Mangled Brass

[Steve4102]

I have a Witness Elite Match 10MM that is beating my brass up pretty good and I was hoping you guys could help me figure out how to fix it.

The pistol is less than a year old. It has a 22lb recoil spring and Grams mag springs and followers. I was doing a little load development with 180gr XTP, Longshot and AA #9. I worked up to 13.5gr of #9 without a hitch. It shot very well, no FTF, no damaged brass, accuracy was very good, but velocity was a little slow, average about 1185fps. Anyhow the problem came when I switched to my Longshot loads. I worked up to 9.2gr of Longshot, this is .3gr under max according to Hodgdon. At 9.2gr velocity averaged about 1285fps and accuracy was good, but some of the brass looked like hell. I also got brass stains on the slide. Here is a picture of one piece of Longshot brass.

It appears that the brass is beating itself up on the slide. So why only with the full house Lonshot loads. You would think that if the recoil spring was to stiff this would happen with other loads as well, especially weaker loads??

Any Ideas??

Thanks

Steve

[CHA-LEE]

I have seen those same brass markings when a slide spring that was too light was used. Try a stiffer slide spring and see if the problem goes away. Otherwise I think your only other option is to tune the ejector finger and extractor spring tension to change the brass ejection angle trajectory when it gets pushed out from the brech face. The ejector finger could have a funky angle on it which forces the spent case down and sideways instead of slightly up and sideways.

Edited October 6, 2009 by CHA-LEE

[bikerburgess]

I agree with cha lee it looks like the brass is hitting the slide on the way out. I have a match in 10mm and I had to trim the ejector back about 1/8 inch trying to get it to throw the brass closer than the next county running 170 pf loads with the load you are talking about the slide speed will be very high so some tuning will be needed. I ended up putting a 40 barrel in my gun and the brass only went 10 feet at the same power factor as the 10 was thowing 30 so I know that the longer 10 brass makes a difference in it ejection

Good luck