After a two-week absence due to vacation and other business, we were back at home on the range today. We missed our weekly shootout, so we packed up the handguns, shotguns and ammo and showed up raring to go.
I brought my S&W 686 and 50 rounds of .38 special. I also brought my Glock 30 and 50 rounds of .45 ACP. Damsel brought her Para Warthog and 50 rounds of .45. We each brought shotguns – our Remington 870 12 gauge security shotgun and Damsel’s 20 gauge Remington 870 Junior.
I captured a frame from one of the videos Damsel shot of me firing the security gun. There were a couple of fairly nice muzzle flashes in the video and that is one of them in the photo above.
We took turns firing the .38 special rounds. The revolver’s cylinder holds seven rounds, so after seven turns shooting, there is always one round left in the 50 round box of ammo. Damsel stuffed the remaining round into the cylinder and sent the last bullet downrange. We have been saving the .38 and .357 brass thinking that *one of these days* we will take up reloading.
We shot the .45s without incident except at one point the slide on the Warthog jammed with a live round still chambered (or nearly so). Damsel couldn’t move the slide at all, so she kept the muzzle downrange and handed it to me. I gripped the slide and worked it back and forth for about 15 seconds and it broke loose. Close examination of the open chamber and ramp showed no reason why this should have happened. Damsel also inspected the round that had been stuck and could find no nicks or other deformity. She put it back into the magazine, slammed it into the gun, racked and fired the rest of the rounds in the magazine – all normal.
We won’t be able to go to the range next week because the management is going to refurbish all lanes with new baffles, traps and other equipment as necessary. It has been thirty years since this range has been upgraded – we will report on the new range in a couple of weeks.
I had a similar problem recently with my Warthog. I bought some SD ammo at the range, the only kind they had left and it would lock my slide tight. I had to use a screw driver to push the slide back a bit more to unlock the barrel. They had quite a wide mouth compared to the other rounds I’ve been using which are Remington but it was in the chamber when it locked up. No problems with the Remington’s though.
It’s still a mystery why the jam occurred at all. Damsel was using Remington UMC 230 grain ball ammunition. Close inspection of the round that jammed revealed no nicks, dents or scratches and, in fact, fired properly on the next shot she took. We have had problems with Wolf ammunition in the past, but it too was 230 grain ball.
Interesting to note that she had no problems firing Winchester .45 JHP when that was all we could get.