Ammo which fails to fire

[pran80]

Dear IFGians,
Happy deepawali to all of you. I have a question to which I could not find an answer here, pardon me if I failed to find it.
What to do with Ammo which fails to fire? This deepavali I decided to try shoot my IOF revolver on a friend's farm house with proper precautions, but 2 cartridges failed to fire. I kept holding the gun towards the target so that in case of hang fire I am safe but they just didn't ignite.
What can be done with such rounds now? do the arms dealers exchange it? The ammunition in question is 4 years old and was kept in a dry cupboard.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Pranjal Tripathi

[sumbriavikramaditya]

Happy Diwali to you Mr. Tripathi,
Dealers will not exchange it as when you bought them they were fresh. And Indian made ammo have slight lower quality when compared to imported ammo. And as you are telling that they were kept in dry cupboard, that's good because moisture free place is best suited for ammo and gun storage.

[pran80]

Dear Sumbriavikramaditya,
Thanks for your reply. Will make sure that I don't keep ammo for long henceforth. I was quite taken aback with this failure since the arm is for protection and such failures can lead to some very nasty results if God forbid the necessity to use the gun arrives.

[Shivaji.Dasgupta]

Dear Mr. Tripathi, the Retailer will not exchange the rounds for sure, but How to Dispose them is Really a Question. Till it is not Fired it will Consider as Live ammo and hence need to be treated like wise..
Not sure any guide line is there in this matter or Not.

Regards

[pran80]

Dear Shivaji,
I have 20 more cartridges from the same batch. I will shoot them all in a day or two when I get time to visit friends farmhouse. Those which don't fire, I plan to remove the bullets and charge so that they don't eat up space on my licence and I can procure fresh ammo against them.
Regards,
Pranjal Tripathi

[sumbriavikramaditya]

Dear Shivaji,
I have 20 more cartridges from the same batch. I will shoot them all in a day or two when I get time to visit friends farmhouse. Those which don't fire, I plan to remove the bullets and charge so that they don't eat up space on my licence and I can procure fresh ammo against them.
Regards,
Pranjal Tripathi

Please execute this procedure with all the safety. If possible take help from some experienced guy. After extracting the gun powder use can use such cartridges as Acrylic Bullet Mementos or something. These are very beautiful items for display. So why waste them.

Regards

[mundaire]

Ammunition which has failed to fire cannot be logically counted as "live ammunition" nor should it be counted against your ammunition limit.

Removing the projectile is fairly easy if you have a bullet puller, not sure if it is this or some other method you plan to use.

[pran80]

Mundaire,
I don't have a bullet puller I was planning to use a couple of pliers with safety gloves and glasses but sumbriavikramaditya's post made me realize that this is not what I should be doing.
Your views about dud cartridges are in your words, "logical". My only problem is that the bureaucratic setup does not believes in following their grey matter. With cases now filed against persons who were unable to produce shells, I tend to be vary.
Let me see if I can procure a bullet puller.
Thanks a lot to your's, sumbriavikramaditya and Shivaji Dasgupta"s advice.
Regards,
Pranjal Tripathi

[pran80]

Gentlemen,
Posting here again as I thought of checking the faulty ammo again with a different IOF handgun. Both again failed to fire in DA mode. Tried again in SA mode and to my amazement both the rounds fired.
My understanding is that the pressure should be equally applied on the primer irrespective of SA or DA action or the SA action is exerting more pressure on firing pin? Need guidance from senior members on the same.
Thanks and regards,
Pranjal Tripathi

[timmy]

Pranjal: The striking force of the hammer in DA mode, where the hammer is lifted by its strut (I tihnk Webley called it the "hammer catch") by pulling the trigger which is slightly less than in SA mode, where the hammer is pulled back to its cocking notch. You can see that the hammer catch is higher up on the hammer, so it doesn't push the hammer back quite as far as when the hammer is manually pulled back to engage the trigger in the cocking notch.

Thus, the striking force of the hammer is slightly less in DA than in SA. This is the nature of the design.

1. You have three possibilities here: the mainspring is slightly weak in both revolvers.

2. The primers are "hard" in the ammunition you have, requiring a harder strike than normal.

3. A combination of 1 and 2 exists.

This is disconcerting, to say the least. You expect the weapon to go "bang" whenever the trigger is pulled.

