At lunch today I went to the range to shoot the 5″ Springfield Armory GI and see how it would do.
Wednesday I field stripped it, cleaned it well and re-lubed it. The ammo I planned to shoot was put in a vibratory tumbler with clean Walnut Shell media and a tablespoon of Mineral Spirits and left to run for about 2 hours to get all remaining bullet lube off of the brass and the bullet outside of the case. The load was 5.7g of Winchester 231 powder over a Wolf Large Pistol Primer pushing a 230g hard cast Lee Truncated Cone bullet lubed with LBT’s Blue lube.
4 different magazines were used. All were Chip McCormic Shooting Star 8 round mags. These mags function with out fail in my other 45′s.
A clean target was placed at 7 yards and 24 to 26 controlled pairs were fired. I was a little rusty but the groupings were more then satisfactory for the speed and conditions.
4 times, always on the last round, the brass remained in the gun lying on top of the mag follower (the slid did lock back) with the case head pointing towards the muzzle of the gun. In other words the brass, when extracted and ejected from the pistol, did a 180 degree (or multiple there of) flip in the air and landed back in the open chamber.
I kept two pieces of brass, both of which were the last rounds fired from their magazine.
Here are a few different views of those two pieces of brass.
The shape and curvature of the “nick” in the brass matches the shape and curvature of the barrel hood. It looks like the brass is, sometimes, being smashed between the barrel hood and the face of the slide and in fact that was the case of the deeply crushed piece. The other, less damaged piece, landed on the ground a few feet in front of me. And yes the slide was locked back.
This gun has been back to the factory twice now. I’m am going to contact them once again. If they take the gun back, this is their last chance to fix it. If they do not I will make loud, semi-obnoxious noises to as many members of the Springfield Armory Management as I can. Both by phone and mail. I will also shoot the gun more, document every damn failure it has and blog about it. After I put about a thousand more rounds (with the several hundred more ensuing jams and failures documented) I’ll consider trading the gun in on something a little more reliable. I hate to do that. I don’t want to sell a dog to someone, but I don’t want to keep it myself if it is unreliable.
Springfield Armory consider yourself warned. Fix this dog.
Update: A friend and retired gunsmith recommends that I try replacing the slide stop. I’ll be giving that a try in the next day or three.
What weight recoil spring are you using? Have you tried different weight springs?
Change extractors? Changed ejector or played with angle on it? Extended ejector? Porting? Beveled?
What does it do when one round is loaded in mag and fired? 2 rounds loaded and fired?
What does it do from a rest? Cheap busted rusty magazines?
What about sending it to Wilson?, Les Baer?, or a someone like that? Yes it would cost money , but you could send the bill to Springfield and tell them if they don’t make good you will BLOG them for eternity . This is just bad customer service to send a gun out that wont run on ANY magazine/load. It’s a 1911 in case they didn’t notice.
Sounds like the “Waterboy” did the work/inspection. You don’t send a gun out that doesn’t work. Keep us informed……….
I’ve used both the factory spring and a Wolf 18.5 lb spring. Right now the factory standard spring is in. The Factory put a new extractor in when it went in for its last visit. After shooting it when it got back it still jammed, perhaps a little less. I installed a aftermarket extended ejector which also seemed to help a little.
The ejection port is factory stock.
It jams randomly with every mag I have. Kimber, SA, Wilson, Chip McCormick… everything … Sometime.
Flat out SA gets one last chance to fix it. I’m wasting time and ammo on it at this point. I will give it one try with the slide stop from my Kimber and see if that makes any difference.
Dam , hope they buy it back or send you a new pistol.
IF they wont I’ll give you 5$ for it. ; )