I was going out to shoot my Springfeild 1911 pistol today, i put a mag in and pulled the slide back and let it fly ahead aimed pulled the trigger and click, went to cycle the action and its stuck ;( now what, i cant take it apart cause i cant get the takedown pin out. so i have a loaded gun laying on the bench and scared to take into the house!

Can't you just re cock the hammer and fire it again (or did you already try that?).
Peter.

Well that i would say was the first time that ever happened, learned what i did. Turns out it was a round i had loaded and primed but not charged!! I am counting my lucky stars that the action didnt go poof any harder and reload and i fired on a plugged tube!! Whew! Of course i was wearing my ear plugs so i didnt hear the primer go, that is why i was confused.

OK, lesson learned. As this has never happened to me, what did it feel like? You should have felt something. Did the bullet move at all?
Peter.

Well i had my ear plugs in and it had no recoil or smoke or any sign at all it had fired. Thats what worried me! well and it being stuck shut. The bullet did not even make it all the way out of the case, thus the reason for the stuck action, it just started to engage the rifling from what i could see and wasn't fully out of the case yet. i held the pistol action with my left hand and opened my right hand like i was going to shake hands with the pistol and kinda slapped it and the action opened right up, saw the spent case fall out and noticed the bullet ever so slightly engaged the rifleing. a little poke with dowel rod and back to the range.

I had a similar problem with cast bullets. They will go far enough down the bore to chamber the next round. I used to have a match barrel in that .45. It's now a prop for a local reloading class. It cracked from the muzzle to the chamber.

quote:

Originally posted by Acrnstlkr:
Turns out it was a round i had loaded and primed but not charged!!

How did that happen, pray tell?

I dont know, i guess human error? but since im not subject to that being super human, id say my brother did it! Just like when we were kids when in doubt blame in on the other one~!

quote:

Originally posted by Acrnstlkr:
Well that i would say was the first time that ever happened, learned what i did. Turns out it was a round i had loaded and primed but not charged!! I am counting my lucky stars that the action didnt go poof any harder and reload and i fired on a plugged tube!! Whew! Of course i was wearing my ear plugs so i didnt hear the primer go, that is why i was confused.

Some years ago a friend of mine was loading .44mag ammo for his desert eagle and decided that mixing corona and reloading was cool. 95 out of a hundred crtgs were fine but five were missing powder! It put a damper on our range time, but at least with those mag primers you could hear something when they popped. Fortunately, a semi doesn't reload when that happens. After that we said he had developed a new wildcat, the .44 Marquez! Primer and no bullet. Just enough to get you maimed with a charging boar!!

I had a customer bring me a Colt army special in .38 a couple years ago. He and his wife were out shooting and while he was doing something else, she was shooting the .38. She had 3 "wierd" shots in a row and when she tried to fire the fourth, the trigger wouldn't move. Turns out they were shooting old reloads and three bullets were jammed in the barrel, the last wedging between the forcing cone and the cylinder, locking the gun up. Thank god the third one was another squib and not a full charge. I hate to see what would have happened!!

Thank your lucky stars in this situation! These things do happen, thank goodness your situation turned out good.

quote:

Originally posted by Acrnstlkr:
I dont know, i guess human error?

Do you think just this one cartridge minus powder was a fluke or could others from this batch be waiting the same fate?

Well i hope this was the only one, but since i only shoot them out of an auto and the most dangerous thing to hunt around here is a ditch tiger, i think im safe. I could put them on the scale and see i guess.

Reload long enough & it happens. Unfortuantely, you porbably can't tell by weighing them, unless the powder charge was mo rethan 7-8gr. There is enough variation in bullet & case wt to be 5gr either way. I am surprised you could not hear the primer detonate. Even w/ plugs & muffs I can hear that pop. You were right to stop, anytime it doesn't feel or sound right, stop & check. Just another reason I don't shoot mousefart loads.

Sadly, I had a similar thing happen just two days ago. Marlin 336 in .30-30. Round chambered, pulled the trigger and nothing. Had earphones on and heard no pop of any sort. Tried to cycle the action and it was jammed. Kept trying and put more force onto the lever and the case came out empty. Not a happy moment to say the least. I grabbed my cleaning rod and gave it a light tap and the bullet popped right out. I shake every round after reloading but not before shooting and those rounds that aren't compressed will make a sound. The rest of the batch all had powder but one got by somehow. I unfortunately don't have anyone else to blame.

The classic "pop - no kick" as we used to call it. You just didn't hear the pop.

A gunsmith I used to visit had some revolvers on display that had malfunctioned to various degrees, some catastrophically. He had cut the barrel of one S&W .38 in half from front to rear to show what was inside. The shooter had a bullet lodged in the bore but had kept on shooting and had even reloaded and fired some more. The dissected barrel showed a series of eight bullets jammed one behind the other in the barrel. Remarkably the frame held and no blow-up occurred. The shooter stopped because he said that the revolver was shooting so wild that he couldn't put rounds on paper. He had taken it to the gunsmith to solve the accuracy problem and was unaware his bullets had not gone down range.

quote:

The shooter had a bullet lodged in the bore but had kept on shooting and had even reloaded and fired some more. The dissected barrel showed a series of eight bullets jammed one behind the other in the barrel.

Sounds like that Cat better be damn careful of his last life.