Troubleshoot an early Series 80 Colt.

J

John Travis

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It was summer 1980 something. The day dawned like any other. The phone rang. An unfamiliar voice on the other end...the friend of a friend who gave up my number. The guy had a problem with his new to him Series 80 Government Model. "It won't work" is the only description he gave me.

When he arrived, he told me that the gun wouldn't eject an empty case and feed another round...but it wasn't your run of the mill failure to eject/failure to feed. He said that he had another friend watch the gun closely, and the slide didn't appear to move.

?? "uh...wut? It's recoil operated. The slide has to move." I said as I hand cycled the slide slowly.

"Well, it doesn't"

We stepped outside with a few rounds in a magazine to see WTH was up...and sure enough, the slide didn't move. Or at least it didn't appear to move. It moved. It just didn't move very much. About a quarter inch to be exact. I had me some suspicions, but because it could be one of two things...I held my tongue.

Field stripped the gun and there it was. Bubba had rained on his parade and interrupted my morning.

15 minutes later, the pistol was shuckin' and jivin' in proper fashion...and then I gave him the bad news.

What in the name of Mose Browning could stop a slide in its tracks?

Little things. Little things, he was heard mumbling.

On your marks! Get set! Go!
 
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Bubba took the firing pin safety plunger out and the lever that activates it went up into the hole preventing the slide from moving.
 
Since everybody so far has hit all around it, I'll go ahead and spill it.

In the late 7os to about the mid 80s, Colt was taking barrels from a vendor who couldn't seem to get the lower lugs to the correct spec dimensions. The result was that in battery, you could push down on the barrel hood and see the barrel drop a few thousandths. In and of itself, that didn't really hurt anything other than cause a little vertical stringing on target...but, then...Bubba stepped in and things sometimes went haywire.

Gunshow vendors had links of all lengths, and our boy...mistakenly believing that the link was a locking mechanism...decided that long linking the barrel was an excellent way to tighten things up. Most of the time, a link only .002-003 inch longer didn't cause a problem, but there were some pretty long links out there, and Bubba figured that if a little was good, a lot would be gooder.

The result was that while the barrel would drop okay from gravity during a slow hand cycle, it didn't when the gun was fired. Since the link couldn't get the upper barrel lugs vertically disengaged in time to let the slide get past, the barrel was caught between the slide's lugs and the vertical impact surface...and the slide crashed to a halt.

The bad news was that it only took once or twice to cause small impact fractures in the lower lug and start the barrel down the highway to no return, making it a matter of when...not if...the lower lug would fail. I told him to keep a close eye on the barrel lug and to start shopping for a new barrel. As it turns out, the lug started to crack at the junction about 500 rounds later and he caught it before it let go completely. He replaced it with a drop-in Storm Lake and as far as I know, had no further trouble.

The takeaway from this one is that the link's only purpose is getting the barrel out of the slide.
 
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MacEntyre said:
I've always wondered what thought process led to the invention of the link. It would be nice to have heard it in JMB's words.
Click to expand...

Ask and you shall receive.

From the 1910 patents:

On firing, the breech-slide recoils
and carries the barrel rearward until the
rear end of the same, swinging rearward
and downward on the link and pivot-pins,
becomes unlocked from the breech-slide
 
Written like it's obviously how it had oughta work... brilliant that he came up with it in the first place. Do you think it took some noodlin'?

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
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