PSA AR-V FTF: First time this ever happened

[bigdawgbeav]

UPDATE:  I believe I have found the issues (yes, plural).  I'm waiting to hear back from some important folks before revealing what happened here.

 

I'm going to try and explain this as best I can, please bear with me. This weekend at Area 8 SC I started to have malfunctions with my Palmetto State Armory AR-V with Taccom, LLC barrel and air buffer. Up until now, this thing has run 100%. All of a sudden I'm having "click, no-bang". Rack the bolt and continue on. It happened on several stages and sometimes multiple strings. Other times it ran great.

 

I picked up the "bad" rounds and found the rims all chewed up, like in the picture, and no primer strike. The one with the blue dot is a round from ULSC. You can see a small indent on the rim, but not like the others. I also looked at some spent brass from a practice session from last week and there are no marks like that on the rims.

 

I'm looking for initial observations as to what I should be looking for. I have not YET taken everything apart, but will this week. Initial thinking is some burrs on the bolt face. Unfortunately it's hard to diagnose these problems while on the clock. Let me know what you think it might be... TIA (and if anyone on my squad when this was happening reads this, please feel free to comment)

Edited May 17, 2022 by bigdawgbeav

[mikeAZ]

I've had  a similar experience... It was a broken firing pin

[Nolan]

1 hour ago, mikeAZ said:

I've had  a similar experience... It was a broken firing pin

 

Interesting.  How does that chew up the rim like that?

 

Nolan

[mikeAZ]

Speculation and how it went... I would get ignition and then no ignition, live round hung up NOT in battery.. (This was the 2nd. broken firing pin) I had an idea by this time of what happened.. I called Strikefire, 1st. thing they asked was "what springs".. I said said silver...They said use lighter ones (I did) no more broken firing pins. My best guess would be check the firing pin. EZ to do.  As far as ugly brass, your gun was trying to put another round in the chamber when there was already one in it, correct?.. Or am I missing something?. ... or bad/dirty extractor?..

[Gregg K]

With a broken firing pin the broke front half will sometimes float forward and be sticking out of the bolt face so that when a round is picked up by the bolt from the magazine and tries to slide up the bolt face and behind the extractor the rim of the brass hits the tip of the firing pin sticking out of the bolt face and jams the gun and marks up the rim.

[bigdawgbeav]

See update above

Edited May 17, 2022 by bigdawgbeav

[mikeAZ]

Kina what I said.... Mike

[bigdawgbeav]

The issue was 2-fold...

1. There is a burr on the underside of the bolt that even numbered rounds were catching.  So the marks were from that burr (blue) and a notch in the bolt (red).  Since the AR-V uses Scorpion-style mags they are a true double stack.  So rounds are a little offset.  The bolt pushes the round over and up.  With the burr on the left side, the rounds on the right side of the mag were getting caught.
2. The firing pin was wore down as well.  The pin measured 2.64oal while my spare pin measures 2.67oal.  So when the rounds were fed, those gouges in the rim kept the round from fully contacting the bolt face.  The shortened pin was unable to make contact with the primer. (Left is current, right is spare)

Contacted the fine folks at PSA and they are going to take care of this to get me back up and running.