What Causes this?

[mpbarry1]

I'm afraid I know, but I'm shopping for answers.

This is the Mihec #68 Clone. I shot thousands of the lazercast version without an issue. I loaded those Lazercast to the recommended COL. I shortened these up a bit because they were occaisionally headspacing on the WC lip ( at leaset that is what i was thinking happened).

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/imagehosting/thum_185834f667e9d8e782.jpg (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=4488)

Sig P220
Sized to .4525 lubed with Felix
Loaded with 5.2 grains of W231, WLP primer, mixed cases.

I am afraid that these are just too big for my chamber and that shortening them up caused this misfeed. I made 3000 of them. [smilie=b:

So, tell me I am wrong and there is an easy solution to this.

[**oneshot**]

I know you shortened them, did you adjust your taper crimp. They almost look like still have flare but it could just be the pic.

[btroj]

The case mouth was dinged on something. those cases are toast.
You need to look at your loading technique and see what the mouths hit to fold them back like that.

[mpbarry1]

the taper crimp looks good, and the cases are dinged in the feeding of the round.

[EDK]

Field strip the gun and check the barrel...something is catching the case mouth? Not likely, but easy to check.

Use a micrometer on the loaded ammo and adjust the taper crimp accordingly. You've heard all the "45s headspace off the extractor/case mouth" theories. Maybe you need to size the boolits a hair smaller/larger? Or harder alloy?

I'd be inclined to LENGTHEN the over all length...a little boolit lip sticking out maybe...do you have one of the DILLON case length gauges? I had a lot of wasted time trying to adjust crimps to work WITHOUT full moon clips in a couple of S&W 625s years ago...said the h*** with it and stuck to using the moon clips. I bought a RUGER 45 Convertible last year, so I'm back to working on "the perfect crimp" again...hopefully I've learned some tricks in the ensuing years and will get better results.

My S&W 645s would eat d*** near anything.

:cbpour::redneck::2gunsfiring_v1:

[btroj]

Ok, I did have a similar problem long, long ago loading for a guys Sig. Cases looked the same. Shorter rounds were worse.
Seated longer the slide may hit the bullet but won't create a bulge that won't chamber. The slide is hitting the mouth of the case and this is the end result.

[subsonic]

Try a little more crimp on a few. Accuracy may suck, but maybe they'll feed?

[Tim357]

I'd be inclined to seat the boolits a little further out in the case, sort of ease the transition into the chamber rather than an abrupt shelf of the swc to hang up on.

[runfiverun]

if i were to seat short like i do for my norinco 1911 i'd use a slight [bump-kiss] roll crimp over the front band like i do for my norinco 1911.
they glide into the 625 nicely too.
i use the taper crimp for the auto ordinance and the ruger b-hawk.

[leadman]

File off the offending metal and try putting it in the barrel by hand. If it is a snug fit try more taper crimp until it will enter the chamber easily.
I had a 1911 that did that with boolits over .4515". I also had to seat the boolits similar to what you have done.

[thegreatdane]

too short. go as long as you can, use the 'plunk test' and they should feed much better.

[Larry Gibson]

Did that happen during seating the bullets or during feeding in the P220?

Larry Gibson

[mpbarry1]

They were damaged feeding in the gun Larry. Hitting the slide i think. I am sure that it is a length issue. In trying to fix one problem I caused another. I think i just need to size down another 1000th and make em thecorrect length. Dangit. I was having so much fun making them that I didnt check to see if they chambered in this sig. Like I mentioned they fed great in the taurus. Runfive had a good suggestion with a small kiss crimp. I did test these by dropping them in the chamber and they fit. Some of em were tight when i had them longer. So I just got ahead of myself. Hopefully these suggestions will let me shoot those i already made.

[Iron Mike Golf]

Whatever is doing that to the case mouths ought to have brass marks on it.

[xr650]

This is what I get out of my 220 with a Lee TL mould.
http://www.fototime.com/144DC6DBC096F8F/standard.jpg

I think when a fired case is being extracted, it catches on the top cartridge in the mag.

Does this ever happen on the first cartridge chambered?
Mine doesn't.

I haven't tried 68's yet.
I gave up on these for a while. Will go back to them or 68's sometime in the future.

[mpbarry1]

Wow. Exactly the same mark XR! Now Im puzzled. Wouldn't have ecpected that with a round nose bullet. Hmmm. I bet it is the ejected case. Hadn't thought of that either.

[xr650]

I think the barrel tipping up has a lot to do with this. Giving the brass more angle to catch on the lip of the boolit.
1911's don't seem to have this problem. Does the barrel tip on a 1911? Never played with one.

I was wondering if the 68's would work better as there is a radius instead of an abrupt shoulder like the lee. I think you may have answered my question on this.

[thegreatdane]

no, this has nothing to do with the action of the barrel. This is due to the spent brass hanging on the rim of the next in line. It happens with semi-wadcutter style boolit shapes, slides with no wedge near the breach face (along the under lug), combined with too short OAL. If your chamber will permitt, try longer OALs to give the spent case something to slide over.

This is the same exact issue that regular (original) XD-45s have with SWCs.

