To anyone following along, I’m a novice with 1911’s and have been learning a lot from the Tisas 9mm SS I picked up, which is my first 1911.
I recently shot a match and towards the end I had multiple malfunctions, mostly mag seating issues and a few stovepipes. I’m still troubleshooting and diagnosing but I’ve identified a few issues I thought I’d share.
The first was obvious once I got home but couldn’t sort it out in the moment at the match. I added the front grip plate from Wilson combat
(
https://wilsoncombat.com/frontstrap-checkered-blue.html ) and it seems during the match it slowly slid down the grip to the point the bottom edge was getting pinched between the magwell and the mag. This made it really hard to seat the mags and I had multiple that were not in all the way, causing a failure to feed. I’ll be finding a way to ensure this panel can’t move or may just remove it for now. Long term. I think a flared magwell would also prevent it from sliding down.
The other issue I had towards the end was a few failures to eject all of which were stovepipe malfunctions. I was using Winchester NATO 124 grain ammo and hadn’t seen any issues in ~500 rounds of various ammo up to that point.
The gun was filthy so I cleaned everything really well and will be switching from oil to grease as described by many helpful contributors to this thread. I think that should help a bit and I’ll also be more diligent about regularly cleaning.
I did replace my extractor with the Wilson bulletproof one but hadn’t done any “tuning” yet, so this led me down the rabbit hole that is extractor tuning. I’ve now spent a few hours reading and watching so I’ll try to sum up what I’ve learned for anyone else getting started. I’m no expert but from all I’ve read, most seem to agree on the general approach to tuning.
Of note - if you need to put a lot of tension into the extractor by bending it significantly, you’re probably missing something. I initially bent mine to add tension to the point I could barely remove it (bad idea). After what I’ve learned, tension from bending it is pretty subtle and if you get to the point it’s difficult to install or remove, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Here are some posts/videos that guided me before I detail my experience.
The best resource I found, bar none:
Because of Photobucket's new policy of not allowing common folks like me to link our pictures on their site into discussion forums unless we gave them $400 all of my pictures here have been blocked. So at the request of several members I've spent time over the course of the past couple of weeks...
www.1911forum.com
A few videos that also helped me:
*****
Okay so first off, a concept I misunderstood that affected my approach is that a 45ACP round should be tensioned by the tensioning wall of the extractor whereas for a 9mm, it seems most common to apply tension via the hook/claw and very difficult (though not impossible) to get a 9mm extractor to tension off the tensioning wall.
I checked mine using an empty case as a starting point and what do you know, there was no contact at all with the unmodified Wilson combat extractor.
As a comparison, here’s the unmodified factory extractor from Tisas that I had replaced when I got the gun.
After a lot of tinkering and filing, which provided a lot of hands on learning, I got the Wilson extractor to look a lot better, though not perfect. I think it’s still a bit long as the nose touches the case so I may file that down a bit yet and continue my learning.
After watching the second video posted above, I’d probably take a different approach to how I modified it, so I’m not going to share photos of what I filed to avoid confusing or misleading anyone. My next extractor will be modified like the second video shows and I may even buy a new one to do just that.
When all was done, here’s the modified wilson extractor. It perfectly passes the “shake test” and I’ll be going to the range this afternoon to shoot it with and without a mag to see how it functions. I may also compare with the factory extractor out of curiosity to know if it’s a valid backup or if it also needs tuning.
Edit to add a photo of the front strap getting pinched in the mag well. I also decided to just finish the extractor and made the nose shorter and round the bottom of the claw it as shown in the video above. It looks even better now and is no longer contacting the case with the nose.
