I havd a rather sever problem with my M-4 a while back, & it turned out to be something quite simple, just not real obvious do to circumstances.
I took my mom out to shoot it, & it was a nightmare. The bolt kept locking up in the buffer tubb, it wasn't extracting worth a dern, & the mags were acting like I glued them in. I had never had such an experiance like that in all my born days with any gun, or gear.
I went home checked it all out & this is how I fixed it.

1) I put all my mags in each of my 2 preban Colt's & found 1 let them all drop freely, while the M-4 did not. So I put the tight mags with the loose fiting rifle.

2) I put a D-fender into the bolt of the M-4, & made sure I didn't use any old ammo with lots of tarrnish on the casings. Just good stuff. I checked the bore, & found it to be polished, & in perfect condition. I lubed it lightly with CLP.

3) The bolt in the stock was easy to figure out when I gave it a through going over. The off set screw for the front holes of the 2 receivers had 1/2 fallen out which was causing the 2 receivers to miss align just enoug to cause the bolt to lock in the stock. I had origanalyy thought it was a problem with the new 6 pos RRA stock I had just put on a few days prior to the shoot.

Anyway, I was able to correct it all with a little help from the members here, & using my own knowledge. I did learn a lot about things I had never had a problem with before with this type of weapon. It now functions properly as it should.

In the spirit of saving someone else some of these problems I would like to know what your worst malfunctions with this type rifle, or the M1911 pistol was or is, & how you fixed it.

Please, if you have never had any problems with either of these fine weapons don't wastes time posting about the fact, but feel free to add any helpfull hints you have learned about keeping things running smoothly for the rest of us.

My NRM Colt Commander is a bit picky with JHP's but I'm still in the process of breaking it in.  Only a few FTF's on my first range visit this year.

My AR15's are flawless.  Colt AR15A2 HBAR with an M4 upper, a PWA A3 variant and a RRA A3 are all flawless.

Good point Searcher.

I can't tell you how it pains me to admit it...but my friend Tman has taught me a lesson about firearms.

They should always work.  

Never put up with failures of any kind.  If a magazine sticks, and you can't get it to work 100%, throw it away.  If a rifle fails for any reason, it should be repaired to 100% or gotten rid of.  

I would never trust my life to a 99% weapon.

What do you think? [:d]

Collapsed/broken extractor spring. Happened twice. Mimics every other problem you can think of. Most annoying.

Which reminds me...

While at Thunder Ranch, we spent a lot of time working at clearing jams.  We would set the rifles up with "stove pipes" and practice  the "Tap, rack, shoot" until it was natural.

We also set up double feeds.  We placed a round in the chamber and then dropped the bolt on a loaded magazine.  This creates a really bad failure (much like its mod namesake [:D]).

The proper clearing procedure is to "Tap, rack, shoot", but of course, this won't work.  You then remove the magazine, try to work the bolt to remove the chambered round.  If this fails, (and it usually will), you then lock the bolt back and use your fingers to remove the second round.  Then release the bolt, clear the weapon, replace the mag, and go to work.

Believe it or not, with practice, this became second nature and was pretty fast.

And, BTW, as you might expect, the fine AR platforms had very few malfunctions that weren't set up on purpose.  A fine weapon system.

[LOL]

The Ar-15 I have now tries to double feed on me about once every 1,000 rounds. In basic when I was qualifying both of the mags I got had cracked feed lips, I had a terrible time every shot it triple fed on me. Of course I got my ass chewed for inproper cleaning never mind that the weapon had not malfunctioned once up till then.

Had a primer pop out once after being fired and it caused a jam.  Last time I use Federal brass.[:P]

Seems like a lot of full automatic fire wears out the gas rings on the bolt and causes "short stroking"And of course the weee little spring that preloads the extractor.I use the polymer booster under these and it seems to help greatly.I also carry a complete spare bolt & carrier assy.to speed getting the piece back in opperation at the range.I do fire an un-godly ammount of full auto.  

Twice, I have ended up with a fired case jammed in really good above the bolt on my AR.  I almost had to disassemble the damn gun to get it unstuck both times.

I've had a pretty high number of failures to eject and/or extract lately.  I think a new set of ejector/extractor springs are in order.

Ammo related for the AR:  I used neck sized ammo meant for a bolt action in it, and it locked up hard about 1/2" out of battery.  That rifle still has bright pry marks on the ejection port from a borrowed screwdriver.

I put my neck sizer in permanent retirement after that and started small base sizing every 223 case I had.  Didn't notice any difference in accuracy with anyrifle I had.

Yeah, still reloaded one or two I had neck sized, same result.

1911:  Feeding problems with half assed formed 38-45 cases.  I made up a hundred or so good cases, will get 38 casull cases for this gun.

My gas block wasn't staked from the factory(Olympic) and I had FTF several times. I tightened it down and staked the bolts. No problems since. Damnit I still can't bumpfire though. Stiff trigger.

My 1911 is the only semi-auto that I have that has been 100% totally completely dependable on me, which is why it lives in my nightstand.

My AR has had only one problem since break-in.  After a long day shooting a few hundred rounds of Wolf, one round short-stroked, and closed the bolt on an empty chamber.  For some reason, I couldn't open the bolt to save my ass.  After pointing downrange and verifying that the chamber was empty, I opened it up.  The carrier would slide back and the bolt would unlock, but the bolt would not come back for anything.  My dad wound up tapping on the back ring of the carrier with a tree branch to free it up.

I'll be damned if I can figure out what it was.  Nothing fell out of the chamber when the bolt opened.  And I was able to run 2 more mags without incident afterwards.  I figured that if it was lacquer from the casings, that I'd have run into the problem again in short order.

