Dumpster Fire
Have you ever seen a dumpster fire? Well, here you go…
I have no explanation, but I simply was not at my best here. I shot poorly and slowly, and that’s no way to have good results in the USPSA game.
I will point out one particular issue, which you will see early in the fourth stage. I had a pretty good malfunction, which I didn’t handle correctly at first, so it took some work to clear it. It began as a failure to feed, but when I racked the slide, the empty case did not clear the gun and remained in the chamber. At that point, my racking the slide created a double-feed, with the gun trying to stuff a second round into the chamber on top of the first. I then had to do the full “unload the gun, load the gun” clearance, stripping the magazine from the gun, getting the spent case to eject, and then reinserting a fresh mag and chambering a round. By that point, my stage was wrecked. The good news is that the gun did run the rest of that stage and the next…finishing the match…with no further problems.
The double-feed.
I should explain that this malfunction was not totally unexpected, and was actually deliberate…in a way. I have been running a bit of an experiment with my single-stack gun the past year or so. I started the 2021 season last March with a clean gun, but then I kept shooting and hadn’t cleaned it in a while, so I decided to just see how long I could go before the gun choked on me…which presumes that eventually it will choke.
So I kept shooting my club’s monthly match, and went the full 2021 season with no cleaning and no malfunctions. All I did was lubricate the rails, barrel hood, and barrel bushing/barrel contact area with Shooter’s Choice FP-10 before each match. I added no lube during matches…just ran it as is. I made it through last month’s 2022 season opener with no issues, but “eventually” came to pass this month, four stages into a five-stage match. The official round count between cleanings comes to 1,341 rounds of .45 ACP (my reloads). The gun is a fairly stock Ruger SR1911. It is well broken-in, with somewhere around 15,000 rounds through it. The only modifications are:
Swapped out grip panels for some grippy VZ stocks
Replaced the front sight with a fiber optic from Dawson Precision
Installed stainless extended mag release, mainspring housing, and magwell from Ed Brown
Had beavertail replaced with a stainless one from Wilson Combat
As you can see, the gun was filthy (those black things are stainless steel parts). The specific culprit was a gunked-up extractor, which comes as no big surprise. At any rate, the experiment is officially concluded, and it’s time to get cleaned up for next month’s match.
