I’ve learned a lot of stuff about shooting since seriously taking up the hobby. Some things I sorta knew about and just got into the nitty gritty detail. Some things I had never considered and was totally ignorant of until stumbling across them. This post is about that latter subject.
Gilding: When you use copper jacketed bullets, that copper smears off on the inside of the barrel. It looks golden, sorta, after you’ve cleaned all the dirt away. This gilding is another form of fouling, and you need something beside regular gun cleaning solvent to get it out of there.
Setback: Sometimes, the action of chambering a semi-auto round will push the bullet deeper into the case. This rarely happens with properly made ammunition. Unless you keep chambering the same round over and over. Eventually, the feed ramp might succeed in jamming that bullet back. And this can be bad as it can mess up the bullets headspace in the chamber or compress the powder and somehow cause over pressure, leading to a very bad event.
Also: All those M1As I saw in gun shops were not surplus rifles and were never machine guns. I didn’t covet them because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of buying an M14.
What else? People besides Colt make the 1911. 1911’s were obsolete weapons that really had no customer base since the military stopped using them in the mid-80s. Except maybe to collectors. Not to actual shooters on a daily basis. Or so I assumed. Wrongly.
Gilding: When you use copper jacketed bullets, that copper smears off on the inside of the barrel. It looks golden, sorta, after you’ve cleaned all the dirt away. This gilding is another form of fouling, and you need something beside regular gun cleaning solvent to get it out of there.
Setback: Sometimes, the action of chambering a semi-auto round will push the bullet deeper into the case. This rarely happens with properly made ammunition. Unless you keep chambering the same round over and over. Eventually, the feed ramp might succeed in jamming that bullet back. And this can be bad as it can mess up the bullets headspace in the chamber or compress the powder and somehow cause over pressure, leading to a very bad event.
Also: All those M1As I saw in gun shops were not surplus rifles and were never machine guns. I didn’t covet them because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of buying an M14.
What else? People besides Colt make the 1911. 1911’s were obsolete weapons that really had no customer base since the military stopped using them in the mid-80s. Except maybe to collectors. Not to actual shooters on a daily basis. Or so I assumed. Wrongly.
most semi pistol rounds headspace on the case mouth which is not effected by bullet setback. Bullet setback pushes the bullet deeper into the case lowering the available volume of the case and raising the pressure of the cartridge when it fires. on a side note, multiple reloadings of cases that headspace on the case mouth can actually grow shorter due to slamming against the barrel so many times, this too can cause things that are not like the awesomepotamus.
ReplyDeleteGood lessons learned, right? :-)
ReplyDelete