Bangity.

2,750 rounds. 

Zero malfunctions. 

Still going.

Hey, look!

"Other than the mildewed-sweat-socks-soaked-in-ammonia aroma given off by the Russkie powder and primers, the test continued exactly as before. The Smith & Wesson Model 5906 didn’t seem to care about the ammunition change and kept chugging away."

The 5906 writeup! Go check it out!
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...and that makes 2,000*.

When I first got my hands on the Wilson Tactical Carry Professional a couple years ago, the first thing I did before launching the 2,000 round test was to glorp a generous amount of Lucas Extreme Duty Gun Oil down the slide rails as well as schmearing it all over the chamber hood and muzzle end. The gun ran through the whole test without a bobble.

With the EDC X9, I didn't glorp. Instead, I put a single drop of Liberty Lubricants CLP on the barrel hood and muzzle end and dripped two drops each on the frame rails.

I don't necessarily think anything was wrong with my choice of lubricants, but definitely there was with the amount. By the 1,700 round mark, the slide was noticeably sluggish in closing, due to the presence of fouling and the absence of lubricant. On rounds 1,711 and 1,724, the slide didn't close all the way.

Rather than turn this into a display of me possibly damaging a dry gun, I grabbed a bottle of FP10 out of my range bag and glorped some onto the four major lube points. The gun proceeded to chew through the remaining 270 rounds like it was brand new, despite being as filthy as filthy can be.

I'll be doing a detailed teardown post and a Q&A in the comments over at the Patreon page.
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"Heavy is good, heavy is reliable..."

Thursday morning's goal through the Model 5906 was 180 rounds downrange to bring the total to the  2,000 round goal. I brought the 100-round box of TulAmmo from home, and picked up a box of the cheapest ball ammo at the range (Magtech 115gr) and a couple 25-rd boxes of JHP.

The only failure of the test occurred on round number 1,876. It was a round of TulAmmo 115gr whose primer would not pop no matter how many good licks it was given by the firing pin. I'd say this qualifies as a dud primer and I'm not counting it against the gun.

So that's the end of the test for the Model 5906.

This brings the total rounds fired through the 5906 to 2000 since the gun was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to fire caused by a dud primer on round #1876.

Look for wrap-up posts on both this and the CZ-75B Omega, complete with dirty gun pr0n, in the immediate future.
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...aaand that's a wrap.

The various testing protocols for magazine reviews leave me with a lot of partial boxes of ammo, and so I grabbed a box of Winchester 124gr NATO FMJ, Federal HST 147gr +P, and TulAmmo 115gr FMJ left over from...I think the XD-E review? Anyway, each box had only 15 rounds left in it.

I needed 91 rounds to finish the test, so those three and a full box of TulAmmo would do the trick.

The COM shots are from seven yards, with the full box of TulAmmo. That was just hosing nearly as fast as I could go, reinforcing not pinning the trigger.

I brought the target in to five yards and fired the fifteen HSTs at the upper A zone, at about the pace you'd use for shooting at the 3x5 in a FAST. Still at fifteen, I fired the fifteen Winchester NATO at the yellow triangle.

Finally, I pulled the target in to four and put the remaining eleven rounds of TulAmmo into the red star because duh.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

So this wraps up the CZ-75B Omega 2k round test. The gun was field-stripped and lubed with Lucas Extreme Duty Gun Oil on November the 6th, and has since fired 2,000 rounds, most of it filthy, steel-cased TulAmmo, with no further cleaning or lubrication. The gun has not once failed to go through the complete cycle of operation. The front sight's tritium vial leaked all its radioactive glow-y stuff, but there have otherwise been no parts breakages.

Stay tuned for field-stripping photos and general thoughts on two months of life with the Cee Zed.
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Heckler & Koch P30L 2000-rd wrapup, part 1...

To wrap up the 2,000-round test with the Heckler & Koch P30L, I dropped in at the local indoor range on Thursday with a fifty-round box of Federal Premium 124gr +P HST, which is my preferred carry load in Federal Ammo, and is pretty much a coin flip with Speer's 124gr +P GDHP in terms of proven effectiveness.

In order to finish out the two thousand round test, I bought three fifty round boxes of 9mm FMJ ammo from the range: One box of Aguila 124gr ball, one of Winchester 124gr "NATO", and one of Armscor 147gr subsonic.

The Aguila ran fine, and I used it to shoot the 1" and 2" targets in the top right corner, first shot double-action from the low ready on the 2" circle and then transition to a single shot on the 1" square. Lather, rinse, repeat 24 more times until the box of ammo is gone...

Next was the Winchester 124gr "NATO" and the Armscor 147gr FMJ shot at the lower 8" circle at about a half-second pace. It was with the Armscor subsonic that some problems cropped up...

