Some of the complaints about jamming on the small autos is just that...learning how to shoot them. Now before anyone gets insulted I went through the learning curve myself! Plenty of complaints about the Smith PPK/S 380 and I own one. A little more lube than maybe some guns and firm support from the shooter and it performs very well...100% when I do my part. These little guys don't have the mass of the full size autos so I had to learn.
This is surely only a small part of the woes in this thread but I thought worth mentioning.
I sure wish it was as simple as that with my S&W PPK/s. I tried everything, grease in the rails, on the feed ramp, every type of ammo I could find and the only thing that worked, if you can call it that, was to only load 5 in the mag, rack one home then take out the mag and tap the remaining 4 rd's back down. If I did that it worked most of the time. If I only loaded 4 at the start and tapped the 3 remaining rd's back down it was pretty reliable......
I thought it was a mag issue at first so I bought 3 more new factory mag's to go with the 2 that came with the gun, still a no go. All did the same thing I mentioned above.
Personally I still think it was magazine related in some way. If you fully loaded the mag, inserted it, then racked a rd home and tried to remove the mag you usually had to wiggle it in order to get it to drop free. The 2nd rd had been pulled so far forward when the 1st rd fed that it was up against the feed ramp, which required the base of the mag to be wiggled forward to get clearance for the pulled forward 2nd rd to fit back down the mag well.
The majority of my fail to "fully" feed's were with the slide forward, to greater & lesser degrees depending on how many rd's were still in the mag, with the base of the rd "cocked up" at the base. I'm pretty sure this was due to the rd's hitting the feed ramp too soon which made the base of the feeding rd tilt upwards.
Mine had gone back to S&W early on for, to use S&W's technical term, "Field Strip Adjust," which meant I couldn't field strip it. I included the fail to feed issue on the note so they also polished the feed ramp while it was there. Still didn't help.
The day I got it back from S&W the 2nd time, which was for the safety recall, is the day I took it to a local gun shop and sold it.
I only post this to provide more information for those who might be considering one and think technique will do the trick. Like I said at the beggining, I wish it would have been that easy. I spent weeks dealing with my PPK/s and have a scar to prove it, not from the slide, but from the edge of the backstrap. If I could have got that sucker to function I was going to get it de-horned......
That PPK/s is the sole reason my range bag always has a ready supply of, good, heavy duty band-aid's in one of the side-pouches.
