CHA-LEE's Tale

[CHA-LEE]

Are you changing just the slide off a 9 pro? and putting on the 40 slide and berrel? Becuz I would love to do that!

I am not changing calibers. But if you wanted to to make a conversion like that I am sure you could do it. Keep in mind that the slide that I ordered was stripped (No barrel, Guide Rod, Recoil Spring, sights, extractor, striker, etc). If you were to buy all of the individual parts to make a complete upper you would probably spend the same amount as simply buying a whole new gun. When I called S&W I asked them if they sold complete 5 inch upper's and they said that they didn't. They only sell the 5 Inch stripped slides. They said that they did sell complete uppers for the shorter barrel guns though.

Edited November 23, 2012 by CHA-LEE

[johnny1gun]

I have a 9 pro. I was going to turn it into a limited minor gun. I beleive I read somewhere you did somthing similar.Im not that good so I need all the points I can get. So would like a .40.Need to sell a gun to buy a gun. So Im in limbo.Would very much like to buy the M&P in the classifieds. Got to get rid of a.300RUM first. so the convertion would be great.But I dont think you can take a 9 and turn it into a .40.

[CHA-LEE]

I have a 9 pro. I was going to turn it into a limited minor gun. I beleive I read somewhere you did somthing similar.Im not that good so I need all the points I can get. So would like a .40.Need to sell a gun to buy a gun. So Im in limbo.Would very much like to buy the M&P in the classifieds. Got to get rid of a.300RUM first. so the convertion would be great.But I dont think you can take a 9 and turn it into a .40.

You can't "Convert" a 9mm slide to work with .40 because the breach face is different size. You could buy a slide and .40 barrel then swap all of your other parts from the 9mm slide over to the .40 slide. That would be fairly cheap, but you would still be in it at least $300 for the slide and barrel. Possibly more if you get an after market barrel. Once you get past $300 that is half the price of a whole gun and it starts making less and less sense to convert it verses getting a whole new gun.

[partyboy424]

I would recommend doing what Cha-lee and myself did and just buying a 40 slide assembly, all the internals and a barrel. Then once you've got it all together you'll have a complete 40pro slide and 9pro slide. What I did, was I bought 4.25" 40 M&P, did the whole slide upgrade and then sold the original slide assembly fully assembled on GunBroker. Sold in about a week for $200. A 9 slide assembly and especially a 9Pro assembly will command a higher price and sell quicker. Most people doing top end conversions are downgrading for cost of ammo/recoil reasons. And you also have the communist states like mine where a Pro slide fully assembled is like gold to someone who isn't comfortable tinkering with their stuff.

Also, they do make a 40 to 9 conversion barrel for short money, so you could still shoot 9 for ammo cost and steel challenge stuff like that just by swapping the barrel and magazines.

Edited November 23, 2012 by partyboy424

[johnny1gun]

I thought about doing exactly what your talking about.Do you need to do anything to the frame? .40 mags fit in the Pro 9 frame.I dont have one to compare it to so thats why so many questions.I would put all after market parts on the slide anyway. So getting a striped slide would free up some time.LOL!!Thats what I did to the 9Pro.

[partyboy424]

I thought about doing exactly what your talking about.Do you need to do anything to the frame? .40 mags fit in the Pro 9 frame.I dont have one to compare it to so thats why so many questions.I would put all after market parts on the slide anyway. So getting a striped slide would free up some time.LOL!!Thats what I did to the 9Pro.

They're exactly the same frames. Honestly the only issue you can really run into is forgetting which mags are which and bringing the wrong ones to the range

Same here with the aftermarket parts, I was pissed at first when I realized the cost was almost as high as buying a NIB M&P Pro, and then I looked at my parts list. Adjustable rear sights and Dawson front, over 100 bucks, KKM Barrel, about 100 bucks more than a stock barrel, FSS trigger, another 150 bucks. But at the end of the day I am in love with this gun! And aside from some growing pains at my first match with a bad aftermarket mag release and being lazy and not hand fitting my Taylor Freelance basepads. This gun always runs. Drop the mags in the dirt and then slap them in the gun, all 20 rounds feed everytime.

[CHA-LEE]

The Thanks Giving holiday is over and it was a busy one. I was able to sneak in some live fire practice on Friday. My buddy Conrad and I went to a friend’s private range and did some stage based practice. I ran through about 200 rounds and it was a productive practice session. Its nice to get some quality practice in while the weather is cooperating. We are yet to get any real snow here in Colorado but its looming in the near future so we need to take advantage of the good weather while we can. The Frozen Finger sub freezing temperature matches will happen soon enough.

