Extreme crud in M1 carbine with Armscor ammo

[bmschreier]

Hi Everyone,
First time posting, but I've been enjoying the wisdom in this forum for awhile now.

I bought a CMP M1 carbine last week, and went to the range to try it out for the first time today. I had bought some Armscor USA ammo, and everything was going well until I went to put in a second magazine and noticed the chamber/mag well, bolt face, etc was covered with some kind of gold flecks or bits (see photo, under a magnifying glass they looked like irregular oblong balls). Not sure if this is unburnt powder or what. After awhile it had completely caked the firing pin hole closed and I noticed the spent cases were dimpled from the crud in the chamber, so I quit until I could figure out what was going on. It was a bugger to clean all that crap out later.

Anyone have this experience with Armscor? Am I safe in assuming it was a problem with the ammo? This is the first time I've fired a M1 carbine, but I assume this isn't something with the gun, right?

Thanks for any thoughts!!
Brian

 

[Palehorseman]

Assuming primers not blown, looks like not enough pressure generated to expand brass and seal chamber.

 

[Ibmikey]

Check your head space with Carbine gauges or have a gunsmith slug the chamber of that Carbine as you have excessive blow by. The carbine headspaces on the case mouth and yours apparently is not making a seal when firing.

 

[ApacheCoTodd]

Regarding the particulars of the carbine.

You write that you bought it last week.

Was this from CMP or represented as a CMP carbine from back when they still had them?

I should think that a proper CMP carbine would have been head-spaced correctly.

Get yours checked - maybe someone switched out bolts to match manufacturer's markings to the receiver or simply wanted the bolt from your rifle to match some other receiver and didn't care about correct fitting of your current bolt.

While it presents of course as a "chamber" issue, if it is in fact a CMP gun, I'd chase the dimensions at the bolt end of things.

Todd.

 

[Speedo66]

I've had issues in my Carbine with dirty ammo. It runs perfectly with everything but Wolf ammo which just seems to load it with dirt to the point that it gets erratic. Clean it, use name brand ammo, including Aguila which the DCM was selling some time ago, and it runs non stop.

Wolf ammo also seems to spew dirt out of the ejection port of my Kel-Tec Sub2K. It runs, but when I later clean it, an enormous amount of crud comes out.

I'm not complaining about Wolf, it's cheap and available, but I'd never call it clean burning.

 

[carbine85]

First question: Is that copper?
second question: What do the spent cases look like?

 

[CarJunkieLS1]

It looks like brass shavings to me. Check your fired cases and see if you can tell where its coming from. I'm gonna "guess" if its brass shavings that it is an extractor/extraction issue.

 

[bmschreier]

Thanks for all the replies! I'll try to answer all the questions:
1) primers look normal, no bulging
2) there is some soot on the top part of the cases (see photo)
3) I bought the gun directly from the CMP (auction). My understanding is that they check headspace on all their guns before they go out.
4) No, it's not copper or brass (see photo). I'm not familiar with powder types, but these are dull gold globules not shiny metallic flecks. I also manually ran a mag of ammo through it just now (cycling the action by hand) and had no metal flecks or anything show up.

So would this be an issue of too much or too little headspace? Should any local gunsmith be able to work on this gun? I'm tempted to try a different brand of ammo to see if that is it, but I know messing around with an improperly headspaced gun is quite dangerous.

 

[aMauser]

Magazine?

The brass shaving can be coming from the Magazine or a ruff spot in the receiver.

 

[carbine85]

If you bought it from the CMP you should be able to send it to them and they will look at for you.
It should have come with a tag attached telling you what the barrel gauged at and they check head space.
IMHO you don't have a head space problem.

 

[Sunray]

There's nothing wrong with your Carbine. That's just brass shavings from the low end ammo. Not a big deal. Certainly not a headspace thing.
Armscor is in The PI and isn't exactly know for high quality. Not unsafe by any means though.
The CMP doesn't send out anything that is unsafe to shoot. Including the ammo they sell.
Suggest you buy different ammo and get into reloading. If you're not reloading you'll have to try a box of as many brands as you can to fond the ammo your Carbine shoots best anyway. Reloading is your friend though. If and when you get there, IMR4227 with Speer 110 grain HP's or FMJ's works well.

 

[bmschreier]

Thanks for the input.

I'll try a couple different brands of ammo and see what happens.

Reloading is definitely in my future!

 

[aMauser]

Better answer

It looks like the extractor is shaving brass off the rims.
I think the corners of the extractor might be sharp and some stoning might help.
I wounder if different ammo might not have that prob.

 

[MartinS]

Changing ammo is a good first move to troubleshoot.

 

[bmschreier]

Update: I took the liberty of contacting Armscor about the issue, leaving the question open and not "blaming" them for the issue. They didn't ask any questions or ask for pictures...they immediately offered to take the ammo back and give me a full refund. Excellent customer service...and that response indicates to me that this isn't the first time they have had this complaint. Maybe it was a bad batch of ammo.

Regardless, this seems to confirm that it was the ammo. I have some S&B and Prvi on the way to test that out!

 

[Mauserguy]

Yes, I would agree that it's the ammo. Some lower grade ammo won't generate a lot of pressure and won't seal very well so you get a lot of unburnt powder pushed into the action. It's not a big deal and I wouldn't worry about it.
Mauserguy