Sometimes a hard head is counterproductive

Written on August 12, 2013   By Tony   in Machine Guns, NFA

When the Reising arrived about 2 months ago, as one might expect, I took it out and shot it. But even before my first range trip, I followed the advice of a fellow reising owner, and modified the firing pin to be inertia style in order to prevent breakage. It did alright the first outing, although it lived up to the poor reliability stereotype.

Each time out, it seemed to get progressively worse. In spite of cleaning the gun to spotless after every outing, it would have frequent jams. I ran through about a dozen different loads, hoping to find the one that would get me some reliability. Almost every jam was the same. The last round chambered would have a light primer strike, but didn’t fire. I surmised that my primers were too hard, and started looking for some federal primers to use. The reason I was looking at different loads was that I was assuming the hammer wasn’t being pushed fully rearward, thus allowing the light strikes from it’s sort of intermediary position.

Before I found any federal primers, my firing pin broke. Frustrated and somewhat disheartened, I ordered a modern and improved replacement from Keystone arms. While I was at it, I ordered a new set of springs.

After installing the unaltered firing pin and new springs, I went to the range, and proceeded to have a jam after 3 rounds. The jam was so bad that I packed the gun up and took it home. When disassembling the gun later that day, I looked and looked, and couldn’t find the reason for my jam. I eventually found a tiny fleck of metal stuck to the bolt, and picked it off. Now the bolt was moving freely again, so I decided to head back to the range. I didn’t expect much.

I took the ammo I had with me, a mix of the various batches I had tried when looking for a reliability load, and loaded up the mags. To my pleasant surprise, when I pulled the trigger, the whole mag went down range, just as I knew it should have been doing since I got it. I inserted the next magazine, and worked the action bar. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrap! Another successful mag dump! I loaded and dumped until I was completely out of ammo. In 400+ rounds, I only had one stoppage, and that was due to a magazine that I knew had issues. I discovered that all of my loads worked just fine, and with good magazines, the gun would run like a watch!

In the future, when I know I should do some simple maintenance, like changing out springs and a firing pin, I hope I’ll remember the lesson learned here, and just do it from the get go.

If you have a Reising, I highly recommend the Ken Christie firing pin and replacement springs, the difference in my gun was like night and day!