Test my theory. Place an empty case into the chamber and a short, dummy round in the magazine. Slowly extract the spent brass and watch for the hangup. Also, pull your slide and see if there's a tiny ramp below the breech face on the under lug.

[mpbarry1]

I am rethinking my original hypothesis Now.

Those lazercast bullets that i shot so many of are really hard. If that ejecting round was damaging the lead in those bullets that were seeded further out it would explain what I thought was the round head spacing on the WC lip. My boolits are air cooled WW presumably much softer than the commercial ones. I will check it out and report back.

[leftiye]

Seat boolit out, headspace on boolit in rifling, roll crimp some?

[runfiverun]

i don't know if the 1911 bbl tips or not i'm not much of a pistol guy.
i do know that my 1911 norinco needs the roll kiss to feed properly.
no matter if i use the 230 rn, the H&G 68,the 225 rnfp,my 160 rnfp, or the lyman swc mold.

[2shot]

Easy enough to find out what it is. Mark some dummy cartridges with a line on the rim and across the primer with a magic marker and put them into the magazine all with the line facing up and down and then work the action with your hand and watch where the gouge lines up with how they were arranged in the magazine. I had the same thing happening with my 1911 and found out that it was a long slide stop that was gouging the cases as they were feeding into the chamber. Once stoned back the gouging disappeared.

It could be like thegreatdane suggested but once again by marking the cases you'll see exactly where or from what the gouge is happening.

2shot

[wv109323]

There are a couple of things that could be happening.
1.) The mouth of the case is severly damaged before resizing. This could be from ejection from the pistol (that is why ejection ports of 1911 are lowered) when the case was fired. The case could have been stepped on and physically deformed.What happens is when the deformed case is resized the brass is torn and folded to the outside. The case goes thru the rest of the reloading process and is never noticed. When the deformed round is forced in the chamber it will not go because it is oversized and will not fit. Look at the rest of your loaded rounds and see if you can find a similiar example.
2.) The round is hitting on something as it is feed into the chamber. The damage is caused because the recoil spring is pushing the slide forward and the rim of the case is contacting a barrel hood of part of a feed ramp. I had a very similiar problem on a Bullseye pistol. Ocassionally the round would feed high and the edge of the round would contact the barrel hood at 11 o'clock and the edge of the rim would be deformed as in the pictures. Of course this caused the pistol to malfunction. You could easily identfy this because the round was torn and left in place when the malfunction occured. These rounds were of the correct OAL and taper crimp.
3.) As suggested it could be when the previous round was extracted. I am not familiar with the SIG pistol to comment there.
4.) The overall length determines when the base the round is allowed to come up out of the magazine and be feed into the chamber. I would suggest that you make up Dummy rounds of various OAL lengths to deteminr what your pistol requires. With the dummy rounds you could work to slide manually and determine what length is needed or fire a live round with a dummy round of known OAL and determine what length is needed by trial and error.

[dmize]

I have had this happen before on 2 1911's and a P90 Ruger with the EXACT same profile bullet. Seat the bullet out a bit further so the barrel slides over the bullet instead of gouging the case.

[MtGun44]

Older XDs do this, dragging extracted case HARD over the next round in mag. SMOOTH
boolit profile is required. Usually causes jams. My brother's XD does this. I have read
that newer XDs have a bump under the slide to depress that top round a touch to clear
this up.

Weld on a dab on center underside of slide just aft of breach face and duplicate the factory
shape? Sell the gun and buy a later model? :kidding:

Shoot only TC or RN with NO shoulder?

Bill

[mpbarry1]

Gosh no Bill! I love my Sig! Lol. I will play w it tomorrow. Im sure that a longer COL will keep the ejecting round from catching on the brass case lip of the next round in the magazine. (That was a good call BTW). Then i can figure out if the ejecting round is damaging the exposed soft lip of the wadcutter rim of that next round. That would explain the occasional misfeed i was having before I "fixed it".

[mnkyracer]

I was about to post this same problem, except mine is with a Glock 21. Mine were definately catching when the spent case was being ejected. It does pay to read before you post.

[MtGun44]

It seems that many European recent design pistols drag the extracted case hard over
the top round, hitting on the boolit first.

Clearly this is a relatively new phenomenon, I had never heard of or seen it in about 40+
yrs of shooting in competitions and loading my own ammo. These were all older designs
like 1911, High Power, S&W single and dblstack 9mms (39 and 59 and huge number of
variants) plus other old designs.

I think that the newer designers are blissfully unaware that there is anything except
military ball ammo in existence.

I added the "pulling your chain" above, I was mostly kidding although welding is a real possible
solution however extreme!

Bill

[TNFrank]

Easy enough to find out what it is. Mark some dummy cartridges with a line on the rim and across the primer with a magic marker and put them into the magazine all with the line facing up and down and then work the action with your hand and watch where the gouge lines up with how they were arranged in the magazine. I had the same thing happening with my 1911 and found out that it was a long slide stop that was gouging the cases as they were feeding into the chamber. Once stoned back the gouging disappeared.

