First of all, happy 248th birthday to the Marine Corps, and thank you to all you veterans! I know I’ve said this a thousand times in conversation, but the best years of my career were working with various military units, domestically and overseas. I had nothing but excellent experiences working with the military and I appreciate the opportunity I was given to do so.
After my experience preparing for Prairiefire last year, I decided to test a few other guns and see what happened. First-shot fliers have been recognized for a long time now, but with the decrease in accuracy-based sports, fewer shooters see them. Many shooters cannot demonstrate the accuracy levels needed to reliably determine what their gun does, especially in professional circles. Given that many qualification courses start up close and move back, usually with loaded guns, even the better shooters will not normally see this issue. In Action Pistol, with its fairly demanding accuracy requirements, the gun stays loaded as the shooting gets further away, removing this issue in that competition as well.
The issue is not actually the first round fired, but rather the first hand-cycled round into the chamber. The best guess, as I’m not aware of any formal testing being done, is that the cartridge seats differently, and the gun locks up differently when loaded with hand pressure, rather than at the cyclic rate of the slide.
My HK P30Ls, worked on by LTT, do not exhibit this problem to a noticeable extent at 25 yards. At 50 yards, it becomes obvious, with a single round a few inches low and right of the main group, every time. In this picture, I shot two more handcycled rounds just to illustrate better.
Precision rifle shooters have long understood that the first round from a cold bore will likely go somewhere else. A cold clean bore will perform differently than a cold dirty bore. In many cases though, the first shot can be attributed to a cold shooter more than the gun. Dryfire before shooting can help with this issue. I think the above photo shows that it is the gun in this case.
All of my Glocks exhibit this issue, some worse than others. Some to a really unacceptable level – like 6-8″s off at 25 yards for the first shot. For units that use Glocks for more sensitive missions like hostage rescue, it really makes me wonder how much testing and evaluation went into that decision. Granted, a pistol shot on a classic “hostage taker” target doesn’t come along often, even less often beyond close range, but nonetheless, I would not want to depend on a gun that can’t put its first round where I want it. It’s probably not an issue at the distances they envision using a pistol. For me on a range though, it matters quite a bit. It also matters quite a bit when I’m hunting, whether for deer with a .45 pistol, or an opportunistic shot on a coyote coming in on our chickens. One of my LTT P30Ls is often used around the ranch because of its great accuracy.
If you have tested this out, I would love to hear about your experiences. Custom 1911s tend not to have an issue. My old classic Sigs did not have much issue at 25 and in. What are you shooting and do you know what it is doing?
SLG have you tested “first” round fired theory from a revolver ? that might be an interesting evaluation ?
Some chambers can certainly negatively affect affect the bullets flight compared to others, but on any decent revolver in proper condition, you should not be able to tell.
I’ve recently discovered the flyer issue in a Gen 4 Glock 17. It started life fairly accurate (equal to my G19 gen3 with KKM barrel). I’d say 4” groups unsupported with iron sights at 25 yards were normal. After a lot of dry practice and about 6-7k rounds later, accuracy degraded where I had a hard time holding a 6” group at 25 with ball ammo with the stock barrel. Not sure if a case of wolf steel cased ammo was a contributing factor.
I played with a PMM barrel & comp on it and accuracy was good again (3-3.5” at 25 yards with ball ammo and red dot). When I ditched the comp, I got a KKM barrel for it and accuracy issues popped up with erratic flyers.
Here are some observations from the trouble shooting that followed:
I changed the locking block and the erratic flyers went away, but now it had hand chambered first round flyers that landed predictably (off set was dictated by which load / barrel was being shot).
I finally mitigated the first round issue by swapping extractors. 115 Magtech and 147 G2 have no discernible first round offset, but now have a small (about 1” at 25 yards) last round in magazine offset.
147 HST’s now has 3 different POI’s for first round, last round, and everything else. Confirmed during round robin of group shooting 9 rounds in different conditions. First shot via hand cycle and last shot in magazine were 2 inches apart (L and R respectively) from the main zero laterally, each respective cluster was sub 2”.
Here are things that could effect first round flyers:
-Ammo. Effects of the flyer phenomena was not as pronounced depending on the load.
-Barrel. The PMM barrel had a significantly less pronounced offset than the KKM barrel. The PMM barrel felt like it had a tighter chamber (but slightly looser barrel hood fit) than the KKM, but I don’t know which was the more significant measurement.
-Extractor fit. I got the idea to swap extractors from this thread on a different forum: https://www.bullseyeforum.net/t10954-flyer-from-hand-cycled-chamber-round
I’m not sure if was actually the length of the extractor hook on Glocks that’s the culprit. I don’t have the proper equipment or knowledge to measure the differences in dimensions of the offending extractor from the one with better consistency.
I tried the offending extractor in a brownells slide and it resulted in inconsistent first shot placement. Shortening the extractor hook as an experiment did not fix that issue.
Hopefully the above info is helpful to someone. It was quite the pain testing the different variables. Once the precision issue was mitigated acceptably, I didn’t care to explore it further than that!
That’s a lot of work, thanks for posting your experience with it! I can’t really change things out in a duty gun, but other people may have luck using that process.