M&P shield 45 fails to feed intermittently

The other day at the range my 45 shield jammed on the second shot. It buried the nose of the bullet into the ramp. To clear it all I had to do was pull the slide back slightly and release, the gun was then in battery. This happened again on the next magazine (same mag) 2 times in a row. Then operated flawlessly for the next 60 rounds. The gun and magazine were clean. The gun has had around 500 rounds through it previous to this day. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

that will fade as you put more rounds through it, mine has stopped doing that after about 600 or so rounds, if you carry for defense, I'd avoid carrying it until it has stopped failing to feed

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I have the same problem, not good for my daily care. I'm disappointed, it shoots nice.

When I first bought my shield I experienced some of the same nose diving. The rounds were hanging up on the sharp ridge at the bottom of the lower feed ramp. I polished everything by hand paying close attention to that ridge. I've put about 500+ rounds through it since the polish job with no issues. I'm not suggesting to anyone that they modify anything on their pistol. Just passing along what I did that so far seems to have worked for me.

I'm going to polish the bottom of the ramp, but I think the problem is the magazine. I clean them every time and usually wipe the follower with silicone and wipe dry. I have done this on all my magazines for the past 30 years, with no problems until now. I do believe that it may be the reason the bullet is nosediving into the ramp. I am going to try cleaning and leaving dry. Which leaves me with a question. What should I be cleaning the magazine with?

I use mineral spirits for cleaning magazines. As far as ammunition are you using factory new or reloads also are the bullets lead or jacketed.

I had the same problem with my Shield .45, and it was still happening at 1900 rounds. I cured it by doing two things at once, so I'm not sure which one of them solved the problem. I suggest doing the easier one first, which is lightly polishing the lower feed ramp and the vertical wall area just below it where the bullet tip hangs up. I rummaged around in my auto stuff and found some "Turtle Wax Polishing Compound Light to Medium Cleaner" paste. I lightly rubbed in a small amount of it with a cotton cleaning patch, and buffed it off thoroughly with a second patch. I used a Q-tip to get any remaining residue out from the crevices around the ramp. To give the ramp an added degree of slickness, I repeated the process with some "Prestone High Protection" synthetic liquid wax. Again, I did some heavy buffing to ensure there was't enough wax left on the ramp to build up on the bullet tip. The result was a ramp that was smoother and slicker than before.

You don't have to use the specific products I mentioned above, (they just happened to be on hand at the time), but you should use ones fairly low in abrasiveness. I know we all like to use our Dremels whenever we can, but I recommend hand polishing.

The second thing I did was more radical, because it's considered by a lot of gun enthusiasts to be a no-no. I very lightly lubed the insides of my magazine tubes. The goal was to "unstick" the followers so they wouldn't hang up part way to the top, thus causing a failure to feed. I have seven semi-auto handguns and I'd never even considered lubing a magazine until then, but I was so thoroughly peeved at the continuing failures to feed with my fully broken-in Shield, that I was willing to try anything. You should only try this if the ramp polishing fails.

I first cleaned them with Mil-Comm's water-based gun cleaner which is designed to prep surfaces for their TW25B synthetic gun grease. I then applied a very light coating of TW25B grease to the insides of my magazine tubes and then buffed it off, leaving the thinnest possible coat. I did the same with the sides of the followers where they contact the magazine walls. I chose TW25B because it only requires a very thin application to be effective, it doesn't migrate, and it doesn't attract much residue. As a result, the followers slid up and down much more easily than before.

I since have fired 290 rounds, all of which loaded and ejected perfectly. I recently cleaned my 6-round magazine and will check how it functions unlubed on next week's range visit. Interestingly, I found very little residue inside. I'll wait on cleaning my seven-rounders, because they can be a hassle to reassemble. (There are several threads devoted to reassembly of the seven-round magazines. I advise reading those before you take your seven-rounders apart.)

These solvable issues aside, the Shield .45 is a great gun. It is amazingly accurate and enjoyable to shoot. Now that its reliability issues have been solved (knock on wood!), it is giving my wonderful M&P 40 compact some serious competition to become my everyday carry.

