What's the biggest piece of crap pistol you've ever owned?

[elric]

Ruger P89 9mm.

Tough, reliable, never jammed.

Blocky, bulky, heavy.

Horrible trigger, both DA and SA.

I'll echo the above statement that you couldn't hit a barn from the inside with it.

Traded it toward a Browning Hi Power ... best trade I ever did .

 

[incursion]

Rohrbaugh

 

[Seven High]

Smith & Wesson Model 59. AMT .380 Backup. It wouldn't make it thru one magazine of any type of ammo. Titan .25acp. Rossi .38 spl, stainless, 3" barrel. All had serious malfunctions. Several got dropped over the side of a boat in deep water.

 

[Bula]

Walther P22-What a POS. I guess i got a lemon. A buddy of mine bought one the same day and he loved his.

 

[Plink]

As much as I like Colt, the two worst guns I've ever owned were Colts. An early Colt Delta Elite that started peening the frame within the 1st hundred shots and a Colt Huntsman .22 pistol that jammed constantly, than began not to cock the striker. I kept the .22 spotlessly cleaned, it just never worked right. I did have a Raven .25 pass through my hands that keyholed it's shots, but the fact that it did so without jamming put it behind the Colts as to which was worse.

 

[cherryriver]

AMT .40

I'm in for the AMT DAO BackUp in .40 cal.
The worst trigger I ever touched. Dry-firing actually made my finger sore, and I'm a carpenter. If the pull was less than twenty pounds, I'd say it was having a good day. But the trigger recess was (seemingly) so full of rocks you couldn't measure it.
Totally inoperative as a repeating firearm. I put 300 factory rounds through it trying to get it to run. A 'smith tried twice, even fabricating a part or something.
No dice. The longest it ever went without stopping was fifteen rounds. Usually it was about eight between sticks.
Even with the gruesome pull and new mainspring, it got into a light-primer strike thing requiring its one good feature, the restrike capability. Sometimes three pulls would do it. Sometimes.
Not bad enough? The chamber separated about a quarter-inch aft of the chamber mouth. Apparently they made them out of two separate parts and then epoxied them into one piece. If you shoot it enough, the epoxy lets go. The empties, if and when they came out, had a circumferential bulge ring a third of the way back from the case mouth.
Hit a barn from the inside? Pah! Couldn't hit a berm if it was buried in it. Couldn't hit its own muzzle crown. Couldn't hit...
Wanna buy a gun?
Bill

 

[Soulrider]

AMT 45 auto

 

[Carl N. Brown]

That ring appears to be a design feature to delay the
blowback action. Anyone know anything about that
model?

Guns tend to be individuals. Some people swear by the
Grendel p10 380; I had one good one, and one that is
now just a bag of spare parts.

RG10 .22 short revolver and .32 Clerke revolver both
lost and not missed.

Look at a typical assortment of grip frames and look at
a typical assortment of hands. If a good gun does not
fit your hand, you are not going to hit with it. That may be
a source of complaints about what appear otherwise to be
handguns highly thought of others.

I am iffy about my AR7 Explorer II pistol. I bought one
because I had an AR7 rifle and a C96 Mauser broomhandle.
Not necessarily my best purchase. The AR7 rifle was
picky about ammo but shoots well with CCI .22 Stinger.
The AR7 pistol shoots Winchester SuperX best, but
forget about accuracy with CCI Stingers.

 

[cherryriver]

Chamber ring

Mr. Brown-
The ring wasn't there when I started. And once it formed, extraction became difficult due to the blown-out brass.
Nope. It just came apart.
Bill

 

[Steve2237]

Pile-O-Crap pistol

Accutec .380 purchased it many moons ago for the sum of $125, probably sold it for $25.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

I have heard of guns like the Grendel P30 that had a ring or
rings machined in the chamber to delay blowback. (Making
safety dependent on consistency of brass????)

I have heard of guns that had the rifled tube sleeved into the
more complex machined breech part with the feedramp, etc.

Now I have seen a photo one of the latter coming apart.
AMT DAO Backup. A model name to remember.

The least reliable magazine I have with my Ruger Mark II
is an AMT magazine for the AMT copy of the Ruger.
Is there a pattern emerging here?

-------
Added: I wonder how long it would be before the barrel
sleeve blew out of the barrel assembly, and accuracy
really took a nose dive?

 

[GaryP]

A Taurus 2" snubbie .38Spl many years ago.

 

[P. Plainsman]

Cherryriver, an impressive account. You made a strong case for your nominee, and you have my sympathies.

 

[tinygnat219]

Kel-Tec P40. Unreliable, handbruising, Jam-omatic. I can see why Kel-Tec discontinued it. A true POS. Sold it.

Walther P22. Utterly finicky. Would not fire reliably, and there were constant jams, Failures to Extract, etc. I must have tried 15 different kinds of .22 LR from Ultra-Velocity to standard target ammo. Looked cool, but form did NOT follow function. Sold it.

 

[Glockfan.45]

Springfield Mil-Spec 1911, jammed every 3 or 4 rounds. I sent it back 3 times and it never was right. Traded it in on a new Glock 21 and it was many moons before I owned another 1911. Its ok now I have made my peace with the platform after having my Kimber perform as well as any Glock I have ever had.

