1911 slide locking

[polyphemus]

"The spring guide just bears against the top front edge of the the link lugs"
The spring guide does not bear on the link lugs,please.
The spring guide bears against the vertical step in the frame designed to hold
it there.

[1911Tuner]

The spring guide bears against the vertical step in the frame designed to hold it there.

Not with the slide and barrel assembly removed from the frame along with the recoil system as a unit.

Think of reassembling it the usual way after a field strip.

When the recoil spring guide and the spring go in, the rear face of the guide flange is against the front of the lower barrel lug.

[ammo.crafter]

Thanks all for the good advice.
I measured the outside diameter of the barrel with a micrometer and found a slight bulge; looking into the BBL I cvan now see a slight ring inside. That would appear to be the problem. I have no idea how or when that could have occurred but I will be ordering a new BBL shortly.

Has anyone have a preference to after market 45ACP 5" BBL?

[Recoiljunky]

Its not as much who maakes the barrel that makes it good. Its how well its fitted to the gun by the installer that makes a defference.

[oldgunsmith]

A bulge in the barrel comes from being fired with an obstruction. Just before it started acting up, you didn't have to hand eject an empty case, did you? If it was reloaded ammo odds are high that something went wrong with one.

[1911Tuner]

I measured the outside diameter of the barrel with a micrometer and found a slight bulge; looking into the BBL I cvan now see a slight ring inside. That would appear to be the problem.

That'll do it.

Where is the bulge?

[polyphemus]

"Not with the slide and barrel assembly removed from the frame along with the recoil system as a unit."
I am not in the habit of doing that so I might be forgiven for not taken that instance into account,I was thinking of the pistol's normal operation.Oh well
chalk it to inexperience.
Going back to the original issue,how do you spell "squib"?

[1911Tuner]

Going back to the original issue,how do you spell "squib"?

That brings up an interesting point.

Although most will argue that a squib can't cycle a slide...and although I always try to keep an open mind on things that "can't" happen...I believed that myself...

Until I saw it happen on day while doing the volunteer "Armorer on Duty" at a local club's plate match.

While watching the female half of a husband/wife team mowing down the plates during a pre-match warmup...looking straight at the shooter, marveling on her thus far perfect score...I heard the light pop...watched the slide cycle...saw the empty case dribble out of the port, and watched it go back to battery.

My mind raced and I knew what I'd just seen. The event that couldn't happen...just happened right in front of me.

Before I could get her attention, she pulled the trigger again and locked the gun up solidly. The barrel bulged radically and split at 3 and 9.

[Unclenick]

Originally Posted by polyphemus

The spring guide does not bear on the link lugs,please.

It's as 1911Tuner explained. It's because the frame is no longer there when you remove the parts as a unit that it can't be born against by the recoil spring guide any longer. The reasons not to disassemble this way are the chance of the spring and recoil guide launching themselves and the fact it doesn't free the barrel up for cleaning, which is the most common reason to field strip. On the other hand, I've seen any number of people launch the recoil spring plunger when disassembling by the normal method without the aide of a bushing wrench, and if you are field stripping to get at something in the frame rather than to clean the barrel, it's a shortcut.

You do have to slip the slide stop through its assembly notch with the slide held in the correct degree of counterbattery to align it, then push the pin back in with the lever paddle dangling down to let the recoil spring push the slide and barrel back into lockup. Then the pin can be slid out leaving the barrel and slide and spring assembly as a unit.

(For some reason, it's become a popular bit of martial arts movie fiction to have their heroes disassemble opponent's guns in this way with just one hand and faster than the eye can follow. I can see dropping a magazine that way, but line up the assembly notch and get the pin all the way out with one hand in the blink of an eye? Emphasis on fiction.)

My assumption was that RJ had done something like I described above, but if the link pin was dragging in both directions he may have had to hammer the slide open first to get the slide stop out, then forward to get the slide and the barrel off. He could also have driven it back into lockup up as I described, or just pulled the slide stop pin completely and left it unlocked. Either way, once that pin is fully removed, the slide can be driven off.