On Saturday I attended a local USPSA club match hosted by PSAC. All of the stages were biased towards difficult shots and funky shooting positions so I knew that getting your hits was paramount at this match. The whole match had a boat load of no shoot and hard cover partial targets and a lot of strange shooting positions so I knew that the stage times would be slower than normal. I focused on getting my hits for the match and it worked out pretty good. I still ended up clipping a no shoot on one stage and a miss on the classifier, but those two penalties were far less than most other shooters in the match. I ended up with a pretty solid match and it paid off with a HOA finish.

On Sunday a group of us built two safe areas out of Rail Road ties for the HPPS club. The Ben Lomond Gun Club recently built 6 new pistol bays just for the competition matches (HPPS) and we have needed some dedicated safety areas for a little while. Since the weather was working with us we figured it would be best to get the safety areas built this weekend while it was still nice. Holly crap, building those safety area’s was a lot of back breaking work!!! My hands are still pretty beat up from all the sledge hammer pounding and moving of the heavy rail road ties. The good news is that we were able to get the safety area’s built and ready to use for the next match.

Now its time to recover from all the hard work and load some ammo this week. Hopefully my M&P parts come in (Night Sights & Slide) soon so I can start working on that project over the winter.

[Jerome]

I bought the Speedcross 3s and have practiced in them twice. They fit my feet much better than the Merrills and the arch support is much more noticible. So far so good just looking forward to trying them over a longer period of time in a match (this weekend).

Thanks for the info.

Jerome> I have pretty "Flat" feet as well and the Speedcross 3 shoes worked fine for me. I would say that I have average width feet as well and I don't feel like the sides of my feet are cramped in the shoe either. I got the shoes online from Running Warehouse and I listed their URL below. They have a free return/exchange policy so you can order a pair, try them out and if they don't fit send them back for a refund. They ship super fast too. I am sold on them myself. I just ordered 3 more pair so I will be covered for the next few seasons.

http://www.runningwarehouse.com/

[CHA-LEE]

I bought the Speedcross 3s and have practiced in them twice. They fit my feet much better than the Merrills and the arch support is much more noticible. So far so good just looking forward to trying them over a longer period of time in a match (this weekend).

Thanks for the info.

Jerome> I have pretty "Flat" feet as well and the Speedcross 3 shoes worked fine for me. I would say that I have average width feet as well and I don't feel like the sides of my feet are cramped in the shoe either. I got the shoes online from Running Warehouse and I listed their URL below. They have a free return/exchange policy so you can order a pair, try them out and if they don't fit send them back for a refund. They ship super fast too. I am sold on them myself. I just ordered 3 more pair so I will be covered for the next few seasons.

http://www.runningwarehouse.com/

I think you should be good to go. My first test of the shoes was to walk all of the Area 2 stages the Thursday before the match. I wore them for 4 - 5 hours that day walking and running around stages and had zero foot pain or new shoe break in discomfort issues. After that full day of wearing them I knew they were good to go for the match.

If you like the shoes keep in mind that shoe companies are continually changing and discontinuing shoes. I ordered 4 additional pair of these shoes so I can be covered for at least a couple shooting seasons.

[CHA-LEE]

Its been a while since my last update. We are settling into the winter shooting season here in Colorado so some matches are getting canceled due to weather and others are just down right cold while attending. Frozen finger shooting is in full effect when there is a match. I have been doing pretty decent at the club matches but the attendance has been lower than summer time so its hard to gauge my actual performance against the local top dogs.

I noticed that my trigger lightened up considerably the last match (1.5lb pull) and found that my custom bent trigger return spring broke one of the legs off making it a lot lighter than it should be. I replaced that spring so the trigger pull is back up to 2.25lbs.

I have also noticed that I am getting sucked into looking at the targets instead of my sights lately. I tried to review my stage runs to see if I could remember seeing the neon green fiber optic in the front sight and I couldn’t. This is a problem because the fiber in the front sight should be pulling my attention to the front sight so I can stay on the sights. For a test I am going to switch over to a neon orange fiber which is a lot brighter than the neon green. I have been try firing this setup and noticed that the neon orange fiber is a lot more noticeable and pulls my attention to it better. I just hope that its not over kill once I get outdoors in normal lighting at the range. I am planning on running the neon orange fiber at the matches this weekend to see how that works out. Maybe swapping the color of the fiber optic is a “Trick of the Day” kind of thing, or not? I am not sure, but it will be fun to see how it affects my shooting.