I clean and lube mine. Spray with CLP and swab dry leaving only the residue for lube properties. Ive never had these issues but I do this to my new mags while going over the gun. I often find manufacturing shrapnel in them (but not the S&W's). Sometime you may even find a spring in backwards which will always cause this problem.....it happens

Seating the rounds in the mag when you load? Gently tap the mag on something firm to seat the rounds to the back.

All factory aammo. It happened twice with federal hs 230grain and once with winchester 230 ball target.

I feel for you and others who have feeding problems with the new 45 Shield. I offer the following only to share my attempts at fixing the feeding trouble, not to bash S&W 45 Shields in any way - I still love them!

Here's my take on it:
I bought three of them on April 1st because of the rebate and because my local LE dealer just got them in that morning. They were all packed on 11/15/16, according to the serial number labels but not consecutives (HDV, HDZ, HHA prefixes).

A week later, after cleaning them and lubing them lightly, I took them to the range and fired all three. I fired a mixture of American Eagle 230, Remington UMC 230, Federal HST 230 factory ammo.
All three 45 Shields failed to feed on the 2nd, 3rd, and/or 4th round in both the 6 & 7 round mags that came with each gun. Sometimes they randomly cycled and closed on an empty chamber. They did it on all three types of ammo. The bullets would be nose-dived in the magazine or caught nose-down on the bottom ridge of the lower feed ramp although the slide had cycled far enough back to have engaged the rear of the cartridge as it should have, and the slide stopped right there every time it misfed. To clear it, you simply pulled the slide back (slingshot) just enough to allow the bullet to pop up and it would feed smoothly into the chamber, as it should. When the slide randomly cycled and closed on an empty chamber, you had to manually cycle it to feed the next round. It sure seemed to be a magazine problem at that point.

I returned home, inspected, cleaned and lubed them and found nothing out of the ordinary for such a beautiful piece of engineering. The barrel ramps were nicely finished, chambers were nice and smooth, and the lower feed ramps were nice and smooth (with the small ridge on the bottom of the lower feed ramp that matches flush with the magazine lip).

I disassembled and inspected all six mags, wiped the insides clean & dry (they were hardly dirty at all) and wiped the followers, noting that all the little metal slide stop shelves were fully inserted. I wiped the springs and re-assembled the mags, careful to keep them matched to the guns they came with. I was ready for my next range trip.

The 2nd trip, I took along my old 6'4" 325 pound shooting buddy who knows more about S&W's than anyone else I talk to and he brought his well-shot 45 Shield that he bought in September, 2016. According to him, it had never failed after hundreds of rounds of all kinds of ammo including his own reloads.

All three of my Shields failed again the same way with the same ammo. To eliminate the limp wrist possibility, I asked him to shoot all three of mine while I shot his. As you would expect, my three Shields failed for him and his shot 100% perfect in my hands with my assorted ammo. So, limp-wristing was not the cause, nor was it the ammo. Then, we marked and swapped magazines with the same disappointing results for my three Shields while we couldn't make his fail. We fired about three hundred rounds total and the failure to feed and empty chamber problems persisted with my three guns.

He knew a gunsmith friend who wanted to buy all three 45 Shields and fix them (his way) so, I later sold them to him. He was still working on them as of a couple weeks ago, confident that he could "fluff and buff" them into reliability.

Well, I missed my disappointingly unreliable 45 Shields so much that I bought two more new ones on May 16th, which were packed on 2/13/17 with serial prefixes HWW. I prepped them as before, gathered up my ammo and rushed to the range for the 3rd time and took my "big bear" S&W expert buddy along. Again, he took his trusty 45 Shield and his own stash of ammo. The first new Shield failed exactly like the previous three: nose-dived cartridges, usually the 2nd, 3rd or 4th round, and random closing on an empty chamber for both me and him. I shot 50 or so rounds of my ammo assortment in his and it was, as before, 100% reliable. Do you think I was disappointed?

