Had another class this Saturday and saw another .380Auto. This one was a Sig Sauer P238. It belonged to a couple and they both shot it; 12 rounds each.
The husband is an experienced shooter who is a Captain in the Marines. He had one malfunction. It was a failure to go into battery on the fourth round.
The wife has limited experience. She had three malfunctions. The first was a failure to go into battery on the first round. She racked the slide properly and didn't baby it. The second was a fail-to-fire on some round in the middle of the magazine. Round didn't even have a mark on the primer, but the hammer fell. The third was another failure to go into battery on the first round of a new mag. The fourth was a failure to go into battery on the third round of a mag. When it did feed, the gun failed to fire. Like the first fail to fire, there was no mark on the primer. Both of those rounds fired fine when fed back into the gun.
This all happened in 24 rounds. The ammo was American Eagle.
Good, quality gun that was used by an experienced shooter and one that was relatively new. The gun was clean. The ammo is decent enough. Certainly not premium ammo, but I've never had trouble with it in other calibers.
I'm just reporting what happened.
What else can you tell us?
"Captain in the Marines" tells me he's youngish and probably has never fired a 1911. You lube a 1911, or its mini versions a lot differently than you do the current crop of polymer framed guns and if you try to run one almost dry like you would a Glock, it will fail.
Ideally you grease the slide rails, frame rails, and spring, and then lightly oil everything else including all the pivot points, the locking lugs and barrel hood.
In addition, the Sig P238, like the Kimber Micro, can be pretty tight when new and may need a couple hundred rounds to break in, so how new was the pistol? People usually don't bring guns to a self defense class if they know they are not reliable, so I suspect it's new
Finally, the mini 1911s feed and function just like the big ones and compatibility between magazine feed lips and bullet point shapes matter. What ammo were they using? and were the failures resulting in a particular magazine or in all of them.
All of the failures you describe appear to be failures to go completely into battery, given the lack of any mark on the primer. Basically, it's in battery far enough for the sear to release the hammer, but the hammer is striking the lower edge of the sliide before it can contact the firing pin as the slide is just a bit too far away from being fully forward. It should not be doing that, and I suspect a QA issues, regardless of being a Sig.
In a 1911 coming up slightly short of being in battery is usually caused by the rim hanging up in the extractor due to an excessively high feed angle, caused by length to ogive issues, and/or the magazine releasing the base of the round late. In more extreme cases it can be the result of the ogive of the round hitting the top of the chamber. It's a bigger issue in amini .380 1911 as the spring pressures are lower. Ironically enough it's less of a problem in a blow back mini 1911 like the Baby Rock as the recoil spring is much stiffer.
In any case, it also reflects a distaste for the particular ammo more than a failing of the pistol.
I would not condemn the Sig P238 based on a single case where the pistol may:
1) be new and/or inadequately lubricated;
2) may not like the ammo being used; and
3) may have a disconnector issue due to less than perfect QA.
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