hang fire

[eric]

What is the proper method for clearing the semi-auto on hanging. It never happened to me but I have heard stories from others about how it will discharge late. Also I must have got some bad ammo from corbon, it was 8 month old and stored in military tight sealed box and was short of power I guess. Bullet lodged in barrell and the safety features on the gun would not allow it to fire again. Glad for that .

[Mike1951]

Bullet lodged in barrell and the safety features on the gun would not allow it to fire again. Glad for that .

I would be interested in knowing what kind of gun could prevent it firing with a plugged barrel.

[seamusTX]

The standard advice is that if you pull the trigger and the firearm doesn't go bang, wait 30 seconds with the muzzle pointed downrange. Then eject the cartridge onto the ground, not into your hand. If the cartridge is unfired, dispose of it in a safe manner (whatever that may be). If the bullet is not in the cartridge, determine where it went. This will generally require field-stripping the firearm and examining the barrel.

I have never had a centerfire cartridge or shotshell fail to fire, so this is all theoretically.

It sounds like you got some squib loads. Corbon probably would like to trade them for a fresh box.

- Jim

[Excaliber]

I would be interested in knowing what kind of gun could prevent it firing with a plugged barrel.

Quite likely what was assumed to be a "safety feature" was circumstantial and had nothing to do with the gun. The most likely scenario is that the squib load didn't generate enough recoil energy to fully retract the slide.

If this had happened, the spent shell would have been extracted and ejected and, if there was a live cartridge in the magazine, it would have been fed into the chamber. Pressing the trigger again would have triggered a full powered round into a fully blocked barrel and ruined the owner's day big time.

Since it apparently didn't happen and the gun reportedly wouldn't fire again, in the absence of any additional information the insufficient recoil scenario is the most plausible.

[Mike1951]

It was rhetorical since I know of no gun with any 'safety feature' that would prevent firing of a second round.

Shooter awareness is the only thing that protects us from such an incident.

[BigDan]

Quite likely what was assumed to be a "safety feature" was circumstantial and had nothing to do with the gun. The most likely scenario is that the squib load didn't generate enough recoil energy to fully retract the slide.

That's exactly what happened. Sounds like a light load if it was stuck in the chamber. If it had cleared the chamber, it would have sounded like it wasn't properly pushed home when it was loaded, keeping the pressure from building properly.

As a lesson to you guys, I ended up putting a 9mm round in my .40 magazine. The round did fire, but OBVIOUSLY sounded nothing like the rest of the rounds fired. Everyone on the line collectively went "Oooh..." and wondered what was up. I waited the 30 seconds, cleared the chamber, picked up the brass, went to the table, disassembled, pulled out the barrel and checked down the chamber. You can also use a standard "stick" pen to poke into the barrel, but I don't like the idea of putting in anything the wrong way. Just counter-intuitive IMO. Here's how the case looked when we examined it. Took a while to go "AHA!" and realize it was a 9mm in a .40 chamber. It had expanded to fill the chamber when it was struck, bullet ejected, but not enough force to rack the slide.

Pictures:




Let that be a lesson to you all... Be careful about any rounds you may drop into the wrong tray. You may end up loading something smaller into a bigger chamber. ;-]

[NcongruNt]

I had that same thing happen when I was new to pistols, before my CHL. A friend of mine gave me his S&W 457S (.45 ACP) to try in anticipation of possibly purchasing it. I took it to the Red's in South Austin, and asked the guy for a box of .45 Auto. He handed it to me, I loaded up the mag, and took the first shot. It was quite inaccurate, and though the action cycled, it didn't quite feed right. I had no point of reference, having never fired a .45, so I thought perhaps it was a mag issue (I was already aware that it wasn't the best mag - my friend told me in advance that the slide lock tab on the follower was broken off). I took a look at the gun, it looked OK. so I chambered another round and fired again. Same result, except that I recovered the case this time, and it was swollen up like a pregnant chicken, similar to the picture above. I also pulled the target, and realized that the rounds were tumbling when they hit the target, all of 7 yards away. It hit me what had happened, and I looked at the casing, and sure enough - .40 S&W. The boxes were generic and not marked individually, so the only indicator was the stampings on the rounds themselves which were hard to see due to the poor lighting at Red's. I let the guy know that he had given me the wrong ammo, and he took the pistol over to the gun smith to look it over. The gun checked out, and he got me the correct ammo. I put 100 rounds through the gun, and decided it wasn't for me. That was also the most expensive practice ammo I've ever purchased... I believe it was something like $90 for the ammo and an hour of shooting ($13 by itself).

