Hang fires -- a real problem?

C

Cal44

Member
Joined
Mar 26, 2013
Messages
3,600
Reaction score
6,464
Location
Northern California
Yesterday, at the range I had a light strike problem with a revolver.

I went on and pulled the trigger again, had a second light strike.

Then it occurred to me that if I had a hang fire after the first light strike, I might have destroyed the gun if I had a hang fire after the cylinder rotated.

By hang fire, I mean when a round is struck, doesn't fire immediately, and then 10, 20, or 30 seconds or so later does fire.

Is this a real problem?

Has anyone actually experienced a hang fire as I defined it?

Or is this a rare problem that once happened to a guy in 1896, and hasn't happened again to anyone in over 100 years?
 
Register to hide this ad
We used to have to wait 5 minutes if we had a hangfire before we could do anything!

Of course we were dealing with a 3 pound Revolutionary War cannon. If we touched off the powder and the round didn't go BANG, we had to wait 5 minutes before we doused it with water down the tube and then emptied the mess from the barrel. UGH.

I seem to recall we used 1/4 lb of black powder double wrapped in heavy duty tin foil; rammed it home; pierced the foil with a prick and then filled the touchhole with either more powder or a fuse. Add a burning linstock and BANG! (We were Royal Artillery Battery "W" out of Annapolis, MD part of the Maryland Loyalist Battalion.)

I just loved that cannon. (And we rarely had hangfires.)

And I too worry about a hangfire in a revolver...and maybe based on my cannon experience, usually wait 5 or 10 seconds before I try to correct the problem.
 
I have had a hangfire, but it wasn't for a long stretch. It was more like a click-BANG. Happened twice with the same loads, so I stopped after the second one and pulled the rest of the loads apart.

This was in .460 S&W Magnum and while I cannot be certain, I believe the issue was far too little crimp which allowed the slug to jump forward from the primer blast. My other theory was that I might have had tumbling media stuck in the flash hole which greatly impeded the flame from the primer.

I'm not 100% sure, but it was a scary wake-up call.
 
I've experienced hangfires, but only in rifles. These have occurred with handloads where I used a powder that may have been recommended in a load manual but was not the best powder choice for the load combination, or perhaps the powder charge was the recommended minimum.

Most of the time this has been with cast bullet loads where much lower powder charges are recommended than the suggested charges for jacketed bullets. In every situation, the "hangfire" fired very quickly after I pulled the trigger; the lapse between pulling the trigger could not be measured in seconds. It would be a much smaller measurement unit than seconds, whatever that is called.

A round firing after ten or twenty seconds? Possible, I suppose, but unlikely. I've never experienced it in more that fifty years of handloading a lot of rifle and handgun cartridges. As I recall, I think I had a hangfire or two with some old factory or military ammo, but that's been a while.

The best example of a hangfire I can recall was more than ten years ago when developing some cast loads for a rifle in .375 H&H Magnum. This is a huge case and whatever powder I was using should have been suitable but the load was susceptible to hangfires. Switching to a magnum primer solved the problem in that instance.
 
While modern self defense instructors teach jam and missfire clearing drills with no regard for the possibility of hangfires, NRA safety rules and hunter safety classes teach hangfire safety precautions.

The self defense instructors I've discussed this with called hangfires with modern cartridges too rare to concern themselves with. However, to me it's like the presumption that guns will not slam fire when a spring drives the bolt or slide into battery. Working at ranges I've seen too many examples of both and had both things happen with my guns too many times to share their confidence. I once had a neighbor who had a real chrome plated toilet paper holder inlet into his Honda above the rear bumper. It held a fake plastic roll of TP over the bumper sticker "**** happens." Spend enough time at ranges and you are going to see and or experience "rare" events. In the heat of a timed match I take the risk but not while casually target shooting. Is putting your expensive S&W revolver at risk worth saving 20 seconds? It is your gun.

After reading Redcoat3340's cannon story I can not resist retelling an old story that my uncle told me. He volunteered to dynamite stumps on the site my parents were clearing for a house. A charge did not go off. He was so afraid to go near it that he stayed and helped them hand dig the well for two days.
 
Last edited:
I've had hangfires in a few of the thousands of rounds of many-decades-old surplus rifle rounds I've fired. None since the Nineties, but most of that garbage has been shot up.



Not Soviet stuff, by the way.
 
Never experienced a hang fire with a modern centerfire or rimfire arm, but have a couple times when firing cap & ball or flint weapons. Did have a black powder revolver "triple" on me once. That wakes you up.

No proof, but hang fires may have been more prevalent back during the days of the switch to cased ammo, hence the warning.

Larry
 
Maybe 1 dud centerfire primer I can remember in many thousands of rounds shot. Never a hangfire even with very small amounts of powder in rifle cartridges. Like 6 gr of fast pistol powder in a 30-06.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Rpg
Never had a hang fire with a cartridge weapon, have had several with muzzleloaders and it seems a old term that really doesn't apply to cartridges.
 
epj said:
Haven’t had one in years, but hang fires were not too uncommon with older rim fire ammo.
Click to expand...

That is the only hangfire I've ever experienced; was with Remington "ThunderBolt" ammo... Imagine that!:rolleyes: I'll shoot Golden Sabre but anything UMC, or Green Box, isn't worth the box its shoved in. It's ruined at least one gun of mine in the past and tried to ruin an otherwise sunrise reliable M&P40 (mid-size)...

OP, your problem was probably due to your strain screw needs a little tightening!
 
Never in many tens of thousands of rounds fired. I know it's theoretically possible, but it has to be very rare.

I have had a few "duds" though - primers that did not fire despite a heavy firing pin mark on them.
 
I've never had a hangfire with any commercial, handloaded or surplus military ball made as far back as 1935. However, .303 British surplus made with cordite is brutal stuff. I made the mistake of buying a few boxes of the stuff on the cheap, and found at least 50% were hangfires.

After shooting a few rounds I broke all of them down and disposed of them.
 
I have. Some older military 8MM rounds probably from the 50s. Got rid of that junk fast.
 
Yes I had a hang fire once shooting Winchester silvertips through my model 66.
It was an old partial box of ammo that iirc came from a garage sale.
CLICK ....1001....1002....BOOM
Be careful with old ammo.
Stuff happens.

The next round was a squib that wedged in the forcing cone and locked up the cylinder.
I had to drive the bullet back into the cylinder with a wood dowel to open it.

The rest of that ammo ended up in the creek.
 
Last edited:
I had a couple hang-fires shooting 45 Colt (+P) loads using AA9 powder in my Ruger SRH 454. Also once when I was experimenting with reduced loads using H110 in my 500 S&W.

As long as you don't have a stuck bullet in the barrel (squib) before the hang-fire it's biggest danger is hitting something you weren't originally aiming at because you were distracted by it.

.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

PeterJ
Armscore, you have a real problem
2 3
Replies
55
Views
6K
GF
GF
R
Blaser 9mm Ammo problem
Replies
12
Views
965
CH4
CH4
Breakaway500
Ejected casing fires off round in box
Replies
18
Views
3K
Taj
Taj
A
Is there a real difference between UMC and HTTP remington line of ammo?
Replies
5
Views
793
agent00
A
M
Am I part of the problem?
2 3
Replies
50
Views
4K
zeke
Z

Latest posts

Back
Top