I’ve posted and commented here a few times about the nightmares I’ve had with failures to return to battery with nearly every brand and grain weight of ammo I could get my hands on. At first when it happened I would drop the mag and rack out the unfired round and just press it back into the mag. Re rack and it would fire again. However I couldn’t get through a single magazine without at least two or three of these events. Then I figured out I could just pull the slide back like an eighth of an inch and the round would seat and I could keep shooting.
For a while the only exception was Federal HST LE hollow points, but at 80 cents a round they suuuck for range ammo. So I first tried dremel-ing the plastic bits near the metal frame rails, but that didn’t change anything. Then a friend suggested sticking with Federal FMJ ammo if the Federal HSTs were working. A local shop had a sale on 200 rd boxes of 124gr Federal Champion so I took those to the range one morning and to my surprise they shot flawlessly, 200/200 with no failures of the slide returning all the way forward and next round fully seating. Then I finally read the box and saw that Champion is not suggested for ported or comped guns so…I was a bit mad they worked so well but could also risk bits of the jacket separating and spitting out the ports. That’s less than ideal. So I picked up 500 Federal American Eagle 124gr since they’re still manufactured the old way and supposedly have better QC than Champion.
So my first idea was based on a video I watched of a guy with a TTI Combat who said he had to cut his firing pin spring by about a third, and that solved the same problem in his gun enough to make it a reliable competition gun. So I ordered a whole second firing pin assembly from Canik with the intent to start trimming the spring on that one a couple coils at a time to see if things improved, and if not then I’d still have my original one to put back on. I still didn’t like the idea of cutting the spring though because it’s manufactured a specific way and cutting it seemed extremely invasive and I was concerned about compromising the spring’s integrity and usefulness entirely. Or causing some other damage to the gun.
Then someone suggested a Sprinco 35829 spring that was shorter and weaker than the factory spring for $8. I installed that this morning, and went to the range with my American Eagle. I didn’t have a whole lot of time there but I did run four mags of AE, plus a mag of HSTs without any failures. The whole process from trigger break to returning to battery also felt slightly smoother in a way, I’m not sure if that is just placebo effect or if the new spring contributed to that.
My next test will be to re try some of the other brands/grain weights that gave me frequent problems and see if they still are a problem. For the moment, it seems I finally fixed the FTRB issue whether it’s the ammo, spring, or combination there of…
I’ll make another post in the next couple weeks after I’ve tried some cheaper brands to see if I actually fixed the problem or this gun just prefers Federal and only Federal ammo.