Out of the fifty round box, I was greeted by this sight six times, with only the angle of the spent case varying. It didn't matter how firmly I clamped the gun (and as softly as these rounds were recoiling, it wasn't hard to grip hard enough to nearly eliminate muzzle flip.)

Spent Armscor brass litters the tray in lane six, from where it had dribbled out of the ejection port, instead of flying over my right shoulder as is proper for spent brass from this pistol. So, I don't know whether it's just this lot specifically or if all Armscor 147gr is complete weaksauce, but I wouldn't run it in this pistol.

The 1-inch square and 2-inch circle at top right were shot at a leisurely pace from the 3-yard line by presenting from the low ready and firing double-action at the 2" circle and then transitioning to a single-action shot on the 1" square. The upper 3x5 box was the HST at five yards, and the 8" circle is a hundred rounds fired at a .5 or so pace at seven.

The HK P30L has now fired 2000 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubricated with ten failures to eject (#1,568, #1,578, #1,606, #1,750, #1,965, #1,972, #1,980, #1,985, #1,988, #1,998) and one failure to feed (#1,664). This concludes the 2,000 round test. Stay tuned for dirty gun pics and a summary post.
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It is finished.

Yesterday morning saw me at Marion County Fish & Game bright and early, with three hundred rounds of 9mm ammo and a grim determination to finish up the Wilson's ordeal so I could clean it.

This is weird. I normally don't care if a gun is filthy, but for some reason I want the Wilson to be all shiny and pretty.

And soon enough it was done. There were no malfunctions of any type to report, and I'd even saved that box of 124gr HST jacketed hollow points for last, to see if they'd function in maximum filth and dryness. Of course they did.

This gun has run like a sewing machine for 950 rounds of Winchester 124gr NATO Q4318 FMJ, 950 rounds of Speer Lawman 147gr FMJ, and 100 rounds of Federal 124gr HST ammunition with no cleaning or lubrication. The only malfunction was an underpowered near-squib round of Q4318 that left the empty case in the chamber. That one doesn't count against the gun, since it would have done the same in any other pistol. Nice QC, there, Winchester.

Would I trust this gun enough to carry it? Hell yes. Sample of one, and everything, but it's as reliable as any Glock or Sig I've tested, and way more so than the Canik or the Steyr were.

I'll take it apart this afternoon and get some closeups of the filth.
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Across the finish line...

Monday morning saw me at Indy Arms Co. with another hundred rounds of Magtech 115gr FMJ to wrap up the 2,000 round test with the Glock 43.

Three- and five-yard shooting went fine, but I dropped a couple at seven and just started hosing out of frustration.

While shooting at the five yard target, I was experimenting with my grip and choked so far up on the gun that I managed to inadvertently activate the slide stop, causing the slide to lock back on round number 1,936. This and that one time I fouled the slide stop and prevented it from locking back were the only two times the gun did not go through its complete cycle of operations over the course of 2,000 rounds of ammo.

I should probably fess up now and mention that, unlike my usual practice, I did not field strip the gun and lube it to factory specs before starting the test and, once the test had started, I felt lube would have been cheating. So, basically what we have here is a little tiny micro 9mm pistol that ran 2,000 rounds with no cleaning and no malfunctions on just the copper-colored anti-seize grease from the factory.

• Nine hundred and fifty rounds of Magtech 115gr FMJ
• Three hundred and fifty rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ
• Two hundred Remington 115gr FMJ
• One hundred and fifty assorted jacketed hollow points from Federal, Speer, Hornady, and Winchester
• And the balance was assorted FMJ, including 124gr +P NATO ball

I'm pretty sold on the reliability of this pistol.
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...and done.

So Thursday morning was the final range trip of the 2,000 round Gen4 Glock 19 project. With only a hundred and thirty-four rounds left to go, I filled factory magazines with a hundred rounds of the TulAmmo and scrounged thirty four rounds out of partial boxes in the trunk: Ten rounds of 124gr Sellier & Bellot FMJ got loaded into a factory G19 mag, ten rounds of Remington "High Terminal Performance" 115gr +P JHP in a Magpul 17-rd magazine, and fourteen rounds of Winchester RA9T 147gr Ranger-T (which was inexplicably in that Federal HST box) in the Magpul 15-round mag.

Oh, TulAmmo, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways! One would be the way it wants to bind up in mags like this. Care must be taken as the rounds are loaded to ensure they are not binding up. In the process of loading, I twice had to unload and then reload magazines due to the exact situation depicted in the above photo.

All one hundred and thirty four rounds functioned properly through the weapon, with no malfunctions to report. I fired the partial mags first at the upper target zone; the Remington was exceptionally flashy and blast-y, with a muzzle report and flash easily the equal of Federal 9BPLE.