 

[Sniper X]

Harrington Richards .44 mag. Not really the companies fault, probably WAS a great or at least good gun before some "pistolero wannabe" got it and did a dremel tool trigger job on it and litterally I shot about 3 rounds thru it before selling it and giving a warning that the trigger was maybe a one ounce trigger. I swear you only had to "touch" the trigger for it to fire. As soon as you rested your finger in ANY way on the trigger it went off.

 

[banddr2]

I had one of the S&W Walther P99 .40s when Walther subcontracted S&W to make the slide and barrel. The barrel to slide lockup was so poor that it rattled when you shook it . I don't know if they all were like that, but it was the most innaccurate hard ass kicking POS I have owned. Couldn't sell it so I sold it to a pawn shop for $270.

 

[Jubjub]

Colt Diamondback .22. Bought it new.

The hole that the cylinder rotated on was bored at an angle. The cylinder gap was about .005 on one side, and about .0001 on the other. After a few cylinders full were fired, the fouling on the front of the cylinder would bind it against the barrel.

Sent it back to Colt, and they replaced the cylinder. Sadly, they didn't replace the crane and yoke that were sprung by having to force open the jammed cylinder. Now it spit lead and shot 6" groups at 25 yards.

It being a Colt, though, I just put it away for a few years and sold it for almost double what I paid. It's probably worth a thousand dollars now.

 

[Blacklabman]

This is easy.
A Smith and Wesson 4" 686P.

The idiot lock, kept engaging itself.
To fire again, the IDIOT ock had to be turmed all the way on, then off. Only then would the Hammer/Cylinder/Trigger release and operate.

The Lock is a stupid design, and I will never again own a new S&W

 

[Magnuumpwr]

I would have to say my SS Ruger Redhawk with the 7 1/2" barrel. Almost makes a good paper weight, but really fun to let buddies use while out on my gun range.

 

[Nightcrawler]

My very first one. A Charles Daly Commander sized .45. Weird disassembly procedure, and it'd choke on ball ammo. Sold it to my friend's brother. The guide rod broke while firing and seized up the gun.

I had a lot of problems with my CZ-97 early on, too. Worked great once it got broken in and after a factory throat & polish. Not at all in the POS category.

 

[DrDeFab]

Well, it isn't really fair to call it a POC, but I did get rid of it because I couldn't trust it.

Taurus 24/7 in 45ACP.

It would occasionally drop it's own mag. Much experimentation determined that when using ball ammo with certain profiles, when the left side of the staggered stack rose past the mag retention notch, would sometimes flick the catch just enough for the mag to drop.

I thought it was me for a long time, accidentally pressing it. Tried all kinds of things. It NEVER happened with JHP. It NEVER happened with a brand of ammo that had a more conical profile. It DID happen with both mags I had.

Taurus has made a number of mods in the line, and it probably doesn't happen anymore. I never sent it in to be fixed - didn't want the hassle, and it was too intermittent for me to expect it to be resolved. Traded it for a nice 'scoped Marlin 336 Texan.

 

[fatelk]

It's so hard to choose.
I have to +1 on the AMT 45 backup. It actually wasn't mine, I tried to make it work for a friend. I'm pretty good at making things work, but this thing was hopeless; rarely could you shoot one magazine without a malfunction. He traded it off on a new Auto-Ordinance 45, which then needed a new barrel before IT would work.

I bought a Jennings 9mm that worked OK but didn't know the meaning of accuracy, got rid of it shortly thereafter. Another friend bought one at the same time, gave it unfired to a friend of his. He had problems with it jamming and asked me to look at it. I looked down the barrel and there was an upward bulge partway down right above the pin that holds the barrel on. The hole had apparently been drilled too high and not caught during QC (if they have any). I told him to not shoot it and contact the manufacturer. I heard a few weeks later that it blew up in his hands. He threw the parts away and never called the company. You can lead a horse to water...

Last year another friend bought a Kahr P9 9mm compact for his wife. In my opinion it's an overpriced junker the local gun shop suckered him into buying. They told him he needed to shoot 200 rounds to "break it in". Almost 400 rounds later it still would not reliably return to battery. I took it apart and figured out that the extractor was much too stiff. Being a new gun that cost plenty, I called the company for him. The service guy there told it might be this, might be that, send it in or they could send me a spring or something. I told him no, I know exactly what it is and I can fix it myself but didn't want to void any warranty. When I told him I wanted to work on the extractor, he said "Go ahead, that won't void the warranty. If you mess it up we can send you a new extractor too". A little careful work with a file on the extractor and it now works like a million dollars. It's still not very accurate. I prefer my German Makarov; a quarter of the price, more accurate and I've never had to mess with it.

 

[TN Trapper]

Bad : Kel Tec P-11
Worse: Kel Tec P3AT
Finally learned my lesson : Kel Tec P-32

 

[Plink]

Oddly enough, 2 of the worst guns I've ever owned were Colts. I like Colt, but twice bitten... The first was a huntsman .22 pistol. It was a jammy, inaccurate gun with a horrid trigger. It soon stopped cocking the striker when it cycled. A trip to the gunsmith resulted only in me paying money to receive back a gun that didn't work. I got rid of it. The second was a Delta Elite 10mm when 10mm first hit the market. The gun was peening itself to death within the first 100 rounds. For a short while, I had a Raven .25 ACP that was more reliable than the Huntsman, and even though the gun keyholed it's shots, it was more accurate too! That's just sad.