Trying another batch of ammunition is problematic, because you can only get so much and because, even if you try 10 or 15 (or whatever number) in a box, you're never quite certain whether the remaining rounds will fire.

Another direction to take would be taking the weapon to a gunsmith and having him add some tension to the mainspring.This is also problematic for two reasons: Firstly, anytime you increase mainspring pressure, you will increase the DA trigger pull, and secondly, DA mechanisms are fiendishly tricky, where just about anything you change in the mechanism affects something else. DA mechanisms are a finely balanced system.

I realize that I haven't given you a sure solution forward, and that's because I have none to offer. Selling the weapon and getting another doesn't get around the issue of questionable quality in both the weapon and the ammunition, even if you were to go with a semi-automatic.

The only other path I could suggest would be to try to find different ammunition, but I recognize that, in your situation, this isn't very easy to do.

[AgentDoubleS]

Hi Pranjal, Timmy’s offered some detailed insight into what could be the issues and solutions. I own an IOF revolver and often encountered this issue.

I still continue to shoot revolvers competitively (not in India) and because of the lighter triggers have to be very selective of what primers use. After understanding and gaining some minor experience here with ammo, DA/SA shooting and reflecting on my shooting back in India with the IOF revolver I can think of the primer being the main culprit with the IOF ammo - hard primers, poor quality control and an incorrectly seated primer could probably be the cause. There are just so many factors that it’s difficult to say anything for sure.

I remember reading an article that said the most common cause of a misfire (and that was in ammo made to SAAMI standards) was ‘insufficient indentation’ - meaning the firing pin did not strike the primer with sufficient force. This is a very common cause but this ‘research’ was by an ammo manufacturer so quite naturally pointed out the issue to the firearm!

I would suggest the next time you have a misfire, compare the dent on the primer to the dent on the round that had fired. If the dent is lighter there could be 2 causes- the firing pin not being consistent in force or the primer not being fully seated and the pin only pushing the primer in on the first strike.

Ammo stored for 4 years (under reasonable conditions) in my experience fires just like regular ammo so I wouldn’t be too worried about that alone.

Unfortunately, no simple answers to this issue.

Timmy, you probably know this already but non IOF (read: imported) ammo is usually 5-6 times the price (US$ 8 per round!) so most people who carry keep the imported ammo for only self defense and shoot IOF ammo when they can. Not ideal since the imported ammo is untested but then that’s the situation here for us.

Cheers
SS

[Woods]

What I observed regarding the cartridges that fail to fire -

When primer fails to be primed - if the gun is functioning correctly in all respects and the primer fails despite the cartridges having been kept always in a dry place , it might be due to gun maintenance oils seeping into primer when cartridge came into gun ( wd40 , rustlick , zorrik , ballistol , gun oil etc) .

In such cases i have seen the cartridges being used by removal of the primer tab and stuffing the so called "tikli" part of the children's fireworks gun and fixing them with sellotape . You can also find a well made primer tab in Chinese fireworks guns .

When the primer goes fired but the powder ( fuel of the cartridge) fails to blast or blasts insufficiently , the gun is almost sure to go in squib load so this cartridge is quite useless (assuming you're definitely not going for reloads.)

[pran80]

@timmy,
Thanks for such a detailed explanation. It indeed is a catch 22 situation for me as the supply of ammunition is limited to a single supplier(IOF) as pointed by you tinkering with DA revolvers is not the best way out. Looks like I will wait for the private handguns in calibers not made by IOf to be sure that everytime I pull the trigger the gun goes bang.
@agentdoubles yes I did notice the indention was not deep enough than the cartridges which fired. The firing pin pressure cannot vary for a couple of cartridges so I think it comes down to how the primer is seated or how hard it is. I just cannot fathom how the IOF managed ISO certificates.
@woods I completely wipe off my revolver before firing it so the primer getting effected due to oil etc is an extremely remote possibility. I am planning to shoot another 10 rounds or so from the same batch and compare it against the fresh carts procured yesterday. Will post how they fared.
Thanks,
Pranjal Tripathi

[Woods]

Also watch for a blackish deposit around the primer tab or in its grove . If this is the case then you will find a few more black stained primer caps in the same box of IOF cartridges . I will indicate that the entire box is not trustworthy . I couldn't figure out what's that black tar like thing found in some boxes of IOF cartridges .