Dusty Devil Dale

I had a similar thing happen with a '73 hammer leaf spring. I stored the rifle for a couple months in a pull-on cloth gun sock, inside a safe. When sliding it into the sock, I evidently pulled the hammer back to the full cock position and stored it that way. When I next took it to the range, the hammer fall was visibly slow and the FP would not break about 20% of the primers.

The gunsmithing part is interesting, but the OP was just intended to share a way to quickly remove the thin shaved lead collars on re-seated bullets.

Sorry --Typo. The too-long rounds were 1.545" (I went back and edited-corrected)

Two- handed shooter has a misfire on the 5th round in first pistol. He re-fires 8 times with no additional round discharging. Reholsters pistol with hammer down on an expended round, and bad (live) round in cylinder, not under the hammer. T.O. stops shooter to check for a live round under the hammer. Round under hammer is expended. T.O. grounds the gun and directs shooter to proceed. The delay costs shooter about 20 seconds. Shooter is denied a reshoot. On appeal, what would be the appropriate action? My own thoughts: Shooter definitely had one round unfired (miss). Reholster was not a violation if hammer was down on an expended round, so being stopped was unwarranted. -- Offer re-shoot of stage with miss from the unfired round carried forward.

It has a Jim Bowie Gen 3 short stroke, but no other mods. It operated OK with the longer rounds until the Western Regional last August. Then the 1.545" [edited] rounds rising in the carrier began to hang up on the lower extractor tab, causing nuisance jambs. I have no idea why. I lowered my crimp die to get a COAL of 1.525" and it works just fine. I gave up trying to figure out why and just shortened the prior loaded rounds.

The last joint outward was severed in a jointer-planer about 45 years ago. It took several surgeries and 8-10 years to re-learn how to play guitar.

Good idea! Then re-seat and re-crimp? But unless somebody makes a better (i.e. metal) hammer- puller than what I have found, I'd need to buy about 10 of them to process 600 rounds. But the idea of shifting the bullet mass forward first is a clever approach that I will try.

Here's a little trick (tool) that saved me some time and kept some rifle ammo out of my "practice box". I loaded about 600 rounds of .38 rifle rounds with a seating die that had moved out of adjustment. The 1.545 [edited] COAL rounds just wouldn't work through my 1873. I re-seated the rounds to shorter length, but because they had already been crimped, re-seating left a thin collar of shaved lead around the crimp on each round. I was concerned the collars would be dislodged in clambering, fouling the chamber and feeding. I did the following, which has worked very well, so I thought I'd share it here for others with similar situations. First I took an empty, unprimed .38 case and belled the end, using a cheap 3/8" HFT drift punch (any 3/8" rod of hard dowel would work), ground to a slight taper at the tip 1/4". (I first tried using the powder die belling feature, but it didn't bell the end deeply enough down the case) I filed four shallow notches in the end, leaving them rough, as teeth. I chucked the belled round in a screw gun and inserted the re-seated rounds tip first, running at very low speed (wear good gloves). The rough brass easily removed the shaved lead collars, leaving me 600 perfect rounds of correct length. When it wears or stretches too much, I can cheaply make another or roll the edge against a hard surface to restore it. Occasionally, someone here posts about re-seating cartridges, so I thought I would share. This works better than grinding the tips off of bullets, and I once discharged a round in my hand from the heat of that kind of grinding.

Folks could use more important things to worry about-and looking at the world today, those things might be coming sooner than we would like.

Regarding wooden plank boardwalks, we have many at our club, and for the most part, I maintain them. Even in our less severe California weather, they are high maintenance. They swell in winter, shrink in summer, and like to warp upward, regardless of material or how carefully and strongly you attach the planks. In wet seasons they can be slippery, and then when they dry out, the attachment deck screws sometimes work their way upward creating trip hazards. They seem to shrink just enough for .38 brass to lodge between them. TREX is one (IMO poor) expensive alternative, but it becomes VERY slippery when wet or icy, or gets even lightly covered with leaves or needles. The wood looks great and period authentic, but if you install it, plan a regular safety inspection and maintenance program.

Rule of thumb: Don't re-seat bullets in cartridges that you did not load yourself or do not know powder VOLUME and type. "Rattle testing" isn't diagnostic.

Directions need to use language that is the same for everybody. If you call it a "Okie Washtub Sweep", or any other colloquial name, then PLEASE also include the target number sequence in the stage instruction.

What is this "Plans" thing that you speak about?

Try this: Hold your arm straight, wrist straight and try to move your trigger finger without also causing a small amount of wrist flexure or rotation. That translates into muzzle motion. Unless you are very unique, you cannot quiet the index finger tendons through the wrist. That is why I like to slip hammer. My grip hand can remain entirely quiet and Master Grip solid, while the non grip hand does the hammer work. For me, It has little to do with speed and a lot to do with steadiness.

Boars, sows and what else? To determine their gender, don't you need to ask how they identify today?