Then I just did mag dumps with the TulAmmo at the lower A-zone. I was the only person shooting that morning, and so I pretty seriously flouted the 1-rd/sec rules.

The comet tail of holes trailing off to the lower left shows the effect of only a month or so spent away from the pistol bays at the outdoor range. Dry-fire and shooting on an indoor range with a nominal speed limit on your rate-of-fire are good for maintaining marksmanship, but can cause a bit of atrophy in the skills used to shoot fast follow-up shots. A lot of that comes from feeling my grip coming apart and trying to fix it mid-string, I think, but it would be useful to video myself at this point, or recruit a training partner.

That makes 2,000 rounds through the Gen4 19 since it was cleaned or lubricated with two failures-to-fire (#205, #1,290), two failures-to-extract (#1,367, #1,447), one failure-to-eject (#1,505), and four failures-to-feed (#814, #864*, #1,681, #1,741). 0 rounds to go.

I'll note that not one of those malfunctions was brass-cased ammo in a Glock magazine. In fact, none of them, except #814 and #1,681, involved brass-cased ammo at all, and both those were in the ETS mags.

Personally, I'd have to say that my own jury is still out on the ETS 30-round stick as anything but a range toy. I could see using the 20-round one in a class-type environment or any game that allowed it, but I think I'd stick with factory mags or maybe the Magpul for carry. (I haven't had any failures with the Magpul mags yet with anything but steel-cased ammo, but factory is obviously the safer bet.)

How do I feel about the Gen4 19 itself? Well, I cleaned it, at least cursorily, and lubricated all the Glock-specified lubrication points, then I loaded it up with Speer 124gr +P Gold Dots and holstered it up. I want to get some range time in with the Gen3 19 I've been carrying since last December, and this gives me the chance to do it without all the administrative loading and unloading that would otherwise be involved.
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Glock 32 2,000-Round Wrapup

So, here's the Gen 3 Glock 32 after firing two thousand rounds of assorted ammunition without any cleaning or lubrication after an initial application of Lucas Oil to the factory recommended lubrication points...

You've got your typical discoloration around the muzzle end. Most of this was done a hundred rounds at a time, pre-loading the three magazines I have, going into the range, shooting up that initial 39 rounds, and then again & et cetera until the 100 rounds were gone. Of note is how the White Sound Defense guide rod protrudes from the muzzle end.

 Pretty grody on the inside.

Note the schmutz collected on the front rails. Part of the reason guns like this are less sensitive to dirt or lack of lubrication is that they just have those little metal nubbins keeping the slide flying in loose formation with the frame, rather than conventional frame rails.

The brass smear on the feed rail is notable as is the sheer amount of cack around the firing pin safety.

In the first three hundred rounds, the pistol experienced three failures to go completely into battery and three failures to feed, and then one more of each around the seven hundred and fifty round mark. It was at this point that I replaced the magazine springs with 11-coil springs from full-size Glock mags, in order to ensure that the next round was lifted into place fast enough to be picked up by the slide (despite the higher slide velocities, Glock 32 magazines use the same springs as 19 mags.)

I also replaced the factory 18# recoil spring with a CrSi flat wire IMSI 20# unit. Unfortunately, this meant having to use an aftermarket guide rod, something of which I'm not generally a fan.

Sure enough, the rear cap on the three piece Lone Wolf guide rod began unscrewing around the 1,300 round mark and the rod itself actually fell out of the gun, which I noticed because the gun failed to go fully into battery at round number 1,503. I knocked the slide off the gun with a rubber mallet, reassembled the guide rod, and fired off a couple magazines, experiencing a failure to feed with defective round of Remington ammunition. (During this test, I fired a total of 1,000 rounds of Remington FMJ .357SIG, two 500-round cases. Each case had one round with the primer wadded in sideways.)

Lone Wolf guide rod starting to unscrew

I replaced the bent Lone Wolf unit with the uncaptured White Sound Defense guide rod at the 1,629 round mark. There were no further malfunctions.

I'll note that, after the spring replacement, the only malfunction that wasn't caused by user error (me not making sure that I'd used thread-locker on the rear cap) or defective Remington ammo was the lone FTE at round #1,033.

So, that's a wrap. I think the 11-coil mag springs are the key, here, although the 20# recoil spring doesn't hurt.
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Canik TP9v2 teardown and wrap-up.

The front sight came out of the box like this: Slightly chewed-up looking and with the dot off-center to the right.

Front frame rails after 2,000 rounds. There was still something like lube on them, despite it being applied two+ months ago.

Locking block area and takedown catch.

Underside of slide. That ragged area at the bottom of the feed ramp is odd...

Feed ramp. You can kinda see the ragged nature of what I presume is a relief cut at the bottom of the ramp. This is where the snouts of the P9HST2 bullets ran aground.

Breechface and extractor. Dirty, but everything looks normal here.