My winter gun projects are coming along pretty good. My first project is to build a Limited Major M&P by converting my Limited Minor M&P. I ordered and received a couple of 5 inch slides from S&W for the project. I got one of the new slides cut down to 11oz to reduce the really chunky 13.5oz stock fighting weight. The 11oz slide should be pretty balanced for Limited Major rounds. But if it isn’t I have another slide to work with. The slide is off getting an Nickel coating this week and hopefully I can get it back by Monday next week. I ordered the remaining upper parts and am waiting for them to come in. Once I get all of the parts I will put it all together and work on setting up some short major PF loads. Then do some live fire testing. I am really excited to try the night sight setup on the M&P to see if that is a cure to the less than optimal lighting shooting conditions. A really good match shooting test for this are the indoor USPSA matches down in Colorado springs.

I also rebuilt 10 of my old EAA magazines. Some had cracks on the feed lips and got those welded up. These magazines are also getting a fresh nickel coating along with the M&P Slide. So once I get these magazines back I will have 10 more EAA magazines ready to rumble for the 2013 shooting season.

I was planning on getting a Tanfoglio Stock III and turning it into a Limited gun but I just found out that the Stock III pistols are based on the Small Frame design, which will not work with all of the magazines I currently have. As an alternate I have been thinking about getting a Limited Pro and converting it to a SA only Limited gun. The Limited Pro is at least $400 cheaper than the Limited and you end up throwing away most of the “Upgrades” that the Limited has over the Limited Pro anyway. The only major differences between the Limited Pro and the Limited is that the Pro has a short dust cover and a straight barrel instead of a bull barrel. This reduction in frame and barrel weight will change how the gun feels when shooting. How much of a change is not known until I actually build it up and test it out. Right now I am waiting to see how the M&P Limited build goes before I invest in another EAA pistol. If the M&P Limited project goes well, I may be switching over to that platform for the 2013 shooting season. I still have a lot of work and testing to complete before making that decision though.

This winter is going to be really busy with testing new stuff and figuring out what I will settle on using for the 2013 shooting season.

[partyboy424]

I ordered a slide racker for my M&P, I'll eventually be using it as a test upper for my Open M&P project later this year, and currently it seems like every match has had at least one table start and I really want a kickstand! Have you removed any material forward of the rear dovetail on the top? I ordered a dovetail cutter endmill and one of the Cheeley slide rackers. If you've removed material there is there anything I should worry about punching through to?

[CHA-LEE]

Partyboy424> Yes I removed material from in front of the rear sight dove tail and before the breach face. You can cut that area down quite a bit before getting close to the striker tunnel. You basically have to watch out for getting too deep into the striker tunnel and the extractor cut on the side of the slide. Measure twice and cut once.

[CHA-LEE]

This weekend I attended two USPSA matches. The weather on both days was not optimal but it was at least bareable. On Saturday the high was in the high 30’s with a light snow and wind at the end of the match. On Sunday it was in the high 30’s once again but overcast all day with a consistent breeze making it pretty cold with the wind chill factored in. Frozen finger shooting was in full effect this weekend for sure. The good thing is that its was still “dry” so we didn’t have to worry about being wet and cold. That would be absolutely no fun.

My primary goal for both of these matches was to test out the Neon Orange FO in the front sight. Given the overcast shooting conditions the bright Neon Orange FO was actually pretty tame, compared to full sunny conditions. It was brighter than the Neon Green one that I was using and did a really good job of pulling my attention to the front sight instead of looking at the targets. I was able to observe the bouncing FO quite well while shooting all of the stages. On Saturday I did get distracted by it on one stage but I think that is more of a “Hay look at that new color on the front sight” kind of thing. On Sunday I was pretty much use to seeing the new color in the sight picture and was able to do an awesome job of calling my shots effectively. The Sunday match had 16 pieces of steel and I only needed one make up shot which was immediately called bad and made up instantly. I have not shot steel that well in a really long time and it seemed pretty easy since I was able to keep a front sight focus instead of getting sucked into looking at the targets. Right now I am considering the Neon Orange FO front sight a good step forward in being able to see my sights better in less than optimal lighting conditions. The only thing I worry about is it being way too much in normal lighting conditions. We will see how that goes in future matches and practice.

