His shop, in his inventory so his gun, his rules when you handle it.
When you test drive a car,(esp. used) do you baby it and only drive it a half of a mile; or do you really take it out for a spin to see how it really preforms?
Before I buy this car, I'd really like to test the air bag deployment.
Handling the inventory?
1. Do not dry-fire without a snap-cap, which you may obtain from any sales associate.
2. Do not allow the slide on a pistol to slam forward. Ease it forward with your hand.
Following these simple rules will help keep our inventory in top condition. Thank you.
Yes, it is "doing the same thing" - going forward - but NOT in the same way.
A slide normally strips a cartridge (NOT a "bullet) from the magazine (NOT the "clip") as it goes forward. As the cartridge is under spring tension from the follower pushing it against the mag lips, this presents a fair amount of resistance, slowing the slide's acceleration considerably.
As the cartridge feeds into the chamber, there may be additional resistance, depending upon how tight the chamber is and even whether the bullet is lead or jacketed. This may further reduce the impact.
Letting the slide fly on an empty gun means none of that occurs and it slams full-speed against the locking lugs, etc., with that shock transmitted through the rest of the gun, including the contact area of the sear.
In short, it's an irresponsible practice.
If you want to read all five pages of that thread, you can find it here.1911Tuner said:A cut and paste that I posted on another forum:
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'Twas asked:
The resistance caused by chambering a round creates some deceleration, is it enough to matter, in terms of whether the damage threshold is crossed?
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Yes...and the amount is substantial. Read on.
Some years back, I had an old pistol that was ready for a rebuild, so I decided to conduct an experiment with it.
I began by using cold rolled stock to make a substitute for the slidestop pin, and fire the gun in 50-round test lots to determine how much impact was absorbed during a live-feed return to battery vs an empty slam.
Two pins were made for each test.
50 rounds revealed no deforming of the soft steel...but the pins were peened badly by dropping the slide on empty in as little as 12 cycles.
By 20 cycles, the pin was all but useless.
Going further, I drilled out the center on the pins in increments of .0156 inch...1/64th...and retesting. These holes were drilled undersized and reamed to exact dimension. By the time I had drilled a full 3/16ths
hole in each of the pins, the empty slam was destroying them in 2 or 3 cycles. The same pins continued to function during live-fire for up to 200 rounds..with minimal deformation. Understand that removing 3/16ths inch from the center of a .200 diameter pin would leave about .025 inch of wall thickness...a shell about 6 times the thickness of a sheet of 20-bond paper.
Assuming that your trigger group/fire control group hasn't been dinked with...the damage incurred is most severe at the lower lug feet. The slidestop crosspin is fairly well over-engineered and well-supported.
The lower lug feet aren't designed to absorb the repeated impact stress of a 16-ounce slide propelled by a 16-pound coil spring.
There's also the matter of the slidestop pin holes in the frame. Ever seen a pistol with the holes elongated toward the front? I have...and in guns that weren't all that old. Guess what causes that. Yep...Impact.
Take two hammers and slap the faces together with the same force
about 30 or 40 times and you will soon start to see the results of steel to steel impact...and the barrel lug is much softer than the hammer heads.
It seems a little arrogant to assert that there is some Golden Rule of firearms handling beyond that of general safety when there are so many differing opinions out there.
You should maybe start a gun shop. Have some guys come in and treat your inventory like sledge hammers. You'd change your tune.I'm glad some of you who responded so rudely don't work in my sales organization. You would be a former employee in short order; along with the clerk referred to in the original post
that you should ask before doing something the owner may not want you doing? IE, dry firing, slamming the slide down, etc?
I'm sure we can all come up with a list of things we feel are and are not acceptable actions to take with another person's firearm. I'm equally confident the lists would vary quite a bit.