I was at the range today when a couple of guys approached me and asked me if I know anything about guns. They then proceeded to show me a sig .40 with a stuck slide. (I know nothing about sigs, sorry I go not know the exact model) It appeared to be in battery, but you pull the trigger and nothing. You try to pull the slide back and it would only move about 5mm. This was not enough to allow you to disassemble the firearm. After about 5 min of troubleshooting, we could not fix the problem.

Fortunately, they had a second firearm to share and I went on my merry way shooting my jam free Glock .  Any ideas on the problem?

Sounds like the case got stuck just before it went into battery (about 1/4 inch left).   Pulling the trigger did nothing and I fixed it by giving it a good whack on the back of the slide to drive it home.  

Probably shooting some Russian ammo?

They probably fired it, the case expanded too much and got stuck in the chamber.  ONLY IF it's fired and there's no hot round in the chamber--->

1. take out the magazine.

2. get a metal rod and stick it from the muzzle like you see in the Civil War muskets and drive it home.  This should dislodge the case from the chamber.


Sig chambers are probably one of the tightest and thus achieve maximum accuracy.  But cheap ammo will get Sig to jam up in no time.

My friends Sig 220 did the same thing with Wolf ammo.  After it happened 2x he stopped using Wolf and the problem went away.  

The only jam my Sig P226 has ever had in all the rounds through it caused a similar experience.  The round was stuck partially in the chamber and the slide wouldn’t go all the way into battery.  This was about halfway through the magazine and the firing pin struck the primer but not hard enough apparently.  

We ended up clamping the gun in a vice with it pointed into a barrel of water.  We then put a steel plate between the gun and us as well as one over the top of it.  I put on heavy leather gloves and pulled the slide back while my friend tapped a wooden dowel down the barrel to drive the round out while he stood to the side.  

I still have no idea what caused it, but it definitely put the gun out of commission until we could manually extract the round.  I had the gun inspected after that and it took a few hundred rounds before I trusted it completely again.  So far so good though; I caulked it up to a fluke in ammo (don’t remember what I was shooting at the time but it’s usually WWB).

Just a thought, but with the slide not coming back he could have buldged the barrel too.