9mm handloads hard to manually eject

Jmccracken1214

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  • Dec 10, 2018
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    Thomasville, NC
    I just got a dillon 550 the other day, loaded up some ammo to try this weekend. I put a round in a mag of my glock 19 and 17, racked it, and ejected it... smooth...

    Do the same on my shadow 2 and its hard to pull the slide back to eject the round, but not with factory ammo. Is the bullet seated too long for this pistol or what? Im inline with the hornady book for length with 124gr fmj
     
    Based on my personal experience with two CZ pistols (TSO, limited-edition 75) and a bunch of Glock and Sig service pistols, your Shadow is going to be far less tolerant of out-of-spec cartridges than your Glocks. The latter are designed, first and foremost, to be reliable, so they'll happily eat cartridges that are likely to badly jam your Shadow.

    My sole source of 9mm reloading brass is what I hoover up from the range, so it can be anything from once-fired quality brass to cases so beat up t's hard to read the headstamp. Firing cases, especially repeatedly as reloads, in service pistols expands the web past SAAMI spec, and your Dillon won't resize the case web (nor will any other press/die combo short of commercial roller dies). In my painful experience, it's these cases that can cause the hardest-to-clear jams.

    Do yourself a huge favor and get yourself a Wilson case gauge and test every round that comes off your new 550 (mine's almost 25 years old). Reloads that don't cleanly drop into it should be put into a "Glock jar." I also mark those rounds with a sharpie so, if I pick them up again after a range session, I dump them into the recycle bin.

    Edit: I've also found my CZ chamber throats to be shorter than the Glocks, so rounds that chamber cleanly in the Glocks might jam the bullet into the lands in the CZ.
     
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    Based on my personal experience with two CZ pistols (TSO, limited-edition 75) and a bunch of Glock and Sig service pistols, your Shadow is going to be far less tolerant of out-of-spec cartridges than your Glocks. The latter are designed, first and foremost, to be reliable, so they'll happily eat cartridges that are likely to badly jam your Shadow.

    My sole source of 9mm reloading brass is what I hoover up from the range, so it can be anything from once-fired quality brass to cases so beat up t's hard to read the headstamp. Firing cases, especially repeatedly as reloads, in service pistols expands the web past SAAMI spec, and your Dillon won't resize the case web (nor will any other press/die combo short of commercial roller dies). In my painful experience, it's these cases that can cause the hardest-to-clear jams.

    Do yourself a huge favor and get yourself a Wilson case gauge and test every round that comes off your new 550 (mine's almost 25 years old). Reloads that don't cleanly drop into it should be put into a "Glock jar." I also mark those rounds with a sharpie so, if I pick them up again after a range session, I dump them into the recycle bin.

    Edit: I've also found my CZ chamber throats to be shorter than the Glocks, so rounds that chamber cleanly in the Glocks might jam the bullet into the lands in the CZ.
    Would a lee "bulge buster" die help with this situation? I have used one of these for .40 s&w fired in glocks to smooth out the bulge left after firing, but I'm not sure if they offer one for 9mm.
     
    Would a lee "bulge buster" die help with this situation? I have used one of these for .40 s&w fired in glocks to smooth out the bulge left after firing, but I'm not sure if they offer one for 9mm.
    I'm not talking about bulged case walls - I'm talking about the web, the solid part of the case head through which the flash hole is punched. The web gets pounded and flattened/pushed outward on firing; generous chambers and repeated reloading accelerate the process.

    I had a good conversation about it with one of the guys at Dillon because I too wanted to resize the case head as well as the walls. Bottom line is standard reloading dies won't resize the case web. Dillon guy told me only commercial roller dies are capable of it. Tapered cases like 9x19mm, .380 ACP, .45 ACP headspace on the case mouth; if the case web expands enough, the case is jammed into the chamber and sticks at the web. They can be a beast to get loose.
     
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    Lee makes a U die with an undersized carbide ring which sizes the web back to spec. They are cheap. A roll sizer is good too. I have a CasePro. But I load single stage and my dies size well enough that it’s not necessary to roll size the brass.
     
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    I’ve purposely shot and reloaded the same 9mm brass 30x just to see what it did.... and shot it through my CZs. The only thing I saw was the cases ended up slightly hourglass shaped before shooting thanks to the resizing process. They expand right back to normal size after firing. I run all of the different round nose weights at an oal of 1.125 without issues. After that test I don’t even worry about the cases anymore. Just keep reloading them!
     
    I’ve purposely shot and reloaded the same 9mm brass 30x just to see what it did.... and shot it through my CZs. The only thing I saw was the cases ended up slightly hourglass shaped before shooting thanks to the resizing process. They expand right back to normal size after firing. I run all of the different round nose weights at an oal of 1.125 without issues. After that test I don’t even worry about the cases anymore. Just keep reloading them!
    Did you repeatedly shoot any of that brass in service pistols such as Glocks, Sigs, etc. before putting it in the CZs?

    I agree that 9mm brass can be reloaded a gazillion times - if it's run in the same pistol or pistols with the same chamber profile.

    I had brass I KNOW I had purchased in the late '70s and '80s and was still loading for my Sig P228 and a couple of Glocks in the 2000s time frame. It was when I bought a full-dress 1911-platform pistol in 9mm and had it jam so tight with reloads in that old brass that it had to be [gawdawfully carefully] pounded open that I learned all chambers are not created equally. I traded that 1911 for a CZ Target Sport Orange and discovered it was even tighter - at a match. Fortunately one of my squad mates was a huge dude with a grip strong enough to pull the "inside-out" TSO slide out without resorting to a rubber mallet.

    I once thought brass was brass and I didn't need to gauge my handloads. Thought that way for 30 years, based on actual experience. Then I learned differently. Now every pistol round I load goes into a gauge before it goes into a firearm.
     
    Did you repeatedly shoot any of that brass in service pistols such as Glocks, Sigs, etc. before putting it in the CZs?

    I agree that 9mm brass can be reloaded a gazillion times - if it's run in the same pistol or pistols with the same chamber profile.

    I had brass I KNOW I had purchased in the late '70s and '80s and was still loading for my Sig P228 and a couple of Glocks in the 2000s time frame. It was when I bought a full-dress 1911-platform pistol in 9mm and had it jam so tight with reloads in that old brass that it had to be [gawdawfully carefully] pounded open that I learned all chambers are not created equally. I traded that 1911 for a CZ Target Sport Orange and discovered it was even tighter - at a match. Fortunately one of my squad mates was a huge dude with a grip strong enough to pull the "inside-out" TSO slide out without resorting to a rubber mallet.

    I once thought brass was brass and I didn't need to gauge my handloads. Thought that way for 30 years, based on actual experience. Then I learned differently. Now every pistol round I load goes into a gauge before it goes into a firearm.
    All my reloads get shot through roughly 20 different 9mm weapons of all different makes and models. Most of which are “service” pistols. I guess I too have been lucky all these years. It wouldn’t hurt me to get a gauge.

    I’ve only had 1 single round have a problem in a pistol that I could attribute to the brass, and that was in a Springfield XDM 5.25 Match. That thing was a bugger to get open!