Originally Posted by 1911Tuner

Although most will argue that a squib can't cycle a slide...The barrel bulged radically and split at 3 and 9.

It's astonishing what a primer can do to propel a slide. I always try to remember J. C. Garand's first rifle design had a primer actuated semi-automatic mechanism. It had to be abandoned when the military started crimping primers to keep them from getting loose in machine guns and jamming the mechanisms, but the force of that little cap piston is real.

I've seen a barrel bulged by a double charge, but it was only a couple of thousandths and not enough to cause what Ammo.crafter describes. I once was involved in a burst barrel investigation for a gun maker, and one of the things that came out of it was that Hatcher's description held true, which is that an obstruction close to the throat of the chamber may be expelled with the next bullet without gun damage, but one that's the correct partial distance down the tube will blow the barrel apart. Still further down the barrel will just bulge it. So it all depends where the obstruction sticks as to how much and what kind of damage it does.


Ammo.crafter:

Do you have a recollection of a squib round or coming up short a hole in the paper or any other kind of miss you couldn't account for at around the time the gun started to stick? Did you find an ejected case with high pressure signs around that time? If not, I think we'd all like to know what the load was that you used for most of that 300K rounds so we can avoid it, just in case it's been slowly fatiguing the barrel steel over time. It seems unlikely you'd find just the right load to do that without obvious pressure signs, but regular high pressure could theoretically fatigue the steel until it began to move.

I've always changed or refit hardball barrels at about 25-30K and softball at 50-100K, but this was to maintain match precision and not because there was zero life left. A 300K barrel is not inside my realm of experience, so I'm not really sure what to expect on the fatigue front.

If you don't know how to do barrel fitting, you'll do best to get some instruction from someone who does. If hands-on instruction isn't practical but you still want to learn and don't want to invest in the full array of tooling a gunsmith uses, probably the easiest barrel to fit is Fred Kart's Easy Fit barrel. It saves you link lug cutting, link fitting, chamber mouth trimming and throating, and internal bushing fitting. All you have to do is fit the barrel extension (hood) and the unique lockup limiting pads Kart has in the rear barrel lug recess, all of which files can do, and the outside of the bushing to the slide. He's done the rest for you. I believe he's got a tool kit for fitting them. Call and ask for details (910) 754-5212. I've installed a number of makes of barrels, and found Kart's to be excellent quality and to realize top precision (minimum group size) on targets.

If you want a better-than-typical-drop-in fit, but don't want to go try fitting, an inbetween measure would be to get one of Bar-Sto's Semi-Fit barrels. They say these will drop in about seven times out of ten, but will need minor fitting on the remaining three. This depends on manufacturing tolerances of the gun, of course. I used a fully fit Bar-Sto match barrel on my Goldcup for a long time and it was well made and precision on target was also top notch.

[polyphemus]

"(For some reason, it's become a popular bit of martial arts movie fiction to have their heroes disassemble opponent's guns in this way with just one hand and faster than the eye can follow"
Thank you,it is a pleasure to be straightened out yet again.I must confess that
I am not well versed in the "martial arts"and maybe I'm reading the wrong
M1911 literature but I have my disassembly guidelines straight from the
1914 Ordnance Department USA description,they seem to work just fine and I
simply don't have the spirit of adventure to try doing it any other way.

[Unclenick]

…And that's that's a very good attitude. The shortcuts and sometimes out-of-order ways of doing things only start to tempt you if your you're building a number of match guns and taking them apart and putting them together again dozens of times in short order. And I'm not even recommending it for that purpose, but describing it mainly just to explain how RJ's description might make sense and to confess to having done it myself, though not regularly. On reflection, it's really been just when impatience had got the better of me.

[oldgunsmith]

A squib can cycle the slide. If you're really lucky, the bullet doesn't go far enough to clear the throat and the next round won't go far enough in to fire the next shot. If you're not, worse things than this can happen.