FWIW I have also seen a Gunblue video where he constantly (purposely) drops the slide of his 1911 (without retarding it) on an empty chamber and empty magazine, then states repeatedly that this will not due any harm to a pistol while continuing to drop the slide over and over and over.
IMHO doing this repeatedly with no loaded magazine or chamber (even snap caps would be OK) is letting metal slam on metal with no cushion or resistance to slow it down. This has to accelerate metal wear and fatigue in my opinion, but not according to him. Again, doing this once or twice is not what he is claiming - but over & over & over. So while that may be his opinion I certainly differ with that opinion! I'd also want to believe that most here familiar with 1911's would back me up here. .../
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His argument about dropping the slide and pulling the trigger for inspection on guard mount is that the 1911 "was made to withstand that over and over again."
He also implies that JMB used that criteria as one of the primary design goals for the 1911. I really doubt that. It certainly wasn't one of the test criteria the military used in accepting it for service.
In practice, 1911s in military service received ample armorer attention and were rebuilt as needed. Any wear and design issues are addressed in that process, so his logic is at best flawed.
A major point to consider is that fire control parts are face hardened so that they have a very hard and wear resistant outer service, while the still inside the part is still very strong and tough.
The problem is that over time, impacts on those parts will cause the grain structure of the part to change. In simple terms, the grain structure that creates that hard - but brittle - outer surface starts to migrate deeper into the part. Eventually the part loses too much of that tough and strong inner grain structure and the part breaks.
The Walther PP series pistols are a well known example of this. The PP (1929) and PPK (1931) were very innovative pistols incorporating and introducing the double action/single action trigger in combination with a decocking lever. However, over the course of as many as 90 years of even infrequent use, the number of times a PP or PPK has been decocked starts to add up and those parts can and do become very brittle. I'm a PP series fan and own a few of them, as well as a few more of the FEG AP and APK series clones. In light of how that change in the grain structure occurs, and the history of parts breakage in the PP series pistols, I've developed the habit of lowering the hammer when I operate the decocking lever to avoid the impacts on the hammer and the decocking block.
Now...someone might argue the PP was never designed to be a service pistol.
Ok, so let's look at one that was. The Beretta M1923 evolved into the M1951 (which also incorporated the locking system from the Walther P.38 service pistol), which eventually became the Model 92 which was initially marketed as a civilian pistol.
However, the Model 92 was subsequently modified for Italian police and military service (as well as other countries) as the 92S. The 92S was further refined as the 92S-1 (Model 92SB) for USAF service, and as the Model 92F (Model 92SB-F) for US federal government service with drop in part interchangeability and a squared off trigger guard. The 92F was then modified slightly with an enlarged hammer pin to keep a broken slide from coming off the pistol as the Model 92FS, which became the M9.
In other words the M9 is a highly refined descendent of a military service pistol (M1951) going through several iterations to work out various bugs and perceived deficiencies to make it what most considered to be eminently suitable for military service.
Fast forward about 20 years. A friend of mine, who spent his career in the US Army and then in the National Guard was asked to look into the high rate of fire control parts breakage in US Army and National Guard M9s. The concern was that these pistols had comparatively low round counts and it was felt they should not be breaking fire control parts at this rate.
My friend, knowing metallurgy, gun history, and how the military works and uses pistols, looked at a few of the broken parts to confirm they were embrittled. He then didn't bother with looking at how the parts had been manufactured (which was where the US Army was wanting to place the fault), but rather started by looking at how the broken pistols were actually used by the US Army. He recognized that round count was a poor measure for this kind of embrittlement failure and he suspected it was frequency of function checks causing the problem.
Where he could establish usage patterns for M9s he found a much higher incidence of parts breakage in M9s that were function checked on a frequent basis. For example, M9s used by MPs, on guard duty, and in front line service were subjected to a function check every time one of them was checked out of the unit armory to be carried. In some units the pistols were function checked again when they were returned. Pistols issued on a daily basis were not surprisingly function checked more often and were more likely to suffer breakage of a fire control part.
The highest failure rates were in pistols used in training where function checks were done multiple times per day as troops learned how to do function checks.
Either way, each function check involved multiple drops of the hammer and or decocking lever, and over the course of daily checks and sometimes multiple checks per day over a period of years, embrittlement of the fire control parts was inevitable.
Ultimately, his response to the inquiry was a much longer and slightly more tactful version of:
"Well no ____, it's not about round count. Given all the function checks, of course the fire control parts are breaking. You are either going to have to accept the breakage, do a better job of managing and rotating M9s between units with different missions to spread those repetitive function checks across more pistols, or modify your function check procedures to reduce impacts."
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As an aside, I googled his other videos and found the lubrication video, 1:00:25 long (!) as well as one on cleaning and lubricating the AR-15, an 1:22:01 long (!!). I can't image watching that.