[Excaliber]

I had a similar experience with incorrect ammunition when I was shooting two weapons, 1 a .40 S&W and 1 a .45. I had spilled ammo out of the box of .40's to shoot that gun, then changed over and did the same thing with the .45, not noticing that there was one .40 round left on the table in front of me next to a box of ammo.

Sure enough, eventually I got around to loading that one too (by feel, just picking up rounds and sliding them into the magazine while talking to a friend shooting with me). My first clue that something was wrong was when the hammer fell and the gun report didn't sound right and recoil was unusually light.

Investigation showed that the bullet had left the bore, but because the charge was not properly confined by the chamber the slide did not fully retract and the fired casing was still under the extractor. It looked almost exactly like the 9mm round photo shown in Big Dan's post.

Lesson learned: I now take ammo directly from the box. The only open box is the caliber I'm shooting. If I'm shooting from loose rounds (e.g., changed out carry ammo) I keep it in clear plastic sandwich bags and operate from only one of those at a time. I haven't had any issues since.

This follows my principle to try never to make the same mistake twice. Plenty of new ones are available.

[Dave01]

Once (many years ago), I had a factory round not go bang. I pulled the trigger on a mid-magazine round and nothing happened. I waited 30 secs and still nothing. I droped the hammer a second time on the same round just incase of a bad primer strike. Still nothing. Another 30 sec wait and nothing happened. Dropped the mag and ejected the round. It bounced off the table and out onto the range floor, so I was never able to get a look at the primer. I told the management at the range the whole story and they seemed unconcerned. I figured someone would come out, stop the firing line and get the round, but no one ever did. All subequent rounds I shot that day were fine.

Dave

[Excaliber]

I figured someone would come out, stop the firing line and get the round, but no one ever did.

If it didn't go off in the time period you reported, it wasn't going to go off by itself later so there was no hazard the range staff would be concerned about. It's not an everyday occurrence with factory ammo, but it's not extremely rare either.

Possible causes include a hard primer, a defective primer with no priming compound, an improperly seated primer, or a problem with the gun itself.

If it doesn't recur with the gun, the issue was with that individual round.

[eric]

Yes, it was a bad load after thinking about it , that was 4 yrs. ago. Slide did not come back enough to feed another round. Safety feature was my bad. I did clear the barrell and next shot did the same but the bullet cleared the barrell. That ammo was put in a large crack in the ground due to drought and filled with water. I thought it might be the gun, Beretta mod. 84f. Right side thumb safety was closer to the slide than the left and I thought that was the problem after looking thru headloop. It was a new gun.

[dukalmighty]

Quite likely what was assumed to be a "safety feature" was circumstantial and had nothing to do with the gun. The most likely scenario is that the squib load didn't generate enough recoil energy to fully retract the slide.

That's exactly what happened. Sounds like a light load if it was stuck in the chamber. If it had cleared the chamber, it would have sounded like it wasn't properly pushed home when it was loaded, keeping the pressure from building properly.

As a lesson to you guys, I ended up putting a 9mm round in my .40 magazine. The round did fire, but OBVIOUSLY sounded nothing like the rest of the rounds fired. Everyone on the line collectively went "Oooh..." and wondered what was up. I waited the 30 seconds, cleared the chamber, picked up the brass, went to the table, disassembled, pulled out the barrel and checked down the chamber. You can also use a standard "stick" pen to poke into the barrel, but I don't like the idea of putting in anything the wrong way. Just counter-intuitive IMO. Here's how the case looked when we examined it. Took a while to go "AHA!" and realize it was a 9mm in a .40 chamber. It had expanded to fill the chamber when it was struck, bullet ejected, but not enough force to rack the slide.

Pictures:




Let that be a lesson to you all... Be careful about any rounds you may drop into the wrong tray. You may end up loading something smaller into a bigger chamber. ;-]

kinda looks like a pregnant chicken