One of the benefits of being a working gunsmith was getting to test-fire all the repaired guns. If you work on a handgun, you should test-fire it before depending on it for a match, in the woods, or to carry it.
You cannot properly test with bad ammo or magazines. For accurate analysis, you must either have a source of absolutely reliable reloaded ammunition or factory ammo. Given the recent astronomical rise in ammunition costs, just testing a handgun is expensive. Second, pistol shooters must have reliable magazines.
For testing, feed your handgun factory ammo. While there may be some poor or even bad factory ammo, the chances are good any factory ammo you select is better than the average reloaded product. If you find your handgun is unreliable, and you want to eliminate the ammunition factor, invest in a couple of boxes of plain factory ammo. You’ll learn quickly.
One of the benefits of being a working gunsmith was getting to test-fire all the repaired guns. If you work on a handgun, you should test-fire it before depending on it for a match, in the woods, or to carry it.
Beware of someone who tells you such and such a level of accuracy is “good enough for defensive purposes.” There is no such thing as “too much” accuracy. (Or power, or reliability, either.) You want all you can get, but what you have to consider is your ability to shoot, and the statistical variance of any manufactured product. Ideally, you check the accuracy by clamping your handgun in a Ransom Rest and plugging groups into the target until you find the perfect load. And I have done just that. More than once I tried various factory loads in my carry guns until I found what would shoot best.
The Ransom Rest is the terminator of testing: It won’t get tired, distracted, learn to flinch, or whine about the weather. But you must use it in a consistent manner. Do not use the handgun itself to lever the rest down out of recoil. Use a solid bench or post, and do not change what rests on the bench or post. If you use sandbags to add dampening mass to the table, do not move them until you are finished. Scrub the bore between types of ammo (brands, different powders, going from lead to jacketed, etc.). Then re-shoot “settling groups” to get the gun settled in, and the bore reconditioned to the new load.
Also, keep in mind the limitations of the Ransom Rest. For revolvers, it works like a champ. What shoots well from the revolver in the rest, shoots well in your hands.
With pistols, the Ransom Rest holds the frame, so it’s possible for a pistol to be as accurate or more accurate in a shooter’s hands, than in a rest. If, on closing, the slide and barrel closed up in the same position together, but wobbled a bit on the frame, the rest would say it wasn’t all that accurate. But a shooter, aligning the sights secured to the slide in perfect lockup to the barrel, aims the barrel, not the frame. Today gunsmiths and manufacturers have nearly perfected slide-to-frame fit. So pistol accuracy information from a Ransom Rest is more reliable than it used to be.
If you do not have access to a Ransom Rest, you’ll have to use sandbags or a rest. Ideally every shot will have a perfect sight picture and perfect trigger release/break. As we are all human, such is not likely to be the case. The question is what do you use to measure the group size? With the Ransom, it’s easy; every shot counts.
If you are shooting over sandbags or a rest, do you shoot five and throw out the widest one? Six and throw out two? Seven? Do you throw out any? The problem with the “best X shots” approach is that you don’t know those shots were your fault, and you may be applying a crude statistical machete to a finer problem. Also, you are more likely to throw bad shots in the beginning and as your testing session goes on too long, more than in the middle.
I use five, five-shot groups from the Ransom as the measure of a load or handgun. Five-shot groups are easy to manage, and five of them provide a good statistical base. A single group tells you nothing except how that particular group shot. For shooting over a rest, I shoot the same five, five-shot groups, but I only compare like to like. I do not compare a Ransom tested gun to a hand-held one for I know I am no Ransom rest. I also do not throw out shots. I shoot five. I measure five. If you are not sure of your own shooting skills, have the best shooter at your gun club have a try with your gun and ammo.
Ammo like this won’t do, when it comes time to test your work. Use good ammo. If your reloads look like this, you need to work on improving your ammo.
Shooting from a rest is a learned skill. Get a comfortable chair. Sit behind a sturdy table tall enough you can sit upright. Use a fixed rest as a shooting aid. Rest your hands and/or arms as well. If the support structure you build doesn’t support your hands, you’ll wobble. Warm up with a .22LR, to get better, before you invest time and real ammo costs in testing your center fire handgun.
You don’t have to consume a truckload of ammo, wearing out a pistol, just to find out if it works. If you don’t learn there’s something wrong in a couple of hundred rounds, then there’s probably not much wrong with it.
For hunting, I insist on groups half the size of the kill zone of what I’m hunting, at the maximum range I plan to shoot. A whitetail has a kill zone of eight inches. The distance, a gun and load reaches a 4-inch average group out of the Ransom is as far as I’d hunt with it. If it means a 100-yard maximum range with that particular handgun, great. If only 50, fine. Then combine that with power; is the load powerful enough, and does it have a proper bullet?
