S&W Shield 9mm out of battery issues

[fubarjohnnyr]

My son picked up a first gen (new) 9mm Shield last week and we went out this morning to put a few hundred rounds through it. Nice size, nice grip, nice trigger, and shoots point-of-aim rather well.

........but, I would say 1 of out of every 25 rounds (MEN German mil spec ammo) would fail to fire due to the slide/barrel being slightly out of battery. What disturbs me, is that the striker is dropping on the outer edge of the primer while out of battery. Also, I can manually retract the slide just a tiny bit while loaded, and the slide will not return to battery on its own.

Anyone with experience on this issue?

 

[tRidiot]

Never had that with my Shield, it's always been rock solid. That's weird. Was this with different types of ammo? Doesn't sound like it should be an ammo problem, but I'm not any kind of expert. Did your son or you fully clean it before taking it out and relube it, or was it right out of the box?

 

[Gunbuffer]

It’s probably “in battery” ;
ie, in the chamber far enough to allow the barrel to begin to swing upward and lock up there’s no huge safety issue there.
In another way, it’s not severe enough for the shooter to know that it’s not locked up,which is why you pulled the trigger. And you wouldn’t have pulled the trigger if you weren’t trying to pop off a round, and so makes me think the ammo is slightly out of spec or the billet has a different incompatible ogive thats barely hitting the rifling, or similar. Swap ammo w a good domestic maker and if it’s all gtg, then prob solved.

 

[O4L]

I would suspect the ammo. Try some other 9mm brands and see if that solves the problem.

 

[D. Hargrove]

With @Gunbuffer on this one, I believe that is an ammo issue all the way ...

 

[Shadowrider]

You can test it without going back to the range. I haven't watched all of this but the first 3 or 4 minutes cover the plunk test well enough.

 

[fubarjohnnyr]

Thanks for the suggestions gentlemen. I'll get some different ammo varieties through the gun and see what happens.

 

[fubarjohnnyr]

Good news, bad news.

We ran about 300 rounds this morning without issues. Remington 124gr, Tula 115gr steel case, Herters 115gr. I reckon maybe it just needed some break-in to get loosened up.

During disassembly for cleanup, we could not get the slide off the frame. The slide stop spring had sprung out of it's groove inside of the locking block and was protruding up. This interfered with the slide being able to move forward off the frame. This spring has now sprung into a shape that will not keep itself inside that channel when trying to get it back into position. I'll call S&W tomorrow and see if they'll ship me a new spring or two. Not sure how often this problem occurs, after googling I did see some other peeps with the same issue.