Henry Rifle Forums

Made a couple of fixes to the little beast yesterday and went to the range to get more rounds thru it and see if it would cycle some hollow point ammo.
First fix was to polish the feed ramp on the barrel to get it nice and slick. Second was to try to get the front sight to stay tight in place as it had loosened up a lot after the first shots. Tried simple first by placing a long piece of .002 shim stock under the sight base and after a tiny bit of anti sieze on the dovetail ends I tapped it back in place. Added the bit of lube so it would not gall up on the dovetail cuts. The sight felt to be tight in place.

Then I picked up some factory hollow point ammo...Speer Gold Dot 230 gr Personal Protection for Short Barrel pistols and supposed to be good stuff.
Also a box of Federal 230 gr. Punch Self Defense Hollow Point ammo and brought along my 230 gr. Xtreme plated hardball plus a box of Speer 230 gr. RNFP training ammo.

Results.... the BBR would happily run my 230 gr RN plated load with no issues. The Speer Traing Ammo with that .250 diameter flat nose did not feed well with jams. However the Speer Gold Dot and the Federal Punch HP did run well with only a couple times of having to bump the slide that last bit of travel. Now tried my Hornady 230 XTP loads again and same trouble with feeding as before. Seems this pistol does not like flat point ammo with a angular profile instead of a more rounded side shape.

Both this pistol and my Springfield XDE have same style barrel ramp and the XDE ate everything I loaded from day one.
Anyway the front sight on the BBR DID move over to the right about 1/16th of an inch after todays shooting and now I will install it again with Loctite Green High Temp and will stake the edges of the sight base in four corners with a punch. The blast thru the barrel ports must have something to do with it. The little beast does shoot well though!

The operation of the 1911 style pistol is pretty complex. There is a lot going on in getting in round out of the magazine and into the chamber. One of the critical items is extractor tension. Too much and the round can't slide up under it resulting is jam on the ramp. Too little and the extractor looses control of the fired case and you get stove pipes on ejection.

That's just one of about a dozen things that can cause the jams you're describing. I would make sure my extractor was tensioned correctly, have good magazine springs and experiment with COL on those XTP loads. You might also try the other recoil spring the factory provided. Wouldn't be the first time a bad one got in during production.

If all that still fails it might be time for a good 1911 smith to look at it. If you go this route make sure you ask around about one that works on them regularly. There are too many shoemakers calling themselves 1911 gunsmiths.

Paul

It feeds the round ball ammo fine and was happy to see it run those Speer and Federal hollow point loads. What is different about the XTP bullet shape is it is more of a straight line angular profile other than a radius shape on the side. Will run it a while and see how it progresses.
Got the stronger spring for the Para 13 round magazine and installed that. Will see if it runs with that mag since before it would not with the standard
round nose ammo. The old spring was weaker than the factory 10 round mag. Now on to welding that front sight in place!!