How many rounds of a certain ammo must your pistol cycle before you trust that ammo?

200+ with NO failures.

On a new carry piece i need 1k down the tube before I am confident in it and my capabilities with it. In the meantime I will stick with one of my other carry pieces.

Whoops I thought you asked how many rounds through a gun but after reading it again I realize you were asking about ammo. That's what when I try to read a post on my phone while waiting at a red light.

100 rounds for me.

Usually a couple magazines.

It depends on the gun as much as the ammunition. For instance if the gun as given me trouble with hollow points in the past, I would look at a new hollow point more closely.

I don't pay a lot of attention to round count.
I have almost 1,600 trouble free rounds through a new LC9. That's nice but it's the next magazine load that's important.

A couple years ago the first round fired from a new box of good defense ammo was a squib load. It's all a crap shoot.



.

For me it's 50 of a defense load AFTER firing 200 rounds of cheap target ammo through it in the SAME session. This way the gun is hot and dirty. I figure if it will cycle and fire 50 SD rounds without incident after all that target ammo it's going to be fine to load for SD after a good cleaning.

50 rounds of my HP round of choice, but that is after I have put 500 rounds of standard round nose ammo through it. If I have no failures I'll carry it.

Elaborating on my previous post...

For any given SD ammunition I'd much "prefer" 200+ with no issues but I'd "accept" 50+ if I "had to". Heck, If I could afford the expense I'd go for 400+ but, at $1 or more per round, that can get pricey. It's not that one's life isn't "worth" $400 but not everyone can "afford" to spend that much $$$. Any less than 50 rounds is REALLY just playing Russian Roulette!!

My carry ammo is expensive. First shoot a couple hundred rounds of cheap stuff. If everything is ok a couple magazines of the carry rounds.

^^^ I have to disagree. A couple mags (20-30 rounds) isn't NEARLY enough to trust one's life on. Heck... 50 rounds is barely a "hint" that it'll cycle reliably, IMHO.

Clean the gun. Load a mag full. Go to the range. Load the gun and fire 3 or 4 rounds. If everything works (all rounds go BANG! and all bullets come out the muzzle end of the barrel) download the mag to just 4 rounds and fire.

My theory is that if there is going to be trouble with new ammo, it'll happen with the first 4 rounds or the last 4 rounds out of the mag. I'll test each mag with the new ammo.

If they all work, clean the gun, load the mags and I'm good to go.

^^^ You're willing to bet your life on that? The lives of your family? Although I agree it's a "pretty good indicator" of reliability that's just not enough testing, IMHO.

2000 rounds before you trust it? Dang, that's a lot of ammo....I've been issued new duty sidearms 3 times in my career. We qualified back to back twice...160 rounds total and put 'em in use that day.

I voted 100, but in truth that is 100 every 6 months or so.

Like many I carry different ammo from what I plink with, so a refresher is good. Much less needed for my 10mm, though, as the loads are twins. (185gr@1265fps)

I run one magazine through the gun, and that is all. Twenty rounds or a thousand whatever makes you feel good.

I'll run a magazine or two of 'em through and then we're good to go. This is after establishing that the gun can digest 300-500 rounds of practice ammo...and then each round in that magazine has been visually inspected. Oh, I also practice malfunction drills, so I think I'm set.

I've ran over 500 through my FIE Titan.
Never a single failure.

I like a gun that is not picky on which ammo it likes.

I don't know about some of this.
I totally understand making sure your carry piece in well bedded in and broken with 150-300 rounds of fmj to make you feel all is fine there.
But after 50-100 hollowpoints of your liking that has just fed,fired,and ejected without a hint of trouble would seem pretty reliable.
And who is say that on round number 497 of Gold Dots or Golden Sabers you finally fished out a bad factory round from the box that had been here to forth all and fine that then caused a malfunction.
What do you do then,start all over with the count with something else??
The more rounds you shoot of factory ammo the odds go up that you will run into the squib or just bad loading.