On the M&P Build front I made some decent headway in the past week. I got the slide lightened and back from the coater with a fresh Nickel coating. Got all of the supporting parts installed along with the new night sights. The rear night sight was super tight and I had to do a lot of fitting to get it installed on the slide. After I got the rear sight installed I noticed a hairline crack on the right side of the frame right where the frame rails ride. I looked closer and the frame is cracked right on the frame rails. Evidently I cracked the frame rail when I was pressing on the super tight rear sight. It really sucked to find that I wrecked the slide while installing the rear sight. But I am glad that I found the issue before I shot the gun. I am also glad that I ordered two slides so I can jump on getting the second one lightened and coated. Two steps forward, one step back. That is the bane of gun modding. The good thing is that I got the night sights installed and now I have to get them milled to the sizes I want. The front sight is .125 wide and I am going to see if it can be milled down to .105 wide. That is going to be tricky because the Night sight insert is about .100 wide. The rear sight is .135 wide by .090 deep. I am going to get that opened up to .145 wide and deep. There is plenty of meat on the rear sight so it shouldn’t be a problem with opening it up and affecting the night sight inserts. The rear night sight inserts are a much smaller diameter. I was thinking that if the front sight trim down does not work I will see if Dawson Precision will make me a .100 wide front sight with a small night sight insert that is used for the rear sight. I plan on giving them a call this coming week to see if its even possible to make. If they can make it I will get one, simply because I want to try it out. Hopefully I can get the second slide lightened this coming week as well. We will see how it goes. My goal is to get the M&P Project up and running by January. There isn’t much time left in December and the Christmass and New Years holidays will cause some delays. We will see how it goes with everyone’s schedule.

[Fried Chicken Blowout]

I'd like to post a complaint about Sunday's match. Your presents threw off the curve, whereas I would have been in the 90% group of Limited shooters without you there, your presents bumped me to the 60% group. Sometimes I can do without a dose of reality...

But I remind myself that one needs this constant reminder to continue to strive for improvement. Keep up the good shooting and keep inspiring the rest of us!

Oh and post some photos of that M&P project. I've pushed in some tight sights on the M&Ps, hopefully I've never cracked any. The rear sights on the new production slides seems to be looser than before, or the sight manufactures got wise to the issue and made the sights smaller. Either way, they the rear sights seem to be easier now than than they were a few years ago. The front sights are still a total bitch and I want a sight tool for the 5" guns. Can't someone please make one!?

[CHA-LEE]

I'd like to post a complaint about Sunday's match. Your presents threw off the curve, whereas I would have been in the 90% group of Limited shooters without you there, your presents bumped me to the 60% group. Sometimes I can do without a dose of reality...

But I remind myself that one needs this constant reminder to continue to strive for improvement. Keep up the good shooting and keep inspiring the rest of us!

Oh and post some photos of that M&P project. I've pushed in some tight sights on the M&Ps, hopefully I've never cracked any. The rear sights on the new production slides seems to be looser than before, or the sight manufactures got wise to the issue and made the sights smaller. Either way, they the rear sights seem to be easier now than than they were a few years ago. The front sights are still a total bitch and I want a sight tool for the 5" guns. Can't someone please make one!?

Someone has to keep you guys honest up there

I will take some pictures of the M&P when its done and functional. Hopefully that will be sooner than later.

[CHA-LEE]

Its been a little while since I have posted an update. The Winter shooting season has gone pretty good so far. We have only had a few matches get canceled due to weather but the ones that do end up happening have been down right cold. Frozen finger shooting is in full effect right now. I have been running the Orange Fiber Optic rod in the front of my EAA and it has helped me keep a better front sight focus. Most of the matches we have been shooting lately have overcast skies so the extra brightness of the Orange FO is working out pretty good. There was one match that had pretty clear skies and full sun and on a few stages the FO rod was very overwhelming. If I use the Orange FO in full sunlight I might have to black out the middle so its not as bright. I am going to try that at the next match where its really sunny to see how it works.

In the mean time I have been working on the M&P Limited build. I got the slide back from betting trimmed down from 13.5oz down to 11oz and now its off to the coater getting a fresh hard chrome coating on it. Hopefully I can get the slide back from the coater this week so I can put this bad boy though its paces this weekend. We were able to cut on the night sights to optimize the sight picture the best we could. The front sight was .125 wide and we were only able to cut it down to .120 given the large night sight insert that was installed. The rear notch was widened to .150 then cut .145 deep. This produces a light bar setup on both sides of the front sight that looks about the same as my .105/.145 setup on my EAA. I did some of varied lighting testing around the house with this new night sight setup and I was really pleased with the results. All medium or low light conditions allowed me to see the white surrounds of the tritium insert or the actual glowing insert. In all of these lighting conditions it was very hard to see the top and side edges of the actual iron sights. The thing I really noticed was the ability to quickly see a three dot sight picture when pointing at dark targets, even in pretty good lighting. The “Shadow Targets” have always been by enemy at matches, so hopefully this will help eliminate that issue.

