Found solution to FTF and failure to return to battery on CW 380

[tigman250]

Bought a CW 380 in December, I shot 200 rounds through it in the first couple outings, 100 rounds of Remington and 100 of Fiocchi. The Fiocchi was terrible, it fell short of battery about 90% of the time, the Remington ran "better" but still failed at least 30% of the time. The problem seemed to be the extractor, when the round was at an angle going into the chamber it was binding on the hook of the extractor, the Fiocchi rims were .015" thicker than the Remingtons and both were gouged from the extractor. Originally I tried simply deburring and softening the sharp corners on the extractor, this defiantly helped but failure to return to battery was still a huge problem. I wanted to try adding a little more clearance between the breech face and extractor hook but the extractor was already pretty minimal so I didn't want to machine anything off the hook, and removing material from the breech face is not an option, after some thought (and buying a spare extractor!) I decided to remove some material off of the front of the pin located at the rear of the extractor which would allow the extractor to move forward. I removed about .015" of material and I am happy to report that after 100 rounds (50 Fiocchi and 50 Remingtons) I had zero, thats right ZERO FTF and failure to return to battery! Just a lack of clearance, the gap between the extractor hook and breech face was too tight to allow the shell to tip in as it was stripped from the mag on it's way into the chamber. I still need a full range trip with a couple hundred rounds to be sure but going from such a high failure rate to zero I'm pretty sure I can call this thing fixed.

[kwh]

Thanks for the post. Good diagnostics.

[b4uqzme]

good post. Hope the Kahr engineers are reading this.

[TennSCN]

The round lug on the back of the extractor?

[tigman250]

The round lug on the back of the extractor?

Yes, you remove material from the front side of the round lug. This allows the extractor to move forward creating more space between the hook and breech face

[Robert1]

Have a picture? It would be helpful.

Yes, you remove material from the front side of the round lug. This allows the extractor to move forward creating more space between the hook and breech face

[BEARDOG]

Nice job on your fix tigman! Please let us know how it works after some more testing.

Fiocchi has been a known issue for most people in their Kahr 380's. I sorted out all my Fiocchi brass before I even fired any of my reloads in my CW380. It has run 100% with the mixed headstamp brass from all the other manufactures, but your mod sounds like a easy fix for the problem.

[tigman250]

Have a picture? It would be helpful.

I knew I was going to get spanked for not including a picture, lets just say I am better at trouble shooting mechanical things than navigating forums. I will post up some pictures when I figure out how, I have not used a file sharing site in probably 10 years and all the ones I use either are no longer around or are pay sites and I don't care to do a paid membership to post 2 pictures a year haha! It will be later today or tomorrow.....

[SlowBurn]

I knew I was going to get spanked for not including a picture, lets just say I am better at trouble shooting mechanical things than navigating forums. I will post up some pictures when I figure out how, I have not used a file sharing site in probably 10 years and all the ones I use either are no longer around or are pay sites and I don't care to do a paid membership to post 2 pictures a year haha! It will be later today or tomorrow.....

Thanks very much for this thread.

I'm mechanically challenged so I'd really like to see the pix. If you have a smart phone, you can take pictures with that and use Tapatalk to access KahrTalk. Makes it really easy to upload pictures directly from the phone to the forum. If not, load the photos from the camera onto your computer. Then, when drafting your post or reply, click on the picture frame thingy in the top margin of the draft. You have to navigate to where the picture is on your drive, and remember to click "upload" after you select the picture file and before you post, but it works fine.

Please, when you next test the CW380 out, try using a seven round spare mag (if you have one) fully loaded with a round already in the chamber. From what I've read here recently that seems to be the acid test. I just tried it and did have a couple of problems which I didn't experience otherwise (I have the same gun bought at the same time). If that works, (and if you'll clue us how you removed the material) I'll give it a try. Otherwise, gun's new and I don't have your mechanical skills so I'm just sending it in.

[berettabone]

The Fiocchi ammo is also longer than most fmj ammo......................................

[tigman250]

and to think I thought taptalk was just an annoying pop up, here is the pic, it's my first time posting with taptalk so if something goes haywire please be gentle!

I have some diamond coated stones that I used to remove the material, I didnt check it to see if it was hard or not or if a file would cut it or not. Beginning dimension was .115" and because the Fiocchi were .015" thicker that was the amount I decided to start with, my pin now measures .100" from front to back (from the area where the pen is pointing to the opposite side). I tried to get a pucture at the point that it used to hang up but no matter how much I rode the slide forward I couldn't get it to stop anymore. I do need to put more shots down range but because of the dramatic difference in performance (zero failures from 90% failures) and the fact that the slide now chambers effortlessly I'm pretty confident it's fixed. I have not shot it with a extended mag, I bought it for deep concealment so all the spare mags I have are 6 round so I can't test that theory out for you but like I just said I'm pretty confident its fixed. If anyone needs any more photos let me know.

Kahr, if you are hiring for R&D let me know LOL!!






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[tony k]

I've got my cw45 at kahr right now for a failure to feed issue. I'm pretty convinced that the problem is the extractor. It might be something like yours. Thanks for the great post!

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[SlowBurn]

Thanks very much. Good post

[tigman250]

I am calling this a 100% fix for the FTF, extraction and out of battery stuff that was affecting my CW380. I have a couple hundred more rounds through it with ZERO failures of any kind.

here is a recap for those that don't care to wade through my previous babbling and in case I forgot to mention anything previously. The Fiocchi ammo would not run at all, probably 90% failure. The Remington was better but still had 10 maybe 20% failure. Because the problem was obviously ammo related I began measuring all the differences between all the 380 ammo I could get my hands on. The biggest thing I noticed was the Fiocchi rim was .015" thicker than all the other ammo, (I originally blamed the issue with short battery on the funny ring Fiocchi has rolled in the middle of their brass.....oops) I began to hand cycle the different rounds through the gun and realized the problem was really with all ammo and it occurred when the round was trying to slide up under the extractor, so I turned my attention to it and it's components. I then noticed that even when you forced the slide closed on a Fiocchi the extractor stuck out farther than on other brands of ammo (this is when I started measuring rim thickness) the extractor was not able to get a hold on the brass because it was too thick, this defiantly explained why the gun would not extract Fiocchi ammo LOL! Because the extractor was so tight to the breech face the round didn't have enough room to tip up behind it out of the mag creating a binding situation which explains the difficulty getting it into battery. By removing the .015" off of the extractor pin that allowed the extractor .015" more clearance between it and the breech face giving even the chubby Fiocchi the room it needs to tip up and allow the gun to complete it's cycle trouble free. Hope this info is able to help someone else out!

[OnTop]

Excellent post. Thanks OP for the info.

OT