Monday mornings I usually go to town with D&L for drinking water and groceries. But this morning they had rather more extensive chores and I didn’t feel like spending hours sitting around. So I gave D my empty bottles and refill money and came home. Which gave me an opportunity to put 80 rounds through the Tracker without fear of spooking horses and upsetting neighbors. Well, the Tracker is kinda loud…
I was mostly practicing double action (fairly) rapid fire at 12 yards, using my usual reloads, and was pleasantly surprised to find absolutely no repeat of the earlier timing problems. Rapid, double action, hard primers are the three indicators, but it didn’t happen once in eighty rounds. Which surprised me, is all – doesn’t mean the pistol spontaneously healed or anything.
I did learn a new way a revolver can jam. Regular readers know that although I’ve been carrying one for a few years now, I’m not really a revolver guy. And I’m continually amused by all the ways mine have given the lie to the old saw that revolvers, whatever their other shortcomings, are just naturally more reliable than autos. They are in fact complicated bits of precision machining that don’t really deal well with dirt. We’ve got lots of dirt around here, this is the desert. And it turns out that just a very little grit between the cylinder and the extractor star will prevent the extractor from fully seating – which will in turn make it impossible to close the cylinder.
Also, Ghost is a complete wuss about gunfire – but we knew that.
In all I continue to be pleased with the Tracker. It does occasionally make me wish I could afford a more expensive gun of exactly the same type, but it is so much easier to shoot well than the 431 was.
Doesn’t even have to be “dirt”. Just a particle or two of unburned powder can do the trick . . . or a tiny bit of lead shaved off the side of a bullet.