It could be like thegreatdane suggested but once again by marking the cases you'll see exactly where or from what the gouge is happening.

2shot

I was just going to suggest this but you beat me to it.[smilie=s: Yep, by marking the cases you can at least figure out where the ding is coming from and then start to look at that area to see if it can be fixed.

[W.R.Buchanan]

The damaged area has nothing to do with the length of the cartridge, but that said making the bullet stick out a little farther might fix it.

My Glock 21 will not feed SWC's period. The reason why is the tip of the bullet and the outer rim on the bullet just in front of the case come into contact with the top of the chamber at exactly the same time as the lower side of the case contacts the feed ramp.

This wedges the cartridge inplace. see pic. I suspect that your chamber has a square edge on the top or somewhere up there that the edge of the case is hitting and it is gouging the brass.

This probably would happen with Round Nose boolits.

The OAL with a SWC should be 1.275 Max, however +/- a few won't hurt anything. The crimp should measure .470 at the case mouth when adjusted correctly. The boolit ends up having about .030 of the driving band showing.

If the case is still belled and not to the above mentioned size then it is hooking onto something while feeding.

I would think a Sig would feed SWC's just fine as I have never heard otherwise.

All that said,,, I bet you'll test a few rounds before you load a bunch next time! I got bit on the Glock but I only loaded 50 rnds,,,, Now I have 450 bullets I can't use.

Randy

[mpbarry1]

Well, I have HAD to go up to our little range like 7 times to test. How tedious. ;) The dinged brass was definately from that ejecting cartridge.

First it measured the OAL of those 400 I loaded. 1.228 average. they were kind of short obviously but had a fingernail of lead above the case rim. I 'swaged' these these down to from .473 to 470. They shot fine. I had a couple hang up on the lead rim. Total misfeeds are down to about 1 in 30. Much better than 1 in 10.

Next I thought what the heck, lets try a longer seating. I loaded up 40 at 1.265 OAL and .471. They didn't feed at all. 1 in 7 misfed.

Next I tried 1.255 at .471. Misfeed were 1 in 20.

Tried about 7 more combinatations, met some folks, ended up buying a gun, worked on my double action trigger pull, miserable days. :)

I think I have some magic number that works now. It is 1.248 OAL at .470. One thing I hadn't thought about was the spread in the OAL lengths. if I measure 20 cartridges, I get about a .008 spread in the lengths. more than I thought I would get. the circumference ranges from .469 to .470. I will test some accuracy now that it is somewhat reliable.

Next time I cast, I will try to water drop these and also size down another 1000th. I think harder boolits should shed that first cartridge without dinging the lead a little better and a little smaller boolit should work.

Thank you all for the advice.

[Dennis Eugene]

Wow never would have thought about empty brass comeing back into loaded round and doing that. Congrats to me 56 years old and still learning. Dennis

[xr650]

Barry,
Thanks for the update.

[Certaindeaf]

It's counter to thought. Good post/thread.

[Silver Jack Hammer]

I fixed that problem by seating and crimping in two different stages. Seating and crimping in two different stages is real easy with a Dillon 550 with the four position head. I only had that problem though in longer cases like the .45 Long Colt. It was my opinion that the crimping die was closing the brass into the bullet while the boolit was still seating, I don't know. But adding the crimp at the 4th stage fixed it for me.

[Greg B.]

Interesting thread. I have a 1937 Luger in 9mm that puts a "v" shaped scrape on the cartridge lip after firing. It doesn't cut right through the case like the ammunition pictured however I never thought that the rim of the spent case dragging over the lip of the unfired round underneath could cause this. I am going to add a seperate taper crimp operation to loading and see if this helps. Lots of good ideas here.

Greg B.

[Char-Gar]

I suspect the cast mouth is hitting the bottom edge of the barrel on it's way into the barrel. This "barrel offset" of the barrel and the frame feed ramp can be a critical dimension. I think seating the bullet out and making certain you have proper taper crimp will cure the problem.

Forget all of those "recommened COLs" and such. Use your barrel as the bullet depth seating guage. If you don't know how, just ask.

The 45 ACP round in a 1911 pistol is one of the easiest to load for accuracy and reliability with cast bullets. I have noticed many folks have frustrations and problems due to paying to much attention to what is written rather than what is in their hand.

[MtGun44]

Mark the cases and orient mark up and run a few. I am pretty certain this is
the extracted case hitting the next up in the mag.

Bill

[mpbarry1]

It definately was Bill! I had one jam where the empty cartidge case hit tbe wadcutter lip and stopped! I was going to take a picture but forgot my phone. [smilie=b:It most definately is the ejecting case hitting the next round in line.

[MtGun44]

Thanks. I learned this one on my brother's XD in .45, he had to switch to RN with
no shoulder at all to get reliable functioning, and I was pretty sure this was what
your problem was.

Glad you could fix it so simply.

Bill

[mpbarry1]

Shot for groups today. The one complaint i have for my Sig are the sights. My point of aim is on the dot imstead of at 6 o'clock. But I got about 2.5 inches at 50 feet. I think it actually will do better than that. Still better than i can shoot.