While waiting for the sights and slide to get done I turned my attention to the M&P magazines. Using the Taylor Freelance 140mm base pads, Grams 11 coil spring and Bolen STI follower I was able to get 21 rounds of .40 into the mags. The 21 rounds are tight but you could reload to it if you had to. Getting 20 rounds into the mags is easy and I should be able to run 20 + 1 most of the time without any issues. I had to modify the front of the follower to add a small set screw to the under side which keeps the follower from shifting forward after the last round is picked up. Without this the follower would get biased forward and jam between the under side of the slide and the feed ramp of the barrel causing the mag to stick in the gun. After adding the set screw the follower stays where it should and does not get jammed up.

The new build is going to be using a KKM 5 inch .40 barrel and I setup some new rounds to work with this. Since the M&P mags don’t work with the really long .40 ammo I use in my EAA I had to create a new load for this gun. Right now I am settled on a 1.140 OAL with a Rainier Ballistics 180gr bullet, 4.8gr of WST powder, with a Winchester Primer. This produces a 935 – 945 fps average velocity. Just for shits and grins I called up KKM and asked them if they had any 6 inch barrels for the M&P and they said the longest they have is a 5.75 inch. I am going to order one up and try it out to see how that works compared to the standard 5 inch barrel. I should be able to get away with a slightly smaller powder drop, maybe a 4.6 – 4.7 to produce the same fps with the 5.75 inch barrel. I will order the barrel after the new year holiday is over and hopefully by the time I get that in I will have the M&P all back together and rocking at the range.

On the EAA front, my primary Limited gun has been developing a small crack on the back right of the frame where the frame rail is. Pretty much the same kind of crack that usually happens on the left side. I have been watching this crack slowly grow over the last couple of months and now its time to get that fixed. I stripped down the frame last night and plan on getting it welded up this evening. Hopefully I can get it welded up and the rail refitted before this weekend so I can give it a shake down run over the weekend.

The winter season is a good time to get all of these equipment challenges resolved. My long term goal is to have my guns and gear fully rebuilt and tuned up for the start of the 2013 shooting season in the spring. My first 2013 major match is the Florida Open which is only a couple months away but it should be enough time to get all of this stuff ironed out.

[partyboy424]

Great info as always! One big question on the magazine updates you did. With the Bolen follower and springs/set screw. Does it lock the slide back? Also, do you have any pictures of the set screw placement? Thanks for posting up this info

[CHA-LEE]

Great info as always! One big question on the magazine updates you did. With the Bolen follower and springs/set screw. Does it lock the slide back? Also, do you have any pictures of the set screw placement? Thanks for posting up this info

Yes it does lock the slide back. You have to shorten the length of the follower by cutting off the back a little bit to make it fit properly in the M&P Mag tube. I don't have a picture of the set screw installed. Its basically a small 2-56 cap head screw that is screwed into the underside of the follower on the front, just ahead of the mag spring that wraps around the base of the follower. The cap head portion of the screw rests up against the inside front of the mag body keeping the follower from biasing forward and jamming up when there are no rounds in the magazine.

[CHA-LEE]

I got the M&P slide back from the hard chrome coater yesterday. I was able to get the slide reassembled and the gun put back together last night. I really like how the three dot night sight setup looks in marginal lighting. Since I got the gun back together I started working on the gear to support it. I did some tuning on the blade tech holster to put it at the correct angle to make it work properly. I ordered some new CR Speed mag pouches but they have not come in yet. The mag pouches I use for the EAA setup “Work” but the M&P mags are pretty floppy when inserted in the pouches. I think I will just deal with the floppy mags in the pouches for now until I get the new CR Speed mag pouches in and can build up a dedicated belt for the M&P gear.

During lunch today I am going to head over to the indoor range and run 100 rounds through the new M&P setup. I have to make sure its sighted in and then run through some live fire drills with varying lighting to see how well the sights work. My goal is to give the gun a decent shake down run today to work out any minor issues. Then give it a good pounding on Saturday with 300+ rounds of live fire practice. If everything is working error free I will shoot it in the Match this coming Sunday. If there are any lingering issues with the M&P I will shoot my EAA at the match this weekend and work on trying to resolve the M&P problems next week.

