Backfire
04-08-2005, 17:04
My story, in case you might be interested.
In 1972 I bought a new Interarms Walther PPK/S in .380 that would have frequent failures to eject (smokestacks) with both Remington and Federal factory ball ammo. Since I bought the Walther based on it's legendary reputation, you can imagine how annoyed I was.
After contacting Remington, a Remington representative met me in my home town and treated me to lunch, borrowed my gun, and tested it at the Remington factory (boy, those were the good old days!). He told me they always had perfect functioning with the two WWII era PPK's they used for ammo testing, but my gun would not eject reliably when they tried it at the factory. So they slightly increased the powder charge and thickened the rims on their production .380 ammo. He returned my gun to me along with a free case of 1000 of the "improved" .380 rounds and asked me to contact him after I shot the ammo up. I fired all of the new rounds over a period of weeks and had perfect reliability and I informed the representative of the great results (His name was "Red" something or other - a very helpful guy).
After this, I removed the loaded chamber indicator from the gun on a hunch and tried some of the old "pre-improvement" rounds and had no problems. After informing Interarms of my experiences, they sent me a letter indicating that they were investigating the possibility of that loaded chamber indicator interfering with the extraction/ejection cycle. My take is that the spring-loaded indicator pin was pushing cases off of the extractor before they could be ejected, resulting in ejection failures. I have left that indicator pin off of the gun ever since and never had any further functioning problem with either factory or my handloaded rounds. I think the thicker rim and more European-like heftier loading of the "improved" rounds also contributed to the enhanced functioning.
In 1972 I bought a new Interarms Walther PPK/S in .380 that would have frequent failures to eject (smokestacks) with both Remington and Federal factory ball ammo. Since I bought the Walther based on it's legendary reputation, you can imagine how annoyed I was.
After contacting Remington, a Remington representative met me in my home town and treated me to lunch, borrowed my gun, and tested it at the Remington factory (boy, those were the good old days!). He told me they always had perfect functioning with the two WWII era PPK's they used for ammo testing, but my gun would not eject reliably when they tried it at the factory. So they slightly increased the powder charge and thickened the rims on their production .380 ammo. He returned my gun to me along with a free case of 1000 of the "improved" .380 rounds and asked me to contact him after I shot the ammo up. I fired all of the new rounds over a period of weeks and had perfect reliability and I informed the representative of the great results (His name was "Red" something or other - a very helpful guy).
After this, I removed the loaded chamber indicator from the gun on a hunch and tried some of the old "pre-improvement" rounds and had no problems. After informing Interarms of my experiences, they sent me a letter indicating that they were investigating the possibility of that loaded chamber indicator interfering with the extraction/ejection cycle. My take is that the spring-loaded indicator pin was pushing cases off of the extractor before they could be ejected, resulting in ejection failures. I have left that indicator pin off of the gun ever since and never had any further functioning problem with either factory or my handloaded rounds. I think the thicker rim and more European-like heftier loading of the "improved" rounds also contributed to the enhanced functioning.