Way back in March I started running a durability test on my Walther P22. I hadn’t really updated on the project because the P22 was running like a swiss watch and digesting everything I had to throw through it; as you can see from the E-Postal matches the accuracy was fine as well.
That was until this most recent E-Postal. I’d been running my P22 pretty often, usually about 100-200 rounds each session, and was in excess of 1500 rounds without a cleaning. After I finished the E-Postal match, I was just blazing away with CCI Stingers, and the P22 jammed. The fired round had failed to extract. I pulled out the magazine and tried twice to get the extractor to pick the round out of the chamber with no success; it was lodged in pretty tight. Locking the slide back and trying to pry the round with a glasses screwdriver didn’t work either, so I eventually just had to punch the thing out with a barrel swab.
The spent casing was covered in fouling; when I took the gun apart and looked down the barrel, the chamber had the thickest coating of black fouling I’d ever seen on a .22. I put the gun back together and tried to chamber another round, but it didn’t chamber completely. So, I had officially broken my P22, as I couldn’t get it to go back into battery or successfully extract rounds.
After a good cleaning, the gun ran just fine. The final round count for the experiment went as follows.
CCI Mini-mags – 700 rounds
CCI Stingers – 550 rounds
Aguila SniperSubSonic – 400 rounds
It took 1650 rounds to break my P22, all fired without a cleaning. I suspect it was the Aguila rounds that did her in, since the CCI stuff usually runs very clean.
Anyone ever starts talking smack about my favorite pistol, you let me know and I’ll give ’em what for.
–