On another note, my Wife has set a goal of making “B” Class in Production during the 2013 shooting season. She has attended a few matches here and there in the past but never really took a solid interest in shooting on a regular basis. She is really fired up about participating in USPSA matches in 2013 and asked if I could help her meet her goals. I am glad to help and am excited to see her take on the challenge. We actually spent about 30 minutes last night doing some dry fire working mainly on draws. She made some decent progress and enjoyed the practice so that is a good sign.

[CHA-LEE]

I was able to get 100 rounds down range with the M&P over lunch at the indoor range. The first shots I took were an attempt to sight it in. I set the target out to 7 yards and tried to shoot a 5 shot group and much to my surprise the hits were all over the place. It was literally making a 12 inch group at 7 Yards. Needless to say I was like “WTF is going on??? Am I that bad of a shot???”. So I rested the gun on the bench to basically replicate shooting off sand bags. From this very solid platform the group was no better. Everything on this upper is brand new and I found it really hard to believe that a brand new barrel would produce such bad grouping. The gun had an 11lb recoil spring in it and I brought a 13lb recoil spring with me just to test how the recoil felt with the heavier spring. I didn’t want to waste the range time so I threw in the 13lb recoil spring to feel how the recoil felt. After doing some fast shooting I decided to try shooting a group again and much to my surprise the group shrunk to about 2 inches at 7 yards. I couldn’t believe that switching to a heavier recoil spring would improve the accuracy that much so I threw the 11lb recoil spring back in there and the group size was back to 12 inches at 7 yards. With the weaker recoil spring I think that the gun is not locking up consistently and that is causing the accuracy issues. Tomorrow I am going to test it out with a 14lb and 15lb recoil spring to see if that increases the accuracy even more. At 7 yards I should be able to get all the hits to touch when slow fire group shooting. I can do this without much effort using my EAA so I know it’s possible. The M&P should be just as accurate at such a close distance.

The good news is that the gun ran flawlessly through the 100 rounds, feeding and extracting each round perfectly. The night sights were interesting to shoot. Seeing a three dot sight picture is a lot different than what I am use to. It will take quite a bit of shooting to get use to that kind of sight picture. But the good news is that I was able to see all three dots while shooting fast so I am able to get some rear sight feedback in less than optimal lighting.

From a shooting feel perspective, the gun feels like it has a more pronounced recoil impulse than when I shoot the EAA. This is to be expected given the way lighter plastic frame of the M&P. I had to consciously grip the gun harder to make the sights track properly. I don’t want to rule anything out right now in how it feels or how the sights track when compared to my EAA. Its like riding your bicycle then jumping on a different bicycle. You can ride it, but it just does not feel “Normal”. I am still in the “This does not feel Normal” mode and I need to give it some time to see how it really feels after some extensive testing.

[Fried Chicken Blowout]

Okay! We're gonna needs some photos NOW!

[CHA-LEE]

OK OK.... I will take some pics and post them up later tonight.

[partyboy424]

Take pics of the follower as well! Also, the not "feeling normal" thing. I went from an M&P 45 in L10, to my 40 with factory ammo to my current load of Silhouette. Softest major load I've ever shot. Last week, I worked on a club member's 2011 and put about 200 rounds of my ammo through it, then since I had it, figured I would shoot about 20 rounds through my M&P with the same ammo. Felt uncontrollable, like a kicking mule. Even though I've been shooting it all month telling everyone "Softest load I've ever had!" You get used to it pretty fast though, the 2011 was great, but I still prefer my M&P and it's reliability (hence, the reason I had the 2011)

Also, I've never used lighter springs on mine, I'll actually be ordering everything to do an Open .40 with a Delta Point, so I'm sure I"ll need to mess with springs and slide lightening. However, everything I've read says that no matter what you've done to the slide, the 11 pound springs will not work. Especially if you don't go to the lighter striker springs, which have been reported to give major problems with light strikes. I've never read of problems with 13#'s and up and with the FSS and full comp springs except for the striker, I'm at 2.5#'s on the trigger pull.

Edited January 4, 2013 by partyboy424

[CHA-LEE]

Here is a picture of the Follower in my M&P magazine. I am using a 2-56 cap head screw going in from the under side of the follower. The cap head portion butts up against the front of the mag body and keeps it from biasing forward too much getting stuck between the slide and barrel feed ramp.

Edited January 5, 2013 by CHA-LEE

[CHA-LEE]

Double Tap Post...... Oops!!!

Edited January 5, 2013 by CHA-LEE