Improved reliability when I remove some wax from .22 ammo

Jayne

Jayne

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My TSG .22 upper with an element 2 on a G19 lower cycles about 80% of the time when using CCI std vel and Agrula subsonic and/or "pistol match" (which seems subsonic by the lack of a 'crack'). Sometimes I get failures to extract with the Agrula stuff, and sometimes I get failures to go into battery with all of it (rounds get wedged half way into the chamber and the bullet gets knocked a little loose in the case neck).

I've not tried it with the supersonic they recommend because that defeats the purpose of the can and would mean I couldn't shoot in the yard without annoying the neighbors.

Looks like some of the rounds seem to be hanging up in the mag, the wax on the bullet nose was dragging on the front of the mag and thought maybe that's the problem, they're not popping up into position in the mag to feed right?

Just using my finger nail I scratched the wax off 20 of each type of round and loaded them up in the mags alternating types. I had one stovepipe on round #2, but the other 39 rounds cycled perfectly. It's never run that well before.

I'll try the experiment again, but what am I risking removing that wax from the top 1/3 of the round?
 
polish the feed ramp :D

Scraping it off, you're not hurting a thing but seems tedious. Wax is a lubricant so not sure why it would hang up on a smooth feed ramp.

So seriously, since it's not a 1911, polish it up with flitz and see if that helps. Helps a SIG mosquito tremendously, and my SR22 came with a mirror finished one.
 
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I've heard that some people put some boxes (like the mini-mag type boxes) in the car to melt off any extra wax and that seems to "fix" the problem.
 
BurnedOutGeek said:
I've heard that some people put some boxes (like the mini-mag type boxes) in the car to melt off any extra wax and that seems to "fix" the problem.
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I'll do this in the summer. Not sure if it helps. Also before my rimfire matches I've been taking out the minimags still attached in the plastic separater and rub he nose of the bullets across a rag.

I'd start with the feed ramp polishing as noted above though.
 
Geerubb said:
I'll do this in the summer. Not sure if it helps. Also before my rimfire matches I've been taking out the minimags still attached in the plastic separater and rub he nose of the bullets across a rag.

I'd start with the feed ramp polishing as noted above though.
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It's still summer, you have till midnight.
 
BurnedOutGeek said:
I've heard that some people put some boxes (like the mini-mag type boxes) in the car to melt off any extra wax and that seems to "fix" the problem.
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Microwave?*

*DO NOT DO THIS!!
 
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The feed ramp is nice and polished.

Here's where I think the wax is coming in to play. Right mag has reduced wax on the bullets and you can see how the first round sits up in the mag. On the left is full wax bullets, and (not every time) but you can see how the noses of the rounds are each dragging on the front of the mag and the top round is no longer all the way to the top even though the follower is all the way up. Every time it fires the rounds get moved around again, and another chance to not line up correctly? I'm thinking this could make it feed funny. I've got 4 mags, they all act like this.

wax_1.jpg

The other wax idea I've got is that the extra wax makes the bullet too large and it just hangs up going into the chamber, such as this:

wax_2.jpg

You take that round off, scrape some wax off, reseat the bullet straight in the case and it will then feed from the mag.

With the extraction failures, perhaps wax builds up in the chamber and makes the cases stick? Not sure on that one because it never happens with the CCI even when mixed in every other round with the Agrula. It's always an Agrula that gets stuck.
 
I have wiped excess wax with a rag, and it is tedious. Considered putting them in a vibratory tumbler, but saw where someone else tried it and all they got for their trouble was waxy rounds with embedded walnut.
 
Can be a problem. Some batches seem to get over waxed.

I like the lube they use on the commie Wolf Match for this reason. More oily and less waxy.
I tend to use higher velocity on auto guns because it seems to give it a little more kick in extracting and a little more umph when pushing them in. Use MiniMag for this reason.
But have gotten Minimags that were overly waxy, too.
 
On a conference call I had some time to kill so I de-waxed 40 rounds and fired them this afternoon. 0 failures to extract, 2 failures to feed. When I popped those rounds out and re-squared up the bullets and cleaned a little more off the edges of the bullet and put them back into the mag they fed OK the 2nd time. That's significantly better than I'm experiencing with the wax on, so I think I have a new tv watching activity, de-waxing .22.

Now my S&W compact does not give a crap about this at all, it runs 100% with everything so far. It just lacks the poor glock ergos and trigger that I'm training with on the conversion or I would simply use it all the time.
 
