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Question on CZ shadow maintenance and reliability


Lior

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Dear shooting folks,

Last night my CZ Shadow burped on ammo a few times during training - multiple failures to fire in single action that were all cured by a second double action strike, resulting in lousy split times.

At the behest of our club manager, I cleaned out the firing pin channel and the firing pin, resulting in plenty of black stuff everywhere. The firing pin and its spring appear to be perfectly intact. I was firing Blazer Brass, with which I have not had reliability problems before in a Shadow.

Is there anything else I should do to get this gun to work properly before the upcoming match?

With thanks, Lior.

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My bet is cleaning the firing pin and channel fixed it. Primers on Remington UMC are not as hard as the CCI, if you want to try them. I usually use Atlanta Arms reloads and never have any problems as long as everything is clean. You can replace the hammer spring if you are still concerned.

If I am concerned over light hits, I take an unloaded gun with no magazine, cock the hammer, insert a wooden pencil, eraser end first, or a wooden dowel in to the barrel and seat it against the breech face, then hold the gun horizontal and pull the trigger and observe how far the pencil is ejected, indicating how hard the firing pin hits the pencil. You can compare two guns or note how far the pencil travels when the gun is working properly and know whether or not to expect problems.

Joe

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One school of thought is that this is a sign of light primer seating, first strike seats it and second gets it done. When you say blazer brass, were these blazer factory or reloads using blazer brass?

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All the above are good suggestions. If you continue to have issues, you might want to consider getting an extended firing pin and associated spring. Both CZ custom and CGW have them. I tend to stick to federal primers for my shadow. It is very reliable.

Good Luck!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was having a similar issue, cleaning definitely helped. But I ended up having a peened firing pin. This was a result of quite a bit dry firing. May want to check out of your pin.

A peened pin will have rounded edges where it hits against the retaining pin. Pick up a new pin and go nuts!

One way you can prevent this is using snap caps when dry firing and putting a small o-ring between the firint pin and the hammer.

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