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Thread: M&P slide cracked at 21K rounds.

  1. #131
    ToddG Guest
    Thanks!

    One more comment, regarding dry-firing.

    With the possible exception of Glock, no company recommends or approves of "excessive" dry-firing a centerfire pistol. All handguns (including Glocks) are subject to a variety of problems if you dry-fire them too much.

    The most common damage is caused to the firing pin block; the firing pin moves farther forward than it should (because there is no primer to stop its forward motion) and causes wear. This can lead to shavings in the firing pin/striker channel (which result in light primer hits) and, eventually, raising a bur on the block which results in the gun not firing.

    It's also possible to get "bounce" of the firing pin (Glocks seem immune to this due to their unique shape), which can raise a bur either on the tip of the firing pin/striker or in the breechface cut for the pin/striker.

    Other guns have unique issues. For example, dry-firing a SIG too much can put undue stress on the firing pin retaining pin, resulting in a cracked pin and possibly a gun that cannot fire.

  2. #132
    ToddG Guest
    Mark? I don't see a mark. No marks here. Move along, nothing to see ... (and thanks again for fixing the windage!)

    Please don't misunderstand my point about service life. I've seen (and even shot) many guns well past 20k rounds. But at a certain point, it becomes acceptable for some percentage of guns to fail. Most LE and military testing only goes to 10k or 20k. While the folks at M4Carbine.net may be exceptions, the typical person is never going to get close to 20k rounds.

    Personally, I don't believe every pre-improved M&P that hits 20k will have this problem. But, I'm not an engineer or a gunsmith. Even if 20k is the service life of the older slides, such a tiny percentage of people will ever reach that point that it's much more economical for Smith simply to replace them as they need to. But it's much more likely that my Smith was an anomaly, just as others have seen Glocks, etc. crack their slides on occasion.

    If you're really bored and care about my opinion about the state of the handgun industry in general, you can read this article.

  3. #133
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    Quote Originally Posted by ToddG View Post
    Other guns have unique issues. For example, dry-firing a SIG too much can put undue stress on the firing pin retaining pin, resulting in a cracked pin and possibly a gun that cannot fire.
    That is exactly what happened to my SIG. I used to dry fire practice all the time. I carried it for over a month between range sessions. Imagine my surprise when it wouldn't fire. Glad I didn't really have to use it.

    I'm sure Smith will figure this out. I'm actually surprised at how few problems there are with the M&Ps. For an entirely new gun, it seems very well thought out. And when there are issues, Smith seems to address them quickly. This is in stark contrast to other manufacturers (I'm looking at you Gaston).

  4. #134
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    Quote Originally Posted by ToddG View Post
    A few thoughts for my first post:

    • The owner of the gun that is pictured in the opening post must be a great guy; we should all donate money to his favorite charity.
    • While I appreciate the sentiment some people put forth about "waiting for a gun to be out a while before I trust it," your thought process is misguided. While you wait five years for the M&P to become seasoned, Glock, SIG, Beretta, and HK are all making changes to their guns (materials, dimensional specifications, subvendors, quality control processes, etc.) that you don't even know about. People see a problem with an M&P and they immediately think, "It's that new car smell ... and I don't like it." See a problem with a Glock and they blame something else. But in both cases, it was either a design, material, or QC problem.
    • The crack occurred during a shooting session but never caused the gun to malfunction or lose accuracy in a noticeable way. It was still working and, I bet, would continue to work for hundreds more rounds. So while it's an ugly breakage, it was not a catastrophic, life-threatening event. Compare this with, say, a Glock takedown lever spring breaking and shutting the whole gun down completely ... a problem that happened to Glocks for more than a decade before they addressed.
    • Though there have been very few cracked M&P slides, most of them have occurred either in the same place as the one pictured in the first post, or they've been the result of people using sight pushers. There is a reason Smith still hasn't released a sight pusher for their gun after two years. They've broken a lot of slides testing different designs.
    • As few broken slides they've seen occur "in the wild," Smith has already made a design change to the slide to alleviate (or hopefully eliminate) the problem.
    • Sadly, the industry standard for major component life is 20,000 rounds. While most guns will go longer, 20k is considered an acceptable point at which parts failure is attributed to wear rather than defect.
    • Someone posted a hope that Smith would get the whole gun back to see what 21k rounds in three months did to the gun overall ... I believe that is exactly what is going to happen; the whole pistol is being replaced.
    Good post and read your article. I do no doubt on any of it. IMHO, companies like Glock tend to fix one problem, but create a new one as they try and find a cheaper way to do things.

    One of the things I like as a S&W LE Dealer, is that the guns get shot (a lot). I have even had a customer accuse me of selling used M&P's because of how dirty the weapon was.

    S&W has found a sight pusher that they like and it will be available by the end of this month.

    C4
    Last edited by C4IGrant; 01-15-08 at 09:55.

  5. #135
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    I like the new guy. He makes sense like my brother Lumpy does.

