Henry Rifle Forums

I took my new gun out for a spin.

15 yards with 115 grain 9mm.





It was not a good session. I couldn't make it through a magazine without a failure to feed. It was ugly. I put 150 rounds down the pipe to see if it was a break in thing. I took it to the LGS when I was finished to see what they thought. Their observations were they thought I had too much oil on it and maybe that was part of the problem. He told me run about 500 rounds through it for break in and if the problems persist they would send it back to SA for me. He also told me to clean it and lightly oil it and try different ammo in it to see if that made a difference.

I had seen some you tube videos where some had the same problems I was having. I wasn't caught off guard because I was looking for these issues.

Second was my VP9.....150 rounds with zero failures of anything!!!

I tried to hit every bull

Doesn't look like any bad guys would be walking away.

Nice shooting.

Hey Coach, was your fail to feed with every magazine or just one mag? Did you take any pics of the fail to feeds you where getting? Was there oil on the mag lips or the followers?

I'm sure the LGS can send it back to SA for you but.....500 rounds to see if the problem goes away is expensive. If you call SA and tell them your issue, with in the same day they will send you a prepaid shipping label through email.

What grain and brand of 9mm did you use?

The performance of your VP9, Coach, was not surprising to me. The reviews I've read on that pistol have been mostly very good.

But your results on the SA EMP was a surprise, mainly because of my experience with my XD9 4" Service Model.
http://www.springfield-armory.com/wp-co ... 01HC_1.pdf
I had it about a year, but at that time I was careful with how much I shot due to 9MM ammo scarcity that was happening. But I can't recall a single glitch with the XD operation, either with FTFs or FTEs. That year I shot probably +700 rounds of varying ammo brands, plus reloads my son-in-law used in his police duty gun, also a smaller-sized XD9. His XD runs extremely well, and of course, he relies on that performance every time he goes to work.

But PMC might be onto a possibility when he questioned your magazines. I see you had three mags with the EMP. Did you use all of them? I had six with my XD, carefully rotated them, and evenly shot them, without any FTFs. So there could be a mag issue....

I also think the LGS is out-of-line because 500 rounds is a lot of ammo to shoot through a problem. What I would do is this. I'd give the EMP a thorough cleaning and finish it off with very light oiling. Have you checked with other fellows (maybe on a SA Forum) as to what ammo works best in their SA 1911s? That might be worth a little research time. I don't know if I'd repeat with the ammo you've already used. Anyway, after the deep clean, I'd then head out with the three magazines full and try the pistol one more range time. If continued to fail, I'd be on the horn for sure with SA.

Bummer that your new gun didn't smoothly spin, but spun out. Best to you on resolving your problem.

One other thing I thought of after my first note, Coach. Did you check the ramp on your EMP? Any tiny burrs or roughness that might need polishing off? Sometimes it's just not finishing the smallest details up well that send a firearm into a tailspin...

Coach wrote:I took my new gun out for a spin.

It was not a good session. I couldn't make it through a magazine without a failure to feed. It was ugly. I put 150 rounds down the pipe to see if it was a break in thing. I took it to the LGS when I was finished to see what they thought. Their observations were they thought I had too much oil on it and maybe that was part of the problem. He told me run about 500 rounds through it for break in and if the problems persist they would send it back to SA for me. He also told me to clean it and lightly oil it and try different ammo in it to see if that made a difference.

I had seen some you tube videos where some had the same problems I was having. I wasn't caught off guard because I was looking for these issues.

Second was my VP9.....150 rounds with zero failures of anything!!!

+ 1 to the above about the feed ramp.