37,660 rounds
7 stoppages, 0 malfunctions, 2 parts breakages
The P30, clearly in protest of getting so few trips to the range over the past three weeks, decided to play rough Wednesday night by breaking the sear spring. The gun continued to function, but the LEM trigger mechanism turned into a traditional DAO with a heavier trigger pull and full reset. It was shootable — I actually finished the drills I was working on — but obviously not as easy to shoot as the LEM.
With the help of pistol-training.com contributor T.K. Ives, I was able to swap the good sear spring from my backup gun into the test gun and keep right on shooting. Over 1,500 rounds have been fired since the breakage with no other trouble.
HK responded to the problem well, and spare springs are on their way (yes, they were in inventory). HK — just like S&W last year — has been great to deal with when problems occur during testing. No one tries to hide anything or make excuses. Then again, it’s a spring. It had over 36,000 rounds through it. Springs break. It’s just not as much fun as it was in college (that’s a Spring Break joke, folks).
This weekend, the gun travels down to North Carolina for an Aim Fast, Hit Fast class. Then if all goes well, I should have a few opportunities to get to the range for practice next week. We’re in the home stretch now, just six weeks to go!
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
Previous P30 Endurance Test posts at pistol-training.com:
- Week Nineteen
- Week Seventeen
- Week Sixteen
- Week Fifteen
- Week Fourteen
- Week Thirteen
- Week Twelve
- Week Eleven
- Week Ten
- Week Nine
- Week Eight
- Week Seven
- Week Six
- Week Five
- Week Four
- Week Three
- Week Two
- Week One
- Initial Report
Man if I wasn’t broke as hell I’d be right there with you in NC shooting since I’ll be there visiting family anyways. I actually went to school at JCC where you’ll be shooting… haha! Crazy. I just can’t drop 200 bucks on 1k rounds of 9mm right now. I’m with you on the M&P though. Love mine but I wish the reset was more positive like a glock or my baby eagle. Any ideas on fixing that? I know you used the MA setup but how does one even get that? Smith and Wesson direct?
james — To the best of my knowledge, the only way to get the MA parts in an existing M&P is to send the gun to the S&W Performance Center for a trigger job and specify you want the MA trigger bar and MA trigger spring.
Todd – Good to hear that H&K squared you away quickly and professionally. Frankly, it’s the first good thing I’ve heard about H&K’s customer service…either the word on the street was wrong (quite possible), or maybe new management is taking the company in a different direction. Good news in either case.
See you in Thibodaux. 😎
Thanks for the heads up on the parts… I understand the spring being stronger but in what way is the trigger bar different?
james — the S&W M&P MA trigger bar is simply designed to work with the MA spring. If you want to use the MA spring without the MA trigger bar, your standard trigger bar needs to be modified slightly.