I had a bit of a scare today that left me very unhappy with a recent decision I made to forsake my normal carry ammo (Federal Hydra-shoks) and go with a make/model I've never used before. I had been researching all different kinds of PP ammo for my new 9mm EDC gun, and I decided to go with the Winchester PDX-1 124gr +P ammo. I trustingly loaded up my mags with it and have been carrying it for the last few weeks completely ignorant of something that could have put me in a terrible situation if I would have had to use my pistol in self defense. This evening as I was settling in after a long day at work, I decided to cycle a few rounds through the pistol just to see if there would be any surface level issues (feeding, extracting, etc) and lo and behold the first round I tried to chamber locked the slide up and rendered the gun inoperable.
I couldn't pull the slide back and eject the round, nor could I get the round to seat into the chamber correctly by jiggling the slide. After carefully disassembling the pistol (which was incredibly difficult due to the cartridge being stuck cock-eyed in the chamber and holding onto the extractor) I pulled the cartridge out and frustratingly emptied all of my mags with the PDX-1's in them. After examining each round and dropping each one into the stripped down barrel, I discovered that TWO out of the twenty rounds purchased had bullets that were improperly tapered and thus would get stuck in the chamber.
Needless to say I'll be giving Winchester a call and expressing (in the nicest of ways of course ) that this is unacceptable. One round in twenty, okay, maybe I just got a bad box. But two rounds in twenty is no coincidence in my book.
So I've leaned a couple of lessons from this:
1- Never trust any ammo without verifying its integrity by spending time with it on the range (and from now on I'll be examining every PP bullet that I load into a mag)
2- It's time to stop thinking about it and start carrying a backup.
Thankfully I had this experience in the comfort and safety of my own home, otherwise I could have ended up a statistic, and I don't think a perp trying to mug me would have the decency to let me field strip my weapon, diagnose the problem, and fix it before things got ugly.
I couldn't pull the slide back and eject the round, nor could I get the round to seat into the chamber correctly by jiggling the slide. After carefully disassembling the pistol (which was incredibly difficult due to the cartridge being stuck cock-eyed in the chamber and holding onto the extractor) I pulled the cartridge out and frustratingly emptied all of my mags with the PDX-1's in them. After examining each round and dropping each one into the stripped down barrel, I discovered that TWO out of the twenty rounds purchased had bullets that were improperly tapered and thus would get stuck in the chamber.
Needless to say I'll be giving Winchester a call and expressing (in the nicest of ways of course ) that this is unacceptable. One round in twenty, okay, maybe I just got a bad box. But two rounds in twenty is no coincidence in my book.
So I've leaned a couple of lessons from this:
1- Never trust any ammo without verifying its integrity by spending time with it on the range (and from now on I'll be examining every PP bullet that I load into a mag)
2- It's time to stop thinking about it and start carrying a backup.
Thankfully I had this experience in the comfort and safety of my own home, otherwise I could have ended up a statistic, and I don't think a perp trying to mug me would have the decency to let me field strip my weapon, diagnose the problem, and fix it before things got ugly.