    Marc, slide over and let the guy have a seat and stay a while.
    Protego quod vallo.
    Si vis pacem para bellum.

  6. #136
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hawkeye View Post
    I like the new guy. He makes sense like my brother Lumpy does.

    Marc, slide over and let the guy have a seat and stay a while.
    Hey, I'm just glad he signed on here at M4C. He will be an asset to this site.

  7. #137
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    I must have dry-fired my M&P45 close to 2,000 times by now.

    Hey, at least the trigger smoothed out!

  8. #138
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    Quote Originally Posted by ToddG View Post
    A few thoughts for my first post:
    [*] While I appreciate the sentiment some people put forth about "waiting for a gun to be out a while before I trust it," your thought process is misguided. While you wait five years for the M&P to become seasoned, Glock, SIG, Beretta, and HK are all making changes to their guns (materials, dimensional specifications, subvendors, quality control processes, etc.) that you don't even know about. People see a problem with an M&P and they immediately think, "It's that new car smell ... and I don't like it." See a problem with a Glock and they blame something else. But in both cases, it was either a design, material, or QC problem.
    Thanks for posting, Todd, and welcome. Good to see you here.

    I agree with the bulk of your list, but less so the above. I count myself as one disinclined to be a guinea pig (beyond T&E, beta testing, etc) with new designs.

    It's true that manufacturers make tweaks to a design throughout it's existence. Most are undisclosed by the manufacturer and unknown by the consumer (until performance anomaly). However, they tend to be less frequent, less substantial in form, and less dramatic in effect than those made to a new offering early in its life.

    This is by necessity, of course, as an issues early in a design life must be corrected quickly, else sales and reputation suffer.

    An established design is indeed "seasoned", and will bear an anomalous result of a tweak to material, dims, process, or QC much better.

    It's that seasoning that makes the existing design more worthy of trust, than the newcomer.

    I'm glad for new and innovating things, and the refinement of the existing. I just marvel at the willingness some have to sign on to some so early, and the things at stake when they do.

    (No reference to, or swipe at, a specific brand or model expressed or implied.)
    2012 National Zumba Endurance Champion
    الدهون القاع الفتيات لك جعل العالم هزاز جولة الذهاب

  9. #139
    ToddG Guest

    Cool

    Quote Originally Posted by Skintop911 View Post
    However, they tend to be less frequent, less substantial in form, and less dramatic in effect than those made to a new offering early in its life.
    My experience says otherwise. Without naming companies, I've personally witnessed, been involved in, or suffered from all of the following on guns that had been on the market at least five years:

    • Company changes its rear sight notch dimensions to accommodate new vendor. However, some old-dimension sights are still in inventory, which get installed on some guns. Result: rear sights falling off the gun within the first few magazines of shooting.
    • Company decides, for cost savings, to change the material on its trigger bar from carbon steel to stainless. However, they don't do adequate testing and their heat-treat process is flawed. Result: trigger bar which are too soft and quickly wear out, leaving the shooter with a 20# trigger pull if he's lucky, and a gun that won't fire if he's not.
    • Company decides, purely for cost savings, to change vendors for a recoil spring. Recoil spring is not adequately tested, however, and has a tendency to induce various malfunctions. It takes over a year of customer complaints for the company to admit the problem and start using a different recoil spring. Major LE customers are informed and offered free replacement springs, but the average consumer is never told. Result: a recoil spring which may fail much earlier than expected causing various stoppages.
    • Company uses an inexpensive process to plate a critical internal part against corrosion. Some of these parts flake, causing bits of the plating material to lodge themselves into critical areas of the gun. Result: light primer hits and guns that don't go off.
    • Company, for cost savings purposes, decides to change from an established European supplier to a much less expensive one for barrel production. The new barrels are not made of the same steel, formed the same way, rifled the same way, etc. Customers are not told of this change. Result: you have a brand new barrel design in your "seasoned" 20-year-old gun design.
    • Company is well aware that its pistols have an unacceptable tendency to fire out of battery, but rather than address the problem they instead let marketing and sales deal with it by blaming the shooter and/or ammo every time. (gee, wonder what company that is!)


    I could go on almost forever with this stuff. The fact is, a "new" gun like the M&P has no more problems in a 2-year period than an established gun typically does. As others have pointed out, if this had been a G19 that cracked a slide the result would simply have been, "Huh, that's weird ... that almost never happens." But because it happened on the M&P, people instead assume it's some kind of major inherent design flaw.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving the M&P (or Smith) a pass on this. I'm annoyed it happened, and I've made that very clear directly to some key people at the company. I expect I'll bend an ear or two at SHOT, as well.

    But it's not the first cracked slide I've seen, nor is it the first gun (new or "established") that I've managed to break just be shooting it a little bit.

    Guns break. Sometimes it's from abuse. Sometimes it's from wear and tear. Sometimes it's a material or design defect. Sometimes it's due to poor QC. But whatever makes it happens, they break. Life is hard.

  10. #140
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    My pistol arrived at Smith & Wesson this morning. We'll see what they say.

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