Adventures with my new Springfield 911 380

New guy here. Followed this forum for several years and finally decided to join up. Looks to be composed of serious shooters and lacking in the gun trolls of many other sites. Hope burns eternal...

In any event, I recently purchased a Springfield 911 380 for pocket carry. Liked the pistol from the first touch, but had some reservations as reviews often cite chambering and FTE problems. On the first range outing, I fired some new Win, Fiocchi, S&B, Federal and Blazer 380 ACP, all 95 gr FMJ. I also fired some 95 gr FMJ reloads of mine made up with various brands of brass.

All of the new ammo ran perfectly except for the Fiocchi, which would not chamber from either of the mags that came with the pistol. I had a mixed bag with the reloads as the pistol would run flawless for several mags and then drive me crazy with chambering issues and failures to extract spent brass. I collected all of the problem rounds and put them aside. When I looked at the headstamps on the problem rounds, they were all Fiocchi or GFL brand. I have since found out that GFL is a Fiocchi brand of ammo.

At home, I miked the various types of brass and found the the WIN, S&B,Blazer, and Federal all fell between 0.674 - 0.676 in. in length. All of the Fiocchi and GFL brass was 0.686 - 0.688 in.long.

A return to the range with all types of ammo (excluding all Fiocchi and GFL brass) found the pistol flawless for 300 rounds. Looks like I have a winner so long as I avoid the longer case length brass

It makes me wonder if at least some of the cited problems with the 911 380 are due to what I ran into. I have to admit that I almost gave up on the pistol for pocket carry due to the initial results.

I am tempted to trim a few thousands off a couple Fiocchi and GFL cases, load them up with a mixture of the "good" brass and see if the problem shows itself again. Just not a high priority at the moment, especially since I can avoid the problem by just not using Fiocchi brass. It is interesting that the same issue surfaced with a Kahr 380 and possibly with a 238. Makes me wonder why the Fiocchi brass is longer than all the others, and how many shooters are being frustrated with chambering issues and FTEs with their small 380s.

Just to see if would make a difference, today I trimmed a dozen each Fiocchi and GFL 380 cases back 0.008-0.010 inches. That brought them down to the same lengths as the Win, S&B, Blazer, and Federal cases (0.675 - 0.678). My reloading manuals tell me that a 380 case should be no longer than 0.680 in. Headed over to the range and all but 1 trimmed reload chambered, fired, and ejected just like it should. The one failure was due to a bad primer, so I suspect the original failures were due to the longer Fiocchi brass jamming in the tight 911 chamber. I have never run into this with Fiocchi ammo in my 9mm and 45 ACP pistols, but I will just avoid using 380 Fiocchi in the 911 in the future.