Wednesday Windage: Test Your Carry Ammo! UPDATED!

 Everyone who carries has probably heard the advice to practice a bit with their carry ammo, with the firearms that you will be carrying. Rotating ammo is a good idea, too, so none of your ammo dies from old age and gun oil.  I recently tried some Federal Punch .22 Long Rifle ammo in my Ruger LCP II.  The little LCP II slips in and out of a pocket easily, so I often have it with me. These little guns can dry out quickly in a pocket, so you must clean and lube them regularly to keep them running. Mine runs great on CCI Mini Mags and Stingers. During practice sessions I also feed it Remington Thunderbolts, Golden Bullets, and various Federal long rifle rounds.  The LCP is broken in and it runs reliably....

...until I tried Federal Punch .22 LR.  The punch ammo, which runs fine in my Mk III and Mk IV pistols and 10/22s will not cycle in the LCP. I had to manually extract nearly every fired case. It took a bit of looking and figuring, but what I see is that the Punch cases are not just crimped into a groove of the bullets, the case mouth is ironed in and is thinned down in the process.  Federal must be using a rotating crimping tool to make the crimp hold extra firmly. That ironed-down case mouth is then folding out so it drags in the chamber.  Even more odd, the LCP II chamber is tighter than the chambers of my Mk Pistols. A fired case from the Mks will not fit into the chamber of the LCP.  It is an unexpected problem, but one I can live with because Punch works fine in other firearms.  Check out the photos and you can see what is happening.  I plan to shoot a bit of video tomorrow, so check back and see if the problem repeats on camera for us!

Fired Punch case, unfired Punch, Mini-Mag.

Punch crimp closeup.

Punch fired case mouth closeup.

UPDATE: We had some failures to eject Federal Punch cases with the little LCP II in .22 Long Rifle, so here is a function test with a different batch of Punch ammo, and comparing function with other .22 firearms and ammo.