doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Winchester 23 fails to fire

I was shooting skeet today with a Winchester 23 (.410) and things went fine until the low house 7 on the second round. The left barrel failed to fire, though I could hear a faint click. The shell had the faintest mark on the primer. I opened and recocked the gun, move the unfired shell to the right barrel and had the same thing happen - a faint click, no boom. I finished with another gun.

Back in the clubhouse I opened and closed the gun a couple times, went outside and got it to fire normally again.

On the third round of skeet, the same thing happened again at low house 7 (the others thought this was hilarious).

My thought is that there is probably some dirt in and around the firing pin hole, but I am wondering if any of you have had a similar experience with their M23.

Thanks for reading.

Are you sure it was the gun and not the ammo? Too deeply seated primers are common with factory ammo, and can cause this. A crushed rim on a round can allow the shell to "seat" deeper in the chamber than normal and will also cause this. The fact that the same shell did not fire with both barrels lends toward those possibilities.

When you got it to fire normally back at the clubhouse was it with a different shell?

SRH

Stan - I should have swapped out the shell on the spot, but didn't. When the gun seemed to be working again and I took it out for a test fire, I used the five remaining shells that I would have shot if the gun had not malfunctioned. The fail-to-fire shell was among those. When the gun was messing up, it did not sound as though the hammers for either barrel were falling very hard.

I still have the fail-to-fire shell from the second incident and it seems normal in every respect.

Crud and varnish from oxidized oil. Clean it with a solvent wash (stock off receiver, let sit overnight in a coffee can full of acetone), blow out with airgun, LIGHTLY re-oil, blow out again.
JR

I agree with John, that cleaning should be the next step, but it just seems so strange that it happened to both hammers at the same time and then both went back to functioning at the same time. I can't picture how that could happen. What I don't know about the Winchesters could fill volumes, but with two independent lock works it would take a significant sized piece of foreign matter to do that, I would think.

Please let us know what you find. This is interesting.

SRH

older single trigger guns seem to need a cleaning every 30 to 40 years or so...have had this problem with parkers and most recently a beretta from the late 60's.

I like the cleaning idea but not solvent wash. The spray cleaners are so good that it is almost impossible to re-oil the gun so it does not rust or gaul a part somewhere. A friend had a 101 he had used solvent on and the gun quit. It turned out that the rods that go through the front of the action had lock up due to no lube.
bill

Yes, you do have to re-lube correctly.
JR

Epilogue - I should start out by saying that a couple decades ago the trigger on this gun began functioning like a single trigger, as in one trigger, one shot. I took it apart and found the most minute piece of dust in the selector mechanism. That was the precedent for me (and others) to suspect gunk.

I took the stock off a second time the other night, but did not try anything more heroic in terms of disassembly. Over white paper I blew out the interior of the receiver and indeed a chunk of dark stuff fell from in front of the right hammer, but it was soft and I doubt it ever caused any problems. There was nothing else to be done so it all went back together.

Oh, I checked the firing pins and found that they protrude about 0.052" from the breech face. That's healthy.

In a subsequent test fire session, I again got a misfire. Like before, the shell had a tiny nick in the primer, not enough to detonate. I measured the distance from the head of the shell to the top of the primer cup and got a 0.031" gap - pretty deep. I measured a bunch of other unfired shells and was getting a value of 0.008"+/-. These were old, old Winchester primers. My takeaway is that about 1 out of 20 of those primers had the cup set sufficiently deep to prevent reliable ignition. Who would have thought?

I've seen that.

It's not common now.

There were a few lots of W209 produced with the defect you observe.

5 or 6 years ago?

It's corrected now, but it did cost them some customers.

Personally, I use a lot of Fiocchi.