For competition, your acceptable accuracy depends on the match you are shooting. For PPC, you must have a handgun capable of placing every shot inside the “10” ring at the maximum distance fired. Outdoors, that’s 50 yards; indoors 50 feet. For IPSC shooting, you want something that will keep every shot inside the “A” ring to 50 yards. At 6 inches wide for the A zone, that means a gun capable of under 6 inches at 50 yards, 2 inches at 50 feet. (Still smaller than the “10” ring in PPC.) More accuracy is better.
For me, a competition gun must deliver groups smaller than 2 inches at 25 yards out of the Ransom Rest. If it doesn’t, I’ll either use another or rework it until it does. For a defensive gun, I work from the ammo first. With a selection of appropriate ammo, I’ll go with what is the most accurate, or if there is not enough to have a ready supply for a few years, the next most available ammo.
Reliability tests are more involved, less demanding and actually fun. You can do your reliability testing as part of your practice or plinking. One advantage revolver shooters have over their pistol-shooting compatriots is that you can uncover a lot of problems by dry-firing. If a revolver is mistimed, skipping, or failing to carry up, you can see it without the need for ammo.
We’ll assume yours has passed the basic dry-fire tests. Fire a few cylinders to make sure it functions properly. Inspect the primers to make sure they are struck on the center, and are not cratered, pierced, blown, or otherwise looking in poor health. Then test to see your wheelgun can shoot 50 rounds double-action. If the cylinder gap is too tight (or the load too dirty) you may find the cylinder rubs against the rear of the barrel before you can go 50 rounds. Dirty ammo may also cause a problem with crud or unfired powder granules trapped under the extractor star. Once yours has proven it can go at least 50, try accuracy testing again. If accuracy noticeably drops off, you may have ammo or dimensional problems that manifest themselves in severe leading and accuracy loss.
A too-small cylinder gap must be opened up to allow proper function. A tight gap of .002 inches may be great, but many competitors will gladly go with .005 inches and a slight velocity loss in order to have reliability enough to get through a match without problems.
If you have changed barrels, and not tightened the new one enough, you will probably find out by the end of the 50-round test session. If the barrel is going to unscrew, it probably will have done so by then. But if, in the course of several practice sessions, you find groups have drifted farther to the left, the barrel may need tightening. You’ll have to either re-cut the shoulder and set it back or peen the barrel shoulder to tighten the fit. Do not use Loctite to secure the barrel. If you ever want to remove that barrel in the future, the thread-locking compound may make it impossible.
With good ammunition and good magazines, testing is relatively simple. You’ll need 200 rounds for a basic reliability test. Start with a single round in the mag. Fire it. Does the magazine lock open? Great. Now load two. Fire them. Why such caution? If you’ve done any trigger work (or even reassembled your pistol incorrectly), you don’t want it running away with a full magazine. A double is exciting enough; you needn’t be hanging on through a full mag.
If it’s good, load up your mags. Check the feel of the feed as you strip off the first round. Is there a catch or hitch in the feed? Does the slide hesitate? You may have too much extractor tension, a rough feed ramp, or a marginal magazine. If the barrel has just been replaced, you may have a tight chamber or sharp edge on the tip-over line.
Watch empties as they exit. Do they fly consistently, or is each one headed in a different direction? If they differ, you may have too little or too much tension. The ejector may be loose, broken or missing. Pick up a few of the first you fire. Is the brass bent, dinged, or marred at the case mouth? Are the case mouths not just marred, but knocked in? They may be hitting the slide sidewall on their exit. The sidewall may be too high, or the recoil spring may be too weak or strong. A weak spring allows too-high slide velocity on the backstroke, a too-strong one too much speed on the forward stroke. A weak spring also has “tadpole” primer hits, where the firing pin hasn’t had time to retract before the barrel begins unlocking from the slide.
You should be able to get 50 rounds out of the tightest gun ever made and still have it work reliably. If you can’t, you’ll have to go back and re-do your work until you find the dimension that is too tight and correct it.
In the event of a malfunction during testing, stop. Do not perform an immediate action drill to clear the problem. Stop and observe. What is the exact nature of the problem? Where are the brass, the magazine, and your hands? Have you made any ammunition changes? Magazine changes? Did you hold it differently?
Write down the problem. What kind of problem is it? How many rounds in the magazine? Which magazine are you using? What ammo? What in particular were you doing? If you have the same problem again, you can track the variables. Maybe it’s just that ammo. Maybe it’s just that magazine. Maybe it’s just you shooting weak-handed. Memory can fail. Write it down. If the problem is too frequent, stop and shoot something else. Otherwise, keep going. Expend all your planned testing ammo and see what malfunctions you had if any, and what kind they were.
Long-term testing requires keeping track of the type and frequency of malfunctions, if any. It doesn’t do any good to have a “gut feeling” that a particular handgun is unreliable, if you can’t remember how often, and of what type, malfunctions occurred. Make note of what is going on so you can correct the problems.