Mike1234567 said:

^^^ You're willing to bet your life on that? The lives of your family? Although I agree it's a "pretty good indicator" of reliability that's just not enough testing, IMHO.

Click to expand...

Ya gotta stop somewhere. Quality factory ammo is as near 100% as anything can be. Visually inspect each round before loading it into the mag. The few factory boo-boo's I've found were obvious at a look.

We're looking for functional reliability, not conducting an endurance test.

All I find out if I fire more than the few rounds as I've described, is that all the ammo I've already fired is 100% reliable, and it's no longer available for use!. If I fire a few rounds from a box that all work, the chances are that the rest of the box is good to go, and that's what I load up with for carry.

Life is pretty much a crap shoot anyway. Malfunction drill training and a spare mag will take up the slack.

For me, since I am a 1911 guy, if my new 1911 (to me or brand new) doesn't fail to fire what I want to carry in a couple mags, I pronounce it worthy. However, I also shoot my carry gun at least once a week even if it is just a few fouling rounds to check cycling after a cleaning.

Also, personally I must be a gifted 1911 owner because I have not yet had one other than a older Colt Gold Cup that would not fire anything I put in them.

I normally run 200 rounds of my carry ammo through a new CCW. This allowed me to find out that Magtech Guardian Gold 230gr +P's were the only JHP rounds my SIG P220 ever choked on. Since I carry Fiocchi JHP's in my .40 and .45 pistols 200 rounds doesn't break the bank.

Recently, I acquired a Beretta 84B as a warm weather CCW. I ordered 140 rounds of Buffalo Bore 100gr HCFP .380 ammo from cabelas for $150. I also picked up 100 rounds of the WWB 95 gr FMJ. The profiles of the BB and the WWB are very similar so I wanted to insure this pistol fed the truncated cone ammo reliably. I put 100 rounds of BB and 100 WWB down range w/o incident.

I voted "other" because it's usually less than 50.

If it's a very reliable gun, with at least a few hundred rounds of various range ammo through it without any failures, I'll usually run about 3 or 4 magazines worth of the particular carry ammo through it to test.

While running these 3 or 4 mags through the gun with a new carry ammo, I'll try shooting slowly, shooting rapid fire, shooting at odd angles, using slightly different grips, etc. If all rounds through those 3 or 4 magazines run flawlessly, I'll call it good. Often, after the initial 3 or 4 mags of 100% carry ammo, I'll also stagger 1 round of the carry ammo then 2 or 3 rounds of range ammo, then another carry ammo round, etc. This way, I can stretch out the carry ammo for another couple of magazines while testing it as the first round in the mag, last round in the mag, or any of the rounds in between.

If you're talking factory ammo, you'd need to sample an entire lot to get a statistically significant sampling. You can't really do that so for factory, I five 1/4 of the box and than that ammo goes into rotation if there are no problems.

My own hand loads are a different story. I've reloaded anywhere from 0 to 25,000 rounds per year for the past forty-two years. I'd guess that comes to something on the order of 250,000 rounds total. Hard to believe but the math and my records don't lie. I've had two failures: both were primers with a missing anvil I should have caught.

Thing is, I had it drilled into me during years of training how to clear all sorts of "jams" and reload in all sorts of handguns to the point where I can do it in the dark. That's where the confidence lies, not in the ammo but the ability to deal with what goes wrong. Because it will go wrong and it will happen at the worst possible time. Murphy came up with that law.

Truthfully, I torture test a new 1911 by loading up a mag with the following, a single round of each: 230gr ball, 230gr JHP, 230gr JHP +p, fully frangable, 185gr Silvertips, and once in a while one of my leftover ( i have a couple boxes left) a 250gr JHP LEO round. Yes they kick a bit more than a +p 230gr JHP round. I even tested my latest 1911 with these all but the 250gr round. They all went right in and out of the RIA tactical flawlessly so I carried it the next day.