Firearm Malfunctions — Hang Fires and Duds

[Annihilator]

Ran across this and thought I would post it since all of us at one time had this occurrence, for me it was mostly Remington Yellow Jacket .22lr, one time on a Federal American Eagle .38 special, hang fire

Firearm Malfunctions — Hang Fires and Duds - The Shooter's Log

Firearm malfunctions and jams are bound to happen at some point, but what causes them and how do you properly fix and avoid them?

blog.cheaperthandirt.com

 

[Bragah]

Had a semi-dud I guess? from Murica brand 9mm 115gr ammo. I will never use that ammo again. It's like a flamethrower coming out of the front of the gun when it works properly. The range I go to sells it, but I asked the guys there about it and they said "Don't use it, it's bad." (Then why... sell it... )

The round went off when I pulled the trigger, but it felt extremely weak and I saw gunpowder actually 'poof' out of the front of the gun. Didn't have enough force to push the slide back to eject the casing and when I dropped the mag out, more gunpowder came out.

Racked the slide (thankfully no jam) and saw the spent casing come out with no round, so I knew it was safe at least.

Ended up taking it apart at the range to make sure the round cleared the barrel, which it did.

 

[Belt Fed]

Had this one not too long ago, i tried firing it 5 times and no go.

 

[Snake45]

THE WORST ammo I've ever shot was some Argentinian-made Concorde .22LR I bought cheap at a LGS back in the '80s. It came in red (hi-speed) and green (standard vel) boxes. The green stuff was okay, just barely. The red stuff was a nightmare. 50% dud rate and when it did fire, it leaded the barrel worse than anything I've ever seen. About half of the duds would fire with a second strike in a different spot; the rest wouldn't. I ended up burning them up in a cheap ERMA-made .22 PPK lookalike simply because that gun was fast and easy to strip for cleaning--every 50 rounds I'd pull the slide off and run a USGI M16 .22 bronze bore brush through it to knock the lead out. I did eventually run through the whole batch of the junk--I seem to recall that I'd bought 2000 rounds of the crap. The cheap ERMA gun was a real trooper through this ordeal.

Second on my list is Remington Golden Bullets. They used to have these cheap at Walmart and about a decade ago I shot about 20K rounds of it through various .22 rifles and handguns. I found that they had a very consistent dud rate of 1% to 2%--i.e., 5 to 10 duds in every box of 550. These duds would not fire no matter how many times you tried different spots on the rim--the problem was they simply had NO PRIMER in them at all. When I figgered this out, I stopped wasting time with second strikes--all duds went straight in the trash. I clearly remember the day I had 100 of these turds fire in a row without incident--in thousands of rounds, this had never happened before and it never happened again. This ammo also produced at least four different sound levels when shooting, but strangely, accuracy was actually pretty darn good and it functioned better than anything else in at least one of my rifles.

Back in the '70s I worked part-time at a sporting goods store and used my employee discount to buy 5000 rounds of Rem Golden Bullets when they came in the useful 100-round plastic packages. Never had any problems with this ammo. In fact I still have some of it and it still shoots just fine, despite having been stored all these years in a garage that gets hot in the summer and very, very cold in the winter. It's MUCH better than the stuff being made today. Go figger.