Muzzle crown.

The total round count was two thousand, of which one thousand was American Eagle 115gr FMJ generously provided by Lucky Gunner, so y'all go buy stuff from them so they're happy.

Malfunctions:

1000 rounds of Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ: 1 malfunction (1 failure to eject.)
160 rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ: 21 malfunctions (11 failures to eject, 9 failures to feed, 1 failure to lock the slide back.)
50 rounds of Federal HST 147gr JHP: 2 malfunctions (2 failures to feed.)
50 rounds of Fiocchi 124gr FMJ: 1 malfunction (1 failure to fire.)
10 rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 124gr FMJ: 1 malfunction (1 failure to eject.)

Other ammo fired, including 150 rounds of Federal 115gr +P+ JHP, 50 Sig Sauer Elite Performance 115gr FMJ, 50 rounds of Winchester "NATO" 124gr FMJ Q4318, and several hundred Fiocchi 115gr FMJ, experienced no malfunctions.

There is the data. I leave it to you to draw the conclusion as to whether you want to spend your own dosh on this gun like I did. I personally would not carry this sample unless I absolutely had to, and then I'd fill it with Federal 9BPLE, since that seems to function the gun with satisfactory vigor.
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P250 two thousand round wrapup (pic heavy)

So the P250C in .380ACP has run through its full two thousand rounds. The gun hasn't physically loosened up enough to notice, and no parts fell off. Let's field strip it and see what it looks like.

I'll note that it got vile enough that I had to wipe the front sight blade so that the white dot & tritium vial were usable.

Rear frame rails, hammer, and slide stop are all visible here. Nothing showed any unusual wear in this area.

Front frame rails and the axle that the bottom barrel lug cams against. Everything's in order here, too, but filthy.

The underside of the slide, barrel, and recoil spring assembly. Pardon the slide looking bent; that's an artifact of the fact that the Nikon P7000 can get sketchy in the focus department while in macro mode unless the lens is at the widest angle setting.

 Muzzle crown is dirty...

 ...as is the feed ramp and barrel hood.

The extractor claw was still good and the breechface was fine.

I'll clean it, lube it, and probably shoot it a little more before taking it to a class in April. Also thinking about frame stippling, and maybe a caliber exchange kit.

To recap the round count, the P250C .380 went through 2002 rounds without being cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447) and one failure to fire (#1578). Ammo fired included the following brands of FMJ: TulAmmo, Fiocchi, Magtech, Sig Sauer, Remington, Federal, and Sellier & Bellot. Additionally, a few rounds of Hornady Critical Defense and Barnes TAC-XPD were fired, mostly for the chrono results.
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...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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P320 Aftermath (WARNING: Pic Heavy...)

Poor little dirty P320 about to get a well-deserved bath and lube job. Detailed pictures of the funk of twenty-hundred rounds below the jump...

...and 2000.

Took the Sig P320 to the range yesterday with the intention of putting the last two hundred rounds through the gun required to bring the 2,000 round test to an end. It was hot and sunny and extremely sticky down on the banks of Eagle Creek, and so rather than try and do productive things with a timer out in the pistol bays, I just whaled away in the shade of the covered firing line.

I discovered I still had one box left of that steel-cased WPA 115gr FMJ, plus two full boxes of CCI Blazer 115gr FMJ. After that it would be catch-as-catch-can with the odds and sods in my 9mm ammo can and whatever I could scrounge from my range bag.

For the last fifty rounds, I found an M&P mag with fifteen rounds of CCI Blazer in it left over from the bowling pin match. I loaded one magazine with fifteen rounds of 147gr +P Federal HST, and two with ten rounds each of that Remington 115gr +P HTP.

Two hundred rounds at ten yards, mostly spent trying to shoot with my strong hand thumb curled down. It really does help me with recoil control and keeps my thumb off the slide stop on the P320. I was occasionally managing to track the sights and the couple times I picked up the pace with followup shots, splits felt faster, but that's speculation since I left the timer in the car.

Anyway, none of this was serious pistol work; it was mostly the next step above "dirtshooting". My main goal was just to finish up the 2k rounds. And I did.

This brings the total to 2000 rounds fired with one failure to feed (#978) and three suspect primers (#903, #1323, #1495). The firearm has not been cleaned or lubricated in any way. Here in the next day or two, I'll take it down and take some closeup photos of the filth before cleaning and lubing it.

I want to do the next test on something different; a .45 or a .380 or something like that, but ammo costs will be a bear. (The costs are bad enough for 9mm; I'd reload, but that adds an extra variable to the test. Plus most people don't reload, and so factory ammo is more representative.) I need to find an ammo sponsor for these things. While I'm looking for one, if anyone wants to hit the "Starving Artist Ammo Fund" tip jar in the right sidebar, it won't hurt my feelings one bit.