So, I shot my second new 45 Shield and....WOW! It was 100% reliable in every way with both round nose FMJ 230 and HST hollow point 230's. I even shot some of his reloads with 100% reliability! This is how they all should have been.

I was determined to find the cause of the failures to feed in my other Shield. Obviously, it was not the magazines' fault. These new mags even had the new, grooved followers (to prevent mag drops) in them. Neither was it limp-wristing or any visually noticeable defect. However, I noticed that my buddy's well-shot 45 Shield slide racked more smoothly than my new-but-failed Shield. Mine sort of stacked up at the end of its cycle when it was far enough back to engage the slide stop and beyond. So, I swapped recoil spring assemblies in my two Shields. No change in either gun - the failing Shield continued to intermittently fail and the good one just kept spitting out anything I fed it. I put the recoil springs back as originally made. Then, I swapped my failing Shield's recoil spring with my buddy's old recoil spring and we fired both guns.

His old 45 Shield continued to function 100% with my suspect recoil spring assembly. BUT, my failing Shield suddenly became 100% reliable with his OLD recoil spring, feeding and functioning just like I wished! We fired about 50 rounds of mixed ammo through each gun with no failures in either. We then restored both recoil spring assembles back to the right guns.

So, where does that lead me?

First, I believe that there is some type of tolerance issue with the new 45 Shields that randomly crops up in some guns. They seem to be very sensitive to this failure to feed issue according to this forum's previous posts about the problem.

Second, as I recall, all my unreliable 45 Shields seemed to be not very smooth in manually slowly compressing the slide in that they all seemed to stack up near the fully-compressed, rear-most position. It would be my guess, based on the fact that putting my friend's old recoil spring assembly in my new intermittent Shield which caused it to become reliable, along with the fact that swapping the two newest recoil spring assemblies did not correct the bad Shield, that there is a sensitivity to the recoil spring assemblies in some 45 Shields.

Whether it's the recoil spring assemblies or the tolerance variance between 45 Shields or shooting them in for several hundred rounds or a combination of all three, I do not know at this point. But, I can say with some level of confidence that some 45 Shields seem to be infallible (as my friend's was right out of the box and as my second new one is right out of the box) and some 45 Shields seem to be very finicky.

I have extensively researched this nose-dived cartridge mis-feed problem on this and other forums and found numerous posts by M&P and Shield owners that go back several years. Some of the owners have reportedly returned their guns to the factory three or four times for the same problem and their reports as to what the factory did to eliminate the failures varies all over the board from polishing, changing locking blocks, slides, barrels, recoil springs, etc. with no particular fix standing out as a pattern. So, the factory (according to the forum posters) keeps throwing a variety of parts at these problem guns until either the problem or the owner finally disappears.

I really hope that S&W takes these kinds of complaints and experiences more seriously so they can finally get to the bottom of this reliability issue once and for all and resolve it. I have sent a copy of this post to my S&W factory rep so they can keep trying to isolate the cause of these mis-feeds and live up to their great reputation with the 45 Shields.

I hope this long story helps those unfortunates like me who have or will buy new 45 Shields and experience this mis-feed issue in their new guns. Guys, it's probably not YOUR fault. ;-o

Great post. Super information.

Ill throw in a monkey wrench

I have two (45's), purchased same time from Whittakers on 4/01

HDZ dated 11/10/16
HUC dated 12/15/16

So basically I have one out of your original HDZ batch. Sorry to say that both have performed relatively flawless.

Nonuthin said:

...

I really hope that S&W takes these kinds of complaints and experiences more seriously so they can finally get to the bottom of this reliability issue once and for all and resolve it. I have sent a copy of this post to my S&W factory rep so they can keep trying to isolate the cause of these mis-feeds and live up to their great reputation with the 45 Shields.

I hope this long story helps those unfortunates like me who have or will buy new 45 Shields and experience this mis-feed issue in their new guns. Guys, it's probably not YOUR fault. ;-o

Click to expand...

