300 more rounds through the gun tonight - and we have a malfunction! Well, not really a malfunction of the gun, exactly:
At about 100 rounds left tonight I started to notice my accuracy degrading. Chalked it up to being tired and decided I’d just finish out the remaining rounds I’d brought with me to the range. Then with about 25 rounds left out of the 300, I took a shot, felt a small
*plink* on my forehead, looked down and saw one of the optic screws on the concrete.
Originally I figured it’d just come loose and backed out, but on further inspection the screw sheared off before rudely tapping me in the forehead. That means there’s still part of the screw left in the slide:
That’ll have to be a problem for my gunsmith to fix. I believe the culprit is the use of a filler plate to mount the RMR-footprint 508T to the DPP-footprint slide cut. While filler plates are supposed to be better than adapter plates at avoiding exactly this issue, this experience has been enough to make me lose trust in the use of plates altogether. Which means I need to replace the 508T with a DPP-footprint optic, and there’s only one such pistol dot on the market I trust for a serious defensive use pistol:
I had been considering getting the SCS-320 over a 508T for this pistol when I first bought the gun, but at the time the optic was still brand new to the market with very little testing information available and nobody even had them in stock. I’ve seen enough at this point to give one a shot riding the slide of this workhorse.
So, right now the Roci is sitting in my safe unloaded. When I get the SCS in I’ll take it to my gunsmith to remove the broken screw, mount the new optic, and zero it with the 147gr HSTs.
After some consideration I’ve decided NOT to qualify this as a malfunction for the purposes of this 2,000 round no cleaning/no lube test, as the pistol still functioned flawlessly and this was a failure of the optic mounting system. I still blasted through the remaining 25ish rounds I had left and still not a single feeding/cycling error. That means the gun has fed and fired 1,200 rounds completely error-free since the last cleaning or lubrication. The optic screw lasted just shy of 3,200 rounds before shearing off.
Frustrating, but this is why it’s important to test your own equipment and not just trust online reviews/experts. I’ll get the new optic in soon, get it mounted to the gun, and carry on throwing more teflon-coated tungsten steel slugs at five thousand meters per seco - er…Bullets. Throwing more
bullets downrange…
I should read (listen to) Leviathan Wakes again…
Total rounds through the pistol: 3,200
Rounds since last cleaned/lubed: 1,200
Malfunctions: 0