2,000 rounds...finally.

So, with a hundred rounds left of the 2,000-round total, I grabbed two boxes of Lucky Gunner's .45ACP and took the CCA 1911 out on the range to stagger across the finish line.

I should preface this by noting that the pistol, which hadn't seen a drop of lubricant in two months or any cleaning for nearly two cases of ammo, spent the night before this range session in the trunk of my car on a sub-freezing night. It was still cold to the touch on the range.

Bone dry and icy cold.

I loaded a magazine, inserted it in the mag well, used the overhand rack method just in case the extra bit of impetus might help, and watched it the slide ooze and shudder forward along the frame rails, stopping half an inch out of battery. I pushed it the rest of the way closed with my thumb, fired a round, watched it stop half an inch out of battery, pushed it the rest of the way closed with my thumb, lather, rinse, repeat.

I'll be honest, I stopped counting. I fired that first box of fifty rounds, and if a third of them went without me having to nudge the slide closed, I'll eat my hat.

After the first box of fifty, I took the pistol into the gunsmith's shack. I grabbed the first stuff that came to hand (an aerosol can of Break-Free CLP) and, locking the slide to the rear, glorped some on the underside of the slide and wet my finger off that and schmeared that on the muzzle. I held the gun muzzle-down for a sec to let everything trickle down into the frame rails and then ran the slide a couple times.

Magic!

It felt like a new gun again, dirt or no. I took it out to the range and ran through the final fifty rounds as fast as I could stuff them into mags and shoot them into the target, ignoring the spray of black CLP flying off the filthy pistol and freckling my face and hands. No more malfs, of course.

CLP to the rescue.

Moral of the story: On an older style gun with large bearing surfaces between the frame rails and slide, lube is important. You'll notice that the gun performed okay for about the first three or four weeks and the first thousand rounds, but once it got good and dried out, it was a mess.

Mind you, this is a gun that went through a two-day, thousand-round class right out of the box and fired probably another thousand rounds after that without a hiccup; obviously neglecting lubricant is far worse than dirt. Something to think about if you choose to carry a gun like this daily.

Anyhow...

The last hundred rounds.

This brings the total rounds fired to 2,000, all but the last fifty since the weapon was cleaned or lubricated, with fifteen a bunch of failures to go into battery (rounds #356, #1,085, #1,247, #1,492, #1,514, #1,578, #1,627, #1,663, #1,717, #1,774, #1,815, #1,823, #1,847, #1,858, #1,883, most of the rounds between #1,900 and #1,950), three failures to feed on rounds #513 and #1,724, $1,851, a failure to feed a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #927, and a failure to eject a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #930.
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