Holy carp! Four of the five Shield .45s you bought suffered from nosedives. If 80% of all Shield .45s that have been sold had this problem, one would think that S&W would be forced to recall them. I don't think that's the case, so you really hit the nosedive lottery. I'm glad to see you haven't given up on the .45, because when it's working right, it's an excellent gun. You might want to try the simple remedies I used to solve this problem (see my post above). You have nothing to lose, and they could bring an end your nosedive miseries.

Good Luck!

swsig said:

Holy carp! Four of the five Shield .45s you bought ......

Click to expand...

He rolled the dice one more time (as of thursday) so 4 out of 6.

Im with you thats crazy. Im anxious to hear if the new 6th one performs well.

Got him a 9er along with it...

Well, I finally got a chance to shoot my sixth new Shield 45 and my new Shields 40 and 9mm today. I was pleasantly surprised and happy with the results.

I first shot the new 9 and it was flawless. Then, I shot the 40 expecting much more recoil but it was only a mild increase at best. (I'm a long-time 40 shooter so I may be more recoil tolerant than the average shooter.)

Finally, I took out my new 45 Shield and expected it to nosedive on feeding just like the previous four did (the fifth one fed fine but had a very bad trigger because the factory ground a groove into the sear actuator on the trigger bar, rather than keeping a continuous smooth surface, so the trigger would stack up and stick in that groove just before let off. You had to press extra hard to overcome the groove and release the sear. No good and not a quick fix.)

But, much to my pleasant surprise, my sixth new 45 Shield is everything that the previous five were not: It was totally reliable, super accurate and had a nice crisp trigger that measures about 6 pounds. What a relief!

Of course, I only fired about 30 rounds through each gun so I have a lot more shooting to do to prove them worthy of carry but we're off to a great start.

For those who love 9mm, I can see why. It's really pleasant to shoot with very low recoil. However, I prefer a 40 and the slight increase in recoil in my experience is worth the additional power. Of course, the 9 gives you that very important extra shot so it's really a toss up and depends on your individual preference as to which is the best for you.

The Shield 45 is really a great gun, although I ran into my share of disappointments with it before this one. I think the Shield 45 has the best overall feel to it compared to the 9 and 40 and it's the softest shooting 45 I have ever fired recently (1911's, Glock 30's, Springfield XD Mod 2's and several others).

I'll update my experience further after I shoot the 45 more extensively but it was worth the effort to get one that lives up to the quality level one should expect to get from S&W every time you open a box.

Thats good stuff right there NoNuthin^^^^^^^^^^^

Dad_Roman said:

He rolled the dice one more time (as of thursday) so 4 out of 6.

Im with you thats crazy.

Click to expand...

He said....as he worked day/night shift both in order to justify ordering a couple more before the rebate ends

Update

I went to the range yesterday and fired 75 rounds of American Eagle 230 and 50 rounds of Winchester Service Grade 230 from my Shield .45. Two of my magazines were freshly cleaned with the lube removed, and the other two were still lubed. It didn't matter. All rounds loaded and fired perfectly. Total consecutive round count without a failure to feed is now 415. I'm still not sure whether the lubed mags or the polished feed ramp cured my nosedive problem, but it appears to be gone and I am a happy camper.

Having experienced such frustrating challenges with new guns, I now accelerate breaking in of any new gun before firing. Custom gunsmiths do similar operations to their high dollar guns before they go out the door to guarantee reliability. They also shoot them more than one or two shots to check basic mechanical function. Less expensive mass (Massachusetts) manufactured guns like the M&P line apparently cannot financially justify these extra steps while staying in the mid-to-low end of the price market. I am all for preventing such problems rather than correcting them, or using the warranty process.

Shield First Range Trip

I've put several hundred rounds through my 45 Shield. The only hangup I had was with some handloads with lead SWC's. Other than that it eats everything I put through it including handloads with lead RN bullets.

I have put 300 rounds through mine now. I just got it at the end of last week. Luckily I haven't had any feed issues and it is awesome shooter.

I have one of the first .45 Shields released......perfect though 650 rounds, deadly accurate, soft shooting and a hoot to shoot.