If anyone's seen this before, let me know what the hell it was!  [>:/]

Same happened to me using old 1980's GI ammo- a primer blew out and deposited itself right in the middle of the gas port on top of the bolt housing- only a trip to the elec. drill managed to get it out- in brass dust and little pieces. What a mess- gun would fire, but not cycle or eject. Until I figured it out, and repaired it, I essentially had a bolt action AR15.

My pre-ban bushy 16" was acting up for a while.  Load gun, pull trigger, gun fires, feeds fine, trigger now feels like it is on safe.  Flip trigger to safe, hear click, flick to semi, then everything is fine.  I put a new disconnector in and the problem was solved for a while.  Now it still does it.  Out of 500 rounds, 3 times in a row it will do it.  I don't know how to fix it.

-DEERSNIPER

Oh yeah.  Another AR malfunction.  I built an upper in 1987 or so, to use the new heavyweight 69 grain bullets.

I used CHEAP aftermarket parts, cept for the barrel.  The gas tube was tweaked and the rifle often failed to lock up into battery.  Couldn't figure it out, took it to a smith.  That is a hard problem to find if you dont know what to look for.  

There's a reason he failed to include Glock in there.

[:D]

Ok I'll skip the Glock since I've never had a single failure with it.

I have had a few with the AR, but it's a podged together franken gun. I'll go first with the most painful malfunction then the most painful to clear/fix.

Well the day before I had showed my buddy my new AR and he was holding it and playing around with it while I was out of the room. Well the next day I went to the range and was shooting some Q3131A and the stock collapsed with the recoil crushing my nose against the charging handle. Turns out he had backed that little screw on the bottom of the 3 position all the way out where there was no tension keeping the stock in place, lesson learned, but damn did I have a hell of a flinch for awhile after that.

Now the worst malfunction is with the same rifle different stock. I put the A2 stock on there for a more solid rifle-like feel. After about 300 rounds it would not cycle at all and was making a horrible grating noise with every pull of the charging handle. Turns out that RRA had included a carbine legnth spring with the tube and it was allowing my buffer to impact the back of the tube really hard causing the rubber stopper on the back to mushroom out and get caught in the coils of the spring jamming up the entire rifle.

That was a relatively expensive one to fix, had to swap out buffer and spring.

Good news is the rifle is getting closer and closer to an all Bushy rifle. [:D]

Worst one I had was the first time I took my AR out. Had a live round get stuck above the bolt & carrier, and the bolt only about 1/8" from full lockup. The bolt wouldn't budge, the receivers wouldn't separate, I didn't know complete operation yet so didn't know WTF to do.

Took me about 2 hours to fix it, then I went and bump fired it.

Never had a malfunction with a 1911 that I couldn't fix immediately or fix what caused the malfunction.

Jonathan

serbu bfg 50 cal

fired several surplus rounds which blew the primer out of the case [happened with several different lots of ammo as i stopped with one bad round each time] - serbu design handled gas well but little did i know that unburned powder was deposited under the ar trigger mechanism which is used to fire the serbu.  eventually some worked their way under the trigger.  i place the rifle on safe to load, IMAGINE MY SURPRISE WHEN THE RIFLE FIRED TAKING THE SAFETY OFF

went downrange ok as i was ready to fire but was a major seat pucker time

I learned this one the hard way also.

I had a 1911 essently go full auto trigger someone had did a really really light trigger job and the sear wore down and well instead of 1 round it fired the whole magazine. My grandpa promtly got it fixed.

Well, not really a malfunction, but one time I shattered an AR stock. Don't ask how.

[b]S[/b]lap the magazine
[b]P[/b]ull back the charging handle
[b]O[/b]bserve the chamber
[b]R[/b]elease charging handle
[b]T[/b]ap the forward assist
[b]S[/b]hoot the rifle

Stuck cases with junk ammo (AR).

Santa Barbara SS109...it sucked. What was it, [b]EladEflow[/b]? 5 stuck cases in about 450 rounds, with 2 different rifles?

After the first one it wasn't very difficult, just drop the mag, lock the bolt, and drop the rod down.

Still made me mad.

I stuck a 230 gr fmj half way down the barrel, in  my USP45 last year  scared the shit out of me. the slide closed with no problems.

I was looking at the target before I squeezed and noticed there was only 2 holes and I had fored my 3rd round off

Last time I had my Bushy M4 out, I managed to get a new round stuck in the chamber and a spent shell stuck backwards up on top of the bolt.  I have no idea how it got up there.  Took a lot of manipulating to get it out.  Worked fine for about 5 mags, and then it happened again.  I bought a D-fender ring.  Haven't tried it to see if it is fixed.

Yep that was a good lot of ammo you bought.

You would of been better off with Wolf

[:D]

Ah, Federal brass.  I made the mistake of reloading Fedreal American Eagle.  Once.  Paid for it with a full case head failure which split the bolt, locking the bolt to the barrel extension.

It took a brass drift to the bolt carrier to get the split bolt/casehead out of the barrel extension.  

That was my worst jam with the AR.  I had a case failure in a 1911 but that was due to CCI shotshells and a racoon in the attic.  9 rounds to kill him in about 3 seconds.  The last one left a ring of the case in the chamber/barrel, preventing #10 frm chambering.

I didn't read any prior posts, but one of the worst malfunctions I had was when the bolt ripped the rear of the shell off and loaded another into the empty the was still in the chamber.

I had another where the gun totaly locked up and I had to KICK down on the charge handle to open the bolt.
Same gun BTW but years apart.


BISHOP