Breaking Bad? How and why to break in a new gun…
GunNoob’s Firearm Rule #72: It doesn’t matter the manufacturer or model of gun. If you ask about the quality of a particular firearm on an internet forum, someone will eventually say the following: “I bought a [Gun A], took it to the range and it gave me nothing but trouble. I couldn’t get through to magazines without it messing up so I took it back to the shop and traded it for a [Gun B]. Don’t waste your money on a [Gun A]. They’re nothing but junk.”
Now we’ve covered some reasons for a gun to constantly fail in our warranty article. There is another, commonly overlooked factor that we haven’t talked about yet: it wasn’t broken in. Like a new engine, shoes and jeans, a gun needs to be broken in as well.
Before a gun leaves a factory, it is inspected and polished to the best of their ability considering they churn out an unfathomable number of them on a daily basis. If you stop and think about it, if they were to stop and fully test every gun to the point they were 100% sure they would all work when leaving the factory, not only would every gun be used to the point that it couldn’t be considered “new” but they wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand of the market. It’s just not feasible in any way, shape or form.
That’s not to say we can’t expect a certain baseline level of functionality. You shouldn’t expect parts to fly off when you shoot it. With certain glaring exceptions, however, there’s a good chance that the first 100 or so rounds might not go as smoothly as you would think. Why is that?
Well, when you buy a pair of shoes what happens initially? You walk for a bit and things are stiff. You might get some blisters. It takes walking in them for almost a week before things soften up, smooth out and stretch out. It’s really the same thing with guns. The parts, although cut to fit, aren’t as smooth as they initially seem. It takes some rubbing and friction to truly remove the tiny burrs and imperfections that you can’t see with the naked eye or even feel when you rub your fingers across the contact surface.
After a bit of shooting, the contact surfaces will polish up and then that gun will work like clockwork.
The question then is “how much shooting?”
I’ve talked to a couple of local gunsmiths and their answer was a very precise “it depends”. Yeah, each gun is different and the break in period is different for all of them. An metal SIG is going to need different break in period than a polymer Glock (and yes, a Glock still needs to be broken in). When pressed, they all agreed that it’s a bare minimum of 100 rounds. One of them stated, rather matter of factly, that we wouldn’t trust his life to any gun that hasn’t had at least 500 rounds put through it.
That brings up a bit of a quandary. For money reasons, I tend to follow the 100 round guideline. When you’re awesome at reloading or have access to ammo at at wholesale prices (like these gunsmiths), I can see where 500 would be an excellent guideline. Both of them also noted that a large number of warranty style problems will show up in those first 100 rounds.
So how do you break in a gun? First off, bring it home and clean it. Many guns today are shipped in a gunk that can only be described as the modern equivalent of cosmoline. Cosmoline, for those of you that haven’t read my article on the Mosin-Nagant, is a vile substance that was created by evil people for protecting guns in long term storage. The protectant on modern guns, while a bit easier to remove, does nothing to help the functionality of a gun. It needs to be removed. Nothing you can do to a gun, short of sticking into mud or epoxy cement, will come close to the nastiness of this gunk. So clean it before you even think of shooting it at the range. I should note again that one of the gunsmiths mentioned that about 90% of the malfunctioning new guns that he sees just needed to be cleaned. He cleans the gun, charges his fee and sends the customer on their way. Easy money. Save yourself the trouble.
At that point, the only thing you can do is just shoot the darn thing. Get a cheap, 100 round box of ammo (or two) and expect a couple of failures for a bit. You’ll find that those failure will work their way out by the end of the day. Also, another thing the gunsmiths mentioned: don’t rule out the magazine being defective before you blame the gun. They aren’t built to the same exacting standards that the guns are. They need to be broken in as well so make sure you swap them out during the process as well.
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