TEXASforLIFE
SAINT
I bought some primer Jag cases and 15% of them didn't fire. Ended up deprimming and reprimed with cci. No issues any more.
Factory Ammo...Fail To Fire
- Thread starter SMSgtRod
- Start date
Not a gun issue. Well cleaned and lubed. Has absolutely not problems with anything else but Remington UMC and Winchester white box.
Hellcat is the way to go. I absolutely love mine. I actually got two now.
Maks_Ameau
Operator
The absolute worst ammo I ever had failure to Fire was Geco 115gr Fmj. I had 10 out of a box of 50 fail to fire. Primer strike no bang.
A few weeks ago I had 1 Hornady critical defense not go bang. I thought insignificant. But 1 in a box of 25 of your carry ammo will make you go hmmmm...
A few weeks ago I had 1 Hornady critical defense not go bang. I thought insignificant. But 1 in a box of 25 of your carry ammo will make you go hmmmm...
Between January of 2012 and January of 2017, I shot a little over 42K rounds of 115 gr. Winchester "White Box" Value Pack 9x19.
My failure rate for that ammo was somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.3% (zero point three percent).
Often considered among the poorest of the poors, in my limited experience, it really was no different than any other range fodder in terms of reliability-of-ignition.
And similar to other failures - the next largest group I have is probably Blazer Brass, of which the 115 gr. variety I have shot perhaps half as much as WWB over the same period - most of what I encountered was actually isolated not to just ammo from the same lot, but rather, from even just one BOX.
And that's really just it.
Range fodder is just range-fodder.
People get too hung up about a certain brand being "dirty" or being perceived as less reliable or less accurate. At the price price-point of typical range-fodder, in all honesty, everything is about the same, and it's much more about specific-gun-to-specific-ammo considerations. Each gun is unique, and the end-user should do their own due to determine what bulk range-fodder works best - both in terms of reliable function as well as external ballistics - for their specific and unique gun, the gun that is in their own hands. Tolerance-stacking is a real thing.
To-wit:
At the higher-end training classes where the instructional cadre have the students shoot a graded exercise right-off-the-git on TD1.....
I've yet to see any student run back to their range-bag or vehicle to dig out some super-duper match-grade ammo. Everyone just runs what they'd brung, and more often than not - even for those guys and gals shooting guns that started life as $1K+ pieces or have been pimped out to the gills à la "Roland Special" John Wick space-guns - this is the cheapest bulk factory-new ammo they could find online.
In most cases, outside of one or two specific brands/types of ammo, most mass-produced modern duty/defensive-grade autopistols usually will swallow whatever is fed to them. Even as the gun is customized and gets more picky, this typically will continue to hold true. When my buddy finally put together his Roland Special, we took the gun to the range, and I brought a huge box that had 16 different makes/models of various factory-new ammo, everything from top-tier premium defensive/duty hollow-points like Federal HST and Speer Gold Dot to the cheapest of the cheap, like Blazer aluminum and steel-case TulAmmo. Of the 16, all functioned the gun, but strangely, the 124 gr. Blazer Aluminum returned a group that was well over twice as large as the others, at ~21 yards (range limitation) - and this is with a mix that also included both the 115 and 147 gr. variants of the same!
That said......
I am a relatively new shooter, having only truly entered the hobby about 10 years ago come November.
So, really, the worst I'd ever seen things was the c.2012-13 ammo craze.
During that time, I - along with many others who shoot a lot but do not reload their own - also started to rely on remanufactured ammo, and that's where I saw most of my failure-to-fires.
At the same time, factory QC/QA on new-manufacture ammo also was in decline (some said that it was a nadir). I still remember how at virtually every class I took that the instructional cadre or a fellow student would pull deformed ammo from their range bag or recount the tales of last weekend's squibs.
-----
Overall, for new shooters, it's important to vet your specific ammo in your specific gun.
Buy smaller quantities of various different ammo and give them a try before you plunk down serious cash for larger quantities.
More often than not, ammo-related stoppages will manifest sooner rather than later, so the small quantities are a good way to mitigate risk.
My failure rate for that ammo was somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.3% (zero point three percent).
Often considered among the poorest of the poors, in my limited experience, it really was no different than any other range fodder in terms of reliability-of-ignition.
And similar to other failures - the next largest group I have is probably Blazer Brass, of which the 115 gr. variety I have shot perhaps half as much as WWB over the same period - most of what I encountered was actually isolated not to just ammo from the same lot, but rather, from even just one BOX.
And that's really just it.
Range fodder is just range-fodder.
People get too hung up about a certain brand being "dirty" or being perceived as less reliable or less accurate. At the price price-point of typical range-fodder, in all honesty, everything is about the same, and it's much more about specific-gun-to-specific-ammo considerations. Each gun is unique, and the end-user should do their own due to determine what bulk range-fodder works best - both in terms of reliable function as well as external ballistics - for their specific and unique gun, the gun that is in their own hands. Tolerance-stacking is a real thing.
To-wit:
At the higher-end training classes where the instructional cadre have the students shoot a graded exercise right-off-the-git on TD1.....
I've yet to see any student run back to their range-bag or vehicle to dig out some super-duper match-grade ammo. Everyone just runs what they'd brung, and more often than not - even for those guys and gals shooting guns that started life as $1K+ pieces or have been pimped out to the gills à la "Roland Special" John Wick space-guns - this is the cheapest bulk factory-new ammo they could find online.
In most cases, outside of one or two specific brands/types of ammo, most mass-produced modern duty/defensive-grade autopistols usually will swallow whatever is fed to them. Even as the gun is customized and gets more picky, this typically will continue to hold true. When my buddy finally put together his Roland Special, we took the gun to the range, and I brought a huge box that had 16 different makes/models of various factory-new ammo, everything from top-tier premium defensive/duty hollow-points like Federal HST and Speer Gold Dot to the cheapest of the cheap, like Blazer aluminum and steel-case TulAmmo. Of the 16, all functioned the gun, but strangely, the 124 gr. Blazer Aluminum returned a group that was well over twice as large as the others, at ~21 yards (range limitation) - and this is with a mix that also included both the 115 and 147 gr. variants of the same!
That said......
I am a relatively new shooter, having only truly entered the hobby about 10 years ago come November.
So, really, the worst I'd ever seen things was the c.2012-13 ammo craze. During that time, I - along with many others who shoot a lot but do not reload their own - also started to rely on remanufactured ammo, and that's where I saw most of my failure-to-fires.
At the same time, factory QC/QA on new-manufacture ammo also was in decline (some said that it was a nadir). I still remember how at virtually every class I took that the instructional cadre or a fellow student would pull deformed ammo from their range bag or recount the tales of last weekend's squibs.
-----
Overall, for new shooters, it's important to vet your specific ammo in your specific gun.
Buy smaller quantities of various different ammo and give them a try before you plunk down serious cash for larger quantities.
More often than not, ammo-related stoppages will manifest sooner rather than later, so the small quantities are a good way to mitigate risk.