Regarding the failure to eject problem, take a good look at the lower bolt tab. Its jobs are: 1. help support the bottom of a live round during transfer from the carrier to the chamber, and 2. to support the bottom of expended cases so that they cannot fall downward away from the (top) ejector hook. Often the lower tab gets broken or broomed to a steep downward taper that allows the case to slip off too easily. (a very slight down-burnishing of the tip is normal. The bolt should solidly grip a spent or live round between the tab and hook. ) The opposite can also occur, wherein the tab is too long for the ammunition being used, so it catches the rear of cases as they rise into clambering position in the carrier, causing a jamb. The solution to that jamb is shorter ammo COAL, by just a hundredth or two. 1873 bolts now come in different configurations. Older ones have solid tabs that can only be repaired by rebuilding with a TIG welder. Newer ones have lower tabs that are replaceable by driving out a 1/16" pin in the side of the bolt. My experience has been that the replacements are usually a drop-in part, requiring little fitting. But that is not usually the case for the top ejector hook. The tapering tail of the ejector, rearward of the installation pin, often needs to be fitted to adjust the up-down position of the hook. Before I would start replacing or changing parts, I would remove the lower tab (if it is removable) and the top ejector hook and thoroughly scrape/clean out the grooves they rest in. Built up crud under the shank of the hook causes the kind of weak ejection that you are describing. As a rule of thumb, always thoroughly clean any gun before endeavoring to change or repair anything.

Widder is right about the cocking force and what I call briskness. If only light force is applied in cocking the hammer, then the second (lower) tooth on the pawl/hand may be filed too low to push the cylinder all the way to the locking notches. The positioning-cocking timing is fairly critical. A few questions: 1> Which side of the primer is being struck? Is the cylinder stopping too soon or too late? (after the cylinder rotation stops upon cocking, can you manually rotate it a little further, or does it skip to the next round?) 2> Is the bolt locking tab riding too high so that it is heavily burnishing or scoring the outside of the cylinder? And is the scoring roughness enough to rub and possibly impede smooth rotation? 3> When you remove the cylinder and insert the base pin into its center bore (out of the gun), is it a snug fit or can you visibly wiggle it side-to- side? 4> Is the pawl/hand in original condition or has it been modified? 5> Is the gun short stroked? If so, realize cocking the hammer has to do all the same jobs as on the stock gun, but in a shorter path, so physics tells us it will require added energy to cock the gun, for any given hammer spring tension. 6> Does your wife slip hammer with trigger held back? Does the gun malfunction if individually cocked and fired? (Suspect hammer being released too soon.) The gun should not come to battery, in full cock, before the cylinder is fully rotated into position and locked. If it does, and it is fired with the chamber & barrel misaligned, gun or shooter damage could result. You don't want the gun to cock prior to the chamber being aligned. With all of those ruled out, the fact that the gun works properly for a different shooter suggests your wife is short- cocking the gun. Try it yourself, cocking both rapidly and slowly, while watching what happens. Hope this helps.

I had a bit of a semantics problem at first. To me the Shooters Handbook is a SASS Rules document. On bigger matches, I like the printed shooters "booklet". Not everyone, and particularly not people on the road, have easy access to a printer --or to the Internet. Publishing it on the web also leaves little choice about whether or not to release stage descriptions in advance. I also like to collect the booklets, just for the fun of looking at them months or years later.

Good to know Ruger still backs their products. This was not my own gun, and it has been short-stroked and had trigger work done in the past, so my flexibility was pretty limited. But still good to know. Thx.

Update: I tried something simple first. The cylinder center bore was 0.041" out of round over the stop recesses, so about half of that should be the expected maximum increase in gap distance over the bolt catch as the cylinder rotates. I machined 0.024" off of the top of bolt's lower arm, below the cylinder catch process (where the bolt contacts the frame, stopping the bolt's rise toward the cylinder.) That change did, in fact, allow the bolt catch to elevate by roughly the same amount. Yesterday, I tested by running 100 rounds through the pistol without any skips or jambs. It was a band aid over a bigger cylinder bore roundness problem, but a cheap band aid by comparison with replacement or performing major cylinder surgery.

The firing pin is probably sticking in the primers. Primers may need to be seated more solidly. Primers might also be blowing back, if the hulls have seen a few firings.

The stage instructions appear to be written to give leeway for unhit plates falling accidentally. It is essentially a plate count and round count stage. Regardless of suspicions, the shooter was clean. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. That's without even considering the likelihood of a separate target interference issue between the P and R target array.

They fired ten rifle rounds. One of the targets was already down, so one round only had to go downrange. Instructions do not specify which one. Nine rounds hit targets and one went downrange. You cannot assign a penalty based on speculation as to what target was engaged/missed when there is no target sequence specified. The miss was just the downrange round. Shooter is CLEAN.

Because no target order was specified, and one round contacted no target, you don't know which target the shooter was engaging. Shooter may have been "shooting where it was" for the fallen plate. Shooter could do that at any time in the rifle string. So it is conjecture to say shooter reengaged one missed rifle target.

You don't know for sure which target was aimed at on the rifle miss. He could have fired that round at the already-down plate (shoot where it was).