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Please bear with me as this is in some ways inexplicable.
I recently bought a Ruger LC9. Good gun, I'm accurate with it, but it's had a real problem with brass shavings and other crap in the chamber area as well as in the firing pin channel.
In fact, so much so that I had a series of fail-to-fires, something that a concealed carry gun simply cannot do.
I looked online, found a few instances of this, and it was recommended to clean out the firing pin channel. It's a bit of a pain on the LC9, but I did it, there was a bunch of grease and brass bits in there--in fact, it prevented the firing pin from fully striking the primers.
Well, I thought, where is all that brass junk coming from?
Saturday, I learned.
I was shooting some of my reloads, in this case some Precision Delta 115gr FMJ with some W231 powder, and I had a kaboom. I had a case failure which blew out the extractor, fortunately, no injuries by me:
I extracted the cartridge case and here's what it looked like:
Note in the above pic, the indentation from the firing pin, which is pretty normal.
But that wasn't the problem w/ the brass bits. Only later did I discover the real problem, which is illustrated here by these two fired cases:
Look closely at those primers; that's brass that's flowed into the hole in the primer. As near as I can tell, the striker from the LC9 is piercing the primer.
I decapped one of the offending cases, and compared the extracted primer to that of a normal case; the one on the right is the inside of the cup of one of the brassy primers, while the one on the left is normal:
Well, I called Ruger, told them about the Kaboom problem; they'll fix the gun for $35 plus parts, and they'll examine it to see if they can figure out why I'm having this primer problem.
I read someplace that if the striker is just a bit long, it can pierce the primer; seems odd, as they're CCI primers which have never given me a problem in my XD9, only in this LC9.
I believe i know where the brass bits in the action are coming from, but what I can't figure out is how this is happening.
Any ideas, observations, words of warning or whatever?
Thanks in advance!
I recently bought a Ruger LC9. Good gun, I'm accurate with it, but it's had a real problem with brass shavings and other crap in the chamber area as well as in the firing pin channel.
In fact, so much so that I had a series of fail-to-fires, something that a concealed carry gun simply cannot do.
I looked online, found a few instances of this, and it was recommended to clean out the firing pin channel. It's a bit of a pain on the LC9, but I did it, there was a bunch of grease and brass bits in there--in fact, it prevented the firing pin from fully striking the primers.
Well, I thought, where is all that brass junk coming from?
Saturday, I learned.
I was shooting some of my reloads, in this case some Precision Delta 115gr FMJ with some W231 powder, and I had a kaboom. I had a case failure which blew out the extractor, fortunately, no injuries by me:

I extracted the cartridge case and here's what it looked like:

Note in the above pic, the indentation from the firing pin, which is pretty normal.
But that wasn't the problem w/ the brass bits. Only later did I discover the real problem, which is illustrated here by these two fired cases:

Look closely at those primers; that's brass that's flowed into the hole in the primer. As near as I can tell, the striker from the LC9 is piercing the primer.
I decapped one of the offending cases, and compared the extracted primer to that of a normal case; the one on the right is the inside of the cup of one of the brassy primers, while the one on the left is normal:

Well, I called Ruger, told them about the Kaboom problem; they'll fix the gun for $35 plus parts, and they'll examine it to see if they can figure out why I'm having this primer problem.
I read someplace that if the striker is just a bit long, it can pierce the primer; seems odd, as they're CCI primers which have never given me a problem in my XD9, only in this LC9.
I believe i know where the brass bits in the action are coming from, but what I can't figure out is how this is happening.
Any ideas, observations, words of warning or whatever?
Thanks in advance!