via its horrible trigger, but otherwise appeared pretty good. Speaking of triggers, I came to realize that the long target trigger in the gun had some sharp edges that were not at all finger-friendly. All the more reason to switch to my preferred A1-length trigger.

Still, this was a good trip. I had expected to have some things to touch up, but I didn't expect the gun to perform quite as well as it did: Fresh from the bench, it had provided 100 mostly error-free rounds. (I didn't consider the forward extraction an error as it didn't tie up the gun.) Still, there was some work to be done.

I started with the extractor. Just back of the hook, its width measured between 0.078" and 0.079". The width at the hook came in at 0.112", which put the hook depth, the difference of these two numbers, at between 0.033" and 0.034". Given that an in-spec extractor hook is between 0.032" and 0.036", my extractor was probably not the source of the ejection misbehavior.

However, I did have a likely culprit for both the extraction issues and the single three-point jam: the same breech face clearance issues that had caused failures to feed the previous week. Hand-cycling the gun showed some reluctance to link down that was attributable to the rim of the round squeezing against the sides of the breech. My clue came from noticing gouges on the barrel hood: Something was stopping it from linking down before the slide came back and hit it. I cleaned up the barrel hood gouges and then opened up the breech face a bit more on the side opposite the extractor to ensure the gouges would not return. I also noticed that the gouges were more prominent on the hood opposite the ejection port; this indicated that either the barrel's lower lugs or the slide's lug recesses were uneven, or both at once. Quick examination showed slight asymmetry in the slide's lugs, which had a slight protrusion that matched up perfectly with the marks on the barrel hood. I carefully relieved the protrusion, then polished the lug area of the slide.

The last check I performed involved the barrel's headspace. It was likely the lugs had seated slightly, so I wanted to ensure that headspace hadn't opened up to a dangerous degree. A 0.89" case admitted a 0.019" feeler between it and the breech face when the barrel was held forward in the slide, indicating a combined headspace of 0.909", which was 0.002" longer than the initial measurement, but still below the maximum of 0.920".

Having checked post-seating headspace and addressed what I believed was the most likely cause of extraction and feeding issues, it was time for another trip to the range.