This is just a follow up review of my 911. I bought different brands to try out again from those that I had not and today I had failures to fire, failures to feed, and failures to eject.
Now to make things clear this only happened with one brand of bullets. The culprits were the Monarch 94 grain fmj with a steel casing. I normally do not shoot bullets in steel cases but I wanted to test this little handgun.
Everything shot well the first 50 rounds and after that I had my first failure to fire. The primer had not been struck and finally I figured out what happened. On the picture below you will see that the slide did not go into full battery.
You can see the guide rod sticking out about an 1/8th of an inch. The guide rod should be flushed with the slide, like the following pictures shows.
After racking the slide I would shoot again and than have issues with FTF's and FTE's with each magazine. After about 100 rounds I had my first light strike as there was a small dent on the primer but not enough to set the round off.
Once I squirted some hoppes #9 on the firing pin housing I got it to fire again but continued to have malfunctions until I depleted the box of 200 rounds. To ensure that it was the Monarch bullets in steel casing causing the issue I did what I normally never ever do and that is shoot bullets in brass casings.
This paragraph is mainly directed at the novice shooters entering the fantastic world of shooting. When ever you shoot a mixture of bullets in brass casings and steel casing you should always remember to shoot the bullets in brass first since the brass case expands inside the chamber thereby living little chance for powder residue to surround the case and have failures to extract. Once you shoot all the brass rounds it is okay to shoot the steel cases as they do not expand in the chamber, thereby living little chance to get stuck due to powder residue .
Well I did the opposite on purpose to see if my extractor would be able to extract the spent cartridge and I shot a box of browning 95 grain bullets in brass casings and a couple of magazines of winchesters semiwad cutters and also some Hornady XTP hollow points without a single malfunction. So I can honestly say that I will never buy bullets in steel casings especially for my 911.
In summary the monarch steel casings caused the following malfunctions to occur in my 911: failure to fire, failure to feed, failure to eject, this was caused by the powder residue interfering with the slide hindering it in such a manner that it would not go into full battery. I believe that the 4 light strikes I had was the cause of the slide not going forward enough but just enough to allow the firing pin to gently touch the primer as I had no issues at all with the 3 brands of bullets in a brass casing which were all shot after 200 rounds of monarch bullets had been shot.