Thread: Misfires

In regards to rimfires, mishandling your ammo can cause misfires.

In forty plus years of hand loading I would have only had a handful of misfires with centerfire rifles. Rim fires are a bit more common but for the amount I was using it still wasn't a lot. So long as you are careful not to get seizing lube on the primer when seating them you should be ok, regular misfiring would more likely be a rifle problem.

PPPS is in my experience a far more common cause of misfires than any contamination of primer explosive.... unless it is a batch issue from the factory

PPPS stands for Piss Poor Primer Seating

twisting the rear of my bolts to let spring tension off when storing has sorted any issues I had.....cant think of last time we had a misfire.

Originally Posted by Sasquatch

In regards to rimfires, mishandling your ammo can cause misfires.

Mis-handling ??? how .... in nearly forty years of using and shooting rimfire ammo from a young fella using stuff rolling around the ute floor for weeks to stuff going through washing machines to ammo dry straight out of shops to the mag in 5 mins .
How do you mis - handle a wax coated , massed producded round that the USA shoot over a billion rounds per year .
Not saying you can't but would love to know how ............enlighten me

I started having misfires with my 22 shortly after buying it (second hand). Pulled the bolt apart and cleaned it, fixed it. I also de-cock (?) bolts while storing them.

.22 Plinkster explains it towards the end of the video @viper - I've had it happened to me a dozen or so times with .22LR, once you rotate the cartridge 180 degrees it generally goes bang.

@ Sasquatch , watched the video. It was well worth a watch, very interesting .
I have had in nearly 40 yrs of shooting rimfire 10 - 20 misfires in .22 LR ......next to nothing but like 22 Plinkster i have only ever really used two brands , CCi and Winchester just because that has always been available.
Both brands have been excellent in terms of performance and reliability.

However the 17 HMR has been a very different story with the CCI been very poor in terms of misfires, it's interesting like Plinkster says about the primer compound not being evenly pushed down in the factory which would explain the rotating
of the round and it working. So that to me say's it's a quality control issue from the factory.
Both Federal and Hornady have been very good and the problem is quite rare.

The weird / funny thing is that the rumor is all 17HMR comes out of the same factory. I am not sure if this is the truth or simply an urban legend.
Maybe it is out of the same factory but different production line ?

Originally Posted by viper

@ Sasquatch , watched the video. It was well worth a watch, very interesting .
The weird / funny thing is that the rumor is all 17HMR comes out of the same factory. I am not sure if this is the truth or simply an urban legend.
Maybe it is out of the same factory but different production line ?

The still to take off 17WSm has the same circumstance. I believe that the Winchester ammo comes out of the Hornady factory (or vice versa) so you aren't really changing much if you are picking between those two.