Jayne said:
On a conference call I had some time to kill so I de-waxed 40 rounds and fired them this afternoon. 0 failures to extract, 2 failures to feed. When I popped those rounds out and re-squared up the bullets and cleaned a little more off the edges of the bullet and put them back into the mag they fed OK the 2nd time. That's significantly better than I'm experiencing with the wax on, so I think I have a new tv watching activity, de-waxing .22.

Now my S&W compact does not give a crap about this at all, it runs 100% with everything so far. It just lacks the poor glock ergos and trigger that I'm training with on the conversion or I would simply use it all the time.
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You may consider having your chamber reamed a hair. A lot of .22 chambers seem to be tighter than necessary.
 
TacSol chambers are tight I had to send a PacLite back to them to ream the barrel. I was having the same style issues.
Zero issues after chamber was reamed. Contact Colt at Tactical Solutions.
 
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I'd have to say I read this last night and got to thinking. Prior to my can I ran just bulk through it with no issues other than the occasional nofire after primer strike.

Now my truck 22 is a 10/22 with Hogue stock, a tacsol barrel, and an Element 2 on the end. I've radiused the back end of bolt (rimfirecentral) and polished the insides. Normally I keep 4-5 boxes of CCI quiet and a couple of Standard in the truck to do my dirty work around the farm. Well I was running out last weekend and picked up some new CCI quiet from Academy on Thu and decided to test this theory today. I also wanted to get some dope on the quiet vs the standard which I had already. I shot 2 boxes (CCI quiet) that have been in the truck for most of the summer and had only one stuck case I let the barrel cool and went and got 2 boxes of new CCI quiet (it hasn't had the hot truck treatment). I had 1-2 stuck cases on each 10rd mag. After this I used a bore snake and cleaner to clean the camber some (think emergency cleaning, and this thing has eaten a couple hundred rounds lately) and tried to shoot another box of new CCI quiet but it continued to produce stuck cases. I think there could be an issue. That said with the standard I don't have any issues. I did notice the bullets are a bit different in design between the quiet and standard yet the same weight.

On a side note my groups for the CCI quiet stink and have fliers left and right vs standard which is a golf ball at 30yds after 30 rounds. Anyone have this issue? I know if I want to drill tacks I need to go to a bolt.
 
When I have this problem, I put a drop of oil on the nose of just one round in the mag. After a half dozen or so mags, the feeding issues go away. Maybe the oil cuts some of the wax build up in the mag & chamber.
 
I took some of the fired brass from the tacsol and put it in the S&W. It drops in the S&W but won't even drop back in the tacsol, so that makes me think the S&W chamber is larger. The S&W also has a much better extractor, it pulls the cases right out when cycled manually. The tacsol extractor won't even pull it's own fired brass back out of the chamber. Huh.
 
I was stuck on a long conference call and daydreaming about how to remove wax from the rounds more efficiently, and really just what needed to be done. I got the crazy idea to use a spent casing to scrape the widest part of the bullet and clean it off, like this:

wax_3.jpg

On this particular one you can see some of the wax scraped off to the outside.

I did this on 3 types of ammo (CCI Std, Agrula pistol match, S&B subsonic) and although it's only a 50 round test, I had only 1 failure and it was a stove pipe instead of a FTF and it was with the lightest ammo (S&B). That's not bad considering how little work it takes to clean up the rounds this way. It's the same motion as using a primer pocket cleaner. Going to give it a longer try and see if my results stay this good.
 
Jayne said:
I was stuck on a long conference call and daydreaming about how to remove wax from the rounds more efficiently, and really just what needed to be done. I got the crazy idea to use a spent casing to scrape the widest part of the bullet and clean it off, like this:

View attachment 24386

On this particular one you can see some of the wax scraped off to the outside.

I did this on 3 types of ammo (CCI Std, Agrula pistol match, S&B subsonic) and although it's only a 50 round test, I had only 1 failure and it was a stove pipe instead of a FTF and it was with the lightest ammo (S&B). That's not bad considering how little work it takes to clean up the rounds this way. It's the same motion as using a primer pocket cleaner. Going to give it a longer try and see if my results stay this good.
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I would use that exact same motion...only with a emery cloth wrapped screw driver right into the chamber!

But I wouldn't recommend anybody else actually doing that....
 
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