A lesson to test your carry gun often.

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clubsoda22

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So, i'm at the range today, my buddy puts up a shilouette and draws his Glock 19 from his holster. This is his daily carry piece and the first thing he does is put a full mag of gold dots downrange...well, almost. The first goes off, and the gun jams. He clears and shoots and another FTF. He turned ghost white realizing for the last X# of days he was carrying a gun that wasn't functioning. We diagnosed it as a bad mag. Then it started failing on good mags. Neadless to say he was kinda freaked out and was moving the Gold Dots into his Sig 228. Fortunately the rangemaster knew glocks and told us to clean the striker area by removing the plate. We must have pulled out a bullets worth of copper shavings.

Note to glock owners: It's not hard to do, you should try removing the striker sometime and cleaning out the cavity.

Anyone ever have something like this happen to you?
 
Anyone ever have something like this happen to you?
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Nope!
I fired thousands of rounds through my G17 and I rarely clean it (every 1K rounds, or so) never had that happened. Thanks for sharing the experience though. I will check/clean that area more often now! :)
 
I'm no fan of Glocks, but where are the copper shavings comming from? This can't be normal, something else must be wrong somewhere.

I did have a 223 Norinco AK clone start to mis-fire. Found a metal chip in the firing pin channel that was preventing the firing pin from moving forward. Removed it and no problems since. My guess is it was debris from machining the bolt that tagged along during assembly.

--wally.
 
He has thousands of rounds through the gun and has never removed the striker for cleaning. I was also confused as to where the copper was coming from. What was happening is he was pulling the trigger and the slide was coming back a quarter inch with the trigger pull. The gunk in the striker cavity was actually causing the slide to come back with the striker.
 
I get criticized on my cleaning by some. There is a saying that too much attention is given to bores and not actions.

I rarely if ever clean a bore. I shoot jacketed ammo.

From shooting and experience with my CCWs , there is a inspect and maintenance schedule.

Often I go to range shoot CCWs from concealement with what I've been carrying and spare mags. No problem.

I'm more concerned chambers, extraction. Toothbrush/pipeclean/long wooden Q-tip, oil if need, shot one or two mags - not going to slidelock - insert fresh mag, holster , this is what I then carry (ammo)for CCW...guns work.

Yes with 'field strip" firing pin, extractor removed and cleaned...depends on gun usually 500 - 1K rds. There is schedule( detail strip) for springs and such - includes both guns and mags.

My "niche gun" a Keltec P-11 was not due for cleaning , but was taken down to show a customer of gunsmith buddy ( demonstration). I cleaned the chamber, blasted with Brakleen the action,frame, slide, relubed with F3 ...well it only had 800 rds thru it, I usually go 1k or so. Since then I've put another 300 rds thru it.

I check for nelphs ...depends on enviroment, clothing...
 
He has thousands of rounds through the gun and has never removed the striker for cleaning. I was also confused as to where the copper was coming from. What was happening is he was pulling the trigger and the slide was coming back a quarter inch with the trigger pull. The gunk in the striker cavity was actually causing the slide to come back with the striker.
Click to expand...

A possibility, but also a symptom of a tired recoil spring. I had my G34 sprung really light for a while with a stock striker spring and everything was peachy until you seated a mag hard, then the striker would pull the gun out of battery. Give it the test, hold the gun muzzle up vertical and slowly close the slide. It should go the last little bit where the barrel comes up into lockup by itself.
 
Testing...Testing...

A very good example of why a carry gun should be tested, detail stripped,
inspected and cleaned frequently, whether or not it's been fired.

Since I am a stickler for reliability to the point of anal retentiveness, I
go overboard on this point. It's probably not completely necessary, but
it makes me feel better about the whole business.

I have four carry pistols in my battery, and they are all as close to identical as I can make them. My habit is to rotate them quarterly. When they are out of service, they are stored disassembled, with all springs relaxed.

The one that is in service is fired with the designated magazine(s)
once a month, detail stripped, cleaned, inspected, and test-fired
with two rounds...then field-stripped and wiped of powder residue, oiled lightly in critical areas, and returned to duty.

Once a week, I field-strip it and put a drop of oil in the frame rails and
dust-wipe it. The chamber round is rotated to the bottom of the magazine
and all the rounds used for the monthly test-firing.

No surprises to date since adopting this routine 20 years ago, and it
gives me something to do in the wee hours.

If your pistol has a serious purpose, get serious about the purpose that it's
intended for. Maintain it, keep it clean, and watch six!

Cheers!
Tuner
 
A lot of people make the mistake of putting oil in the striker channel.

This causes problems.

Leave it dry.

Glocks are useally so reliable that their owners tend to neglect their maintainence.

They will run when very dirty and dry more so than a lot of other guns but crap does tend to build up under the extractor and inside the striker area.

This needs to be cleaned often.

