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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4903 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool;

I have always been told that dry-firing (most?) guns is bad mechanically because certain pieces aren't meant to hit together repeatedly (hardened firing pins on non-brass surfaces?). Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?

I'm definitely not an expert on this, so I'd be curious to hear more from someone who knows.

Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?

Yes. Most modern guns can be dry fired no problem. If you're very worried about your striker or have an older/rimfire gun, a snap cap will fix you right up.

You can just get dry-fire snapcaps for this.

I had the same understanding, but there was a post here from one of our commenters with significant experience in the services, who pointed out that dry fire is in fact superior for training the mechanics of marksmanship. The way he put it is that dry fire is the study, and live fire is the test; I believe he recommended something like a 10:1 ratio. Given that dry fire is free in terms of money and maximally cheap in terms of effort (no getting your gear together, driving to a range, paying range fees, cleaning and maintenance afterward, etc, etc), this seems pretty reasonable. The idea, as I understand it, is that you practice acquiring and maintaining a sight picture while squeezing the trigger. There's no muzzle blast or recoil, so you see all the flinches and shakes and disruptions as they happen, and can work to get your process as smooth and fast and precise as possible. Then you switch over to live fire, and practice maintaining those good habits under real firing conditions.

This is roughly the standard in western army basic training. It's particularly useful for movement and engagement exercises that aren't directly related to marksmanship. Now that I think about it, weapons handling seems vastly more important than marksmanship in training to engage an enemy.

"Snap caps" are recommended for rimfire guns of any kind, and older guns; what extent they matter for modern semiautomatics is somewhat controversial. It's plausible that even new centerfire gun designs will still have increased forces on the firing pin or its surrounding structure when used with an empty chamber but attempts to experimentally demonstrate the matter haven't been able to show clear and obvious results, and modern firing pins are also cheap to replace.

For rimfires, the tip of the firing pin can hit steel on the breach face, as part of the design, and the difference between steel-on-steel and steel-on-compressable-brass is huge: people have experimentally demonstrated damage in <100 uses. There's a small number of rimfire revolvers that avoid this failure mode through some really clever design, though. Some rimfire rifles (such as the popular 10/22) claim that they've eliminated the problem with a firing pin stop, but that's only really true for relatively small counts, and heavy dry fire practicers have found out the hard way that this just moved the problem to a bent firing pin stop.

Older centerfire guns sometimes had similar issues, mostly pre-1970. GLOCK still recommends snap caps for very heavy dry fire use, and people have very rarely shown breach-face problems when not using snap caps, but they almost always are also the sort of people sending hundreds of rounds of very sketchy ammo through their guns.

You can get cheap all-plastic or plastic-rubber snap caps for common calibers at most reputable gun shops, but they're usually specced for 500-1000 uses, so if you're really into dry-fire drills, splurging for spring-based ones can be worthwhile.

Snap caps are also useful for ammo failure and clearing drills.

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