Lesson Reinforced!

by Jon Math 2/12/2019, 7:02 am

My beloved Pardini failed to feed the other day. I stroked the bolt and an empty case was extracted from the chamber and I let the bolt forward and a round was stripped off the magazine. It fired but again no ejection and resetting of the trigger occurred.

I tore the pistol apart, checked the firing pin, springs and rods, extractor etc. and everything seemed fine. I cleaned the barrel, chamber and magazines thoroughly. I went back to the range and everything was fine. I shot a couple of matches with no issues, only to have the pistol fail again during a practice a few weeks later.

Same problem as before. I had fired off the remains of a box of 50 I had used a day before in a match without problems, and went into a fresh box from a new brick and started having feeding problems from round one. I first wondered if the chamber might be carbon filled and the rounds were not seating fully, so I swabbed that out and it was actually very clean. Another try and again only one round would fire but not eject.

I was about ready to tear into the trigger and hammer assemblies when I decided to try a different brick of ammo. Everything was back to normal with the new ammo. I get into a zone when I shoot and honestly don’t realize when the pistol fires other than my sight picture being disturbed. In hindsight I do not recall the recoil or sound being as pronounced as normal, but with a heavy pistol and a .22 LR there is not much of either. I never expected the issue to be ammo –but it was and wasn’t!

I shoot CCI Standard Velocity. The outer box of the brick was labeled CCI Standard, but the internal boxes (which looked identical) were labeled CCI Quiet in tiny lettering. I had purchased the ammo from a place running a special a few months ago. They did not have bricks available but the stock clerk reloaded the 50 round boxes back into a master carton for me. I guess he was picking Quiets rather than SV off his shelf.

I’m fastidious about checking that I have the right caliber and bullet weight of my ammo. This was something I never expected--I’m not sure how you ID these Quiets once they are out of the box, they do not have a distinguishing bullet shape or color and the head case marking as no different from normal LR ammo. But for me it was a lesson reinforced and it’s something to keep in mind if your pistol is acting off normal.