...and finally Part Two.

So two things remained to do with the BG380 test.

First, determine how much of Monday's fiasco with the ignition problems on the Sig Sauer FMJ ammo was the gun and how much was the ammo. Second, would the BG380 return to some semblance of reliability when returned to a diet of the Fiocchi FMJ from Lucky Gunner?

This obviously required a second .380 as a control, and since all the other pistols I own in the caliber are antiques of questionable reliability themselves, I used a Colt Government .380 thoughtfully provided by Bobbi to double check the Sig ammo.

Above are the nine rounds of Sig .380 and the one Remington that qualified as "duds" in Monday's testing, each showing the marks of multiple primer hits from the BG380.

When fed into the Colt, they all fired normally on the first try. Obviously, despite being a hammer-fired gun with a stout mainspring, the BG380 had reached a point where it was having ignition problems after going a thousand-plus rounds with no cleaning or lubrication.

The second part was to re-try the Bodyguard with the Fiocchi. To this end I ran another hundred rounds of the Fiocchi through the gun. All fired. However, four of them did not go on the first try. This time, though, instead of ejecting the round, photographing the primer, noting the round number, and reloading it in the magazine, I took advantage of the true Double Action Only trigger mechanism and just pulled the trigger a second time.

All four ignited with a second trigger pull.

Obviously the BG380 had reached a point where the increasing amounts of propellant residue and lack of lubricant were affecting its reliability. I decided to call the test done at a round count of 1335 rounds total through the gun.

"For you, ze var is over."

My hypothesis, and I'm just guessing here, based on the slightly off-center primer hits on the "duds", is that the gun had reached a point where it was sometimes stopping just a tiny fraction of an inch out of battery, and the fall of the hammer would push the gun the rest of the way closed. This, however, was absorbing enough energy to keep the primer from popping. This is why they went off, four-for-four, when I just pulled the trigger again, instead of cycling the round out of the gun and back into the magazine.

Regardless, the gun still shoots fine. And all the trigger practice on this thing has been a big help! I was standing there Tuesday shooting 20-yard steel with a tiny mousegun with a 10+ pound DAO trigger like it was the most normal thing in the world. This is not something that was in my skillset not all that long ago.

I will clean the gun, give it a good lube, function fire it, and resume carrying it with more confidence in the gun than I had before I started this program. (Do note that there was not a single failure to feed or failure to eject over the course of 1335 rounds.)
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