So far I have never seen a Glock fail because of a dirty striker but I have cleaned a lot of junk out of this area.

I have seen them fail from the junk left under the extractor caused by extended use of CCI Blazer ammo.

That is why I never use it in a Glock.
 
This sounds more like, he should of tested the carry gun with the magazines and the ammo he was going to carry. For example, I carry axd-9 fullsize with 10 round magazines. I purchased 6 xd-40 magazines to use as a high capacity magazine. They all work fine with ball ammo, but some have issues with my gold dot hollow points. Of those six, only one gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to use, and theres two more that Im slowly feeling better about. Until I get zero failures with those other magazines with my carry ammo, Im carrying the gun with the two 10 rounders and 1 15 rounder I feel comfortable with. gun+magazines+carry ammo = complete system. If you change anything in the equation you need to test the system all over
 
I've been shooting Glocks for years and I've always been amazed by the amount of brass in the striker channel. I don't know how it all gets there, perhaps it is shaved off as the rounds are stripped from the mag by the slide. It takes only a couple of minutes to clean that area and is well worth the effort.
 
Navy SEALs are famous for NOT having weapon stoppages.

The reason is, they are absolute anal-retentive NUT cases about cleaning their weapons.

They figure out a fast effective cleaning method, decide from real-world experience what solutions and lubes to use, then service the weapon every time they possibly can.

They NEVER shoot a weapon and put it away uncleaned. Before a mission, they clean (again), test fire the weapon and go.

As soon as they get back, the weapon gets cleaned before ANYTHING else gets done.

These rules are good advice, since it works. You hear lots about people having stoppages in combat, but SEALs using the same weapons and ammo never seem to have problems.

It isn't because their SEALs, it's because they CLEAN their weapons.
Do the same, and your's will function properly too.

It ain't rocket science.
 
I wipe out the striker channel with a couple of dry cotton swabs (Q-Tips) everytime I shoot. It takes all of 30 seconds.
 
This sounds more like, he should of tested the carry gun with the magazines and the ammo he was going to carry.
Click to expand...

Every time he goes to the range he fires off the mags he was carrying with the gold dots. It's the first time this pistol has failed, ever.

I think i figured out where the copper shavings were coming from. Every time he cleans the gun he scrubs the breach face with a metal brush. I think that some of it was shaved off in the firing pin hole. He now cleans the striker channel all the time, so this shouldn't happen again. He is also getting a new spring set. Until we put another 200 rounds through it at the range tomorrow without failure he'll be packing his Sig.
 
I had a similar experience with a Glock 23 back in '93, when a fully loaded magazine for that pistol held 13 rounds of .40S&W.

After being left fully loaded for a few months, an attempt to use it (recreationally) showed that the magazine spring had become SO weak that it wouldn't feed ANY of the loaded rounds reliably.

I replaced the spring, without further difficulties.
It was a factory-original mag spring. Other Glock mag springs I've had have been fine.
Those from Wolff are even better, IME.

I've owned eight Glocks to date, and have left one or another fully loaded for months at a time otherwise, and have never had this problem again, though I check spring tension more frequently now.

I suspect I got a defective spring, but it was upsetting to think that if I'd needed the pistol, it would have been a one-shot gun. The spring hadn't simply "taken a set", it had almost no compressive force left!

FWIW, I expect this is a more likely problem with staggered magazines, which use an eccentrically-wound spring. Straight single stack magazines (eg, 1911, H&K P7M8) don't seem to have any stories like this told about them.

Best.
 
We have no clue why every round in one mag failed to function. We are assuming the spring. we found that the front of the follower in the factory magazine was sticking, and this was causing the the last round to get caught on the feed ramp, it was going straight forward and grabbing on it.
 
ATTN: clubsoda22

I had similar problems in my Glock 19 as well. I started having failures at the range despite the fact the gun had previously been very reliable. What I discovered were brass shavings under the extractor, leading down to the the firing pin channel. What was happening was that there was a sharp corner on the bottom edge of the extractor, which dug into the brass cases and shaved off some brass as the gun cycled. I stoned off the sharp corner and kept a watchful eye for a few hundred more rounds. So far the amount of brass being found when I clean is normal, and the FTF/FTE's haven't returned.

On a related note, I once was shooting at the range and pulled out the Kel-Tec P32 I was carrying just to use up my old carry ammo. It jammed on the second shot! So yes, I know the white-faced feeling of realizing the gun I'd been carrying was a dud.
 
Years ago I was part owner in a gunshop and got to know the local police. One day as I was wiping down the guns in the display cases a LEO asked if he could borrow the gun cloth to wipe his Mod 19 S&W. I didn't pay much attention to him until I heard him giggling. He pointed the muzzel to the ceiling and the hammer went "thunk" . Muzzel pointed the floor, hammer went "thunk" . He had been carrying this revolver around for who knows how long with a broken mainspring. Some scary s***,if he would of needed it.
 
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