TargetTalk

wich free pistols can be dry fired? the ones that can't, what do you use? an empty casing?leather? or a wood plug? inquiring minds want to know. thanks all
Dave

I think practically any free pistol can be safely dry-fired. Certainly Toz, Morini, Hammerli 150/152 and 160/162. The beauty of a set trigger (or an electronic one) in this regard is its detachment from the firing action: don't cock the gun, just set/arm the trigger and squeeze. Click! but the firing pin/striker will never know anything happened. Just remember not to do this with the action cocked after ejecting the last spent cartridge!

I agree, it seems unlikely you'll find a FP from any manufacturer that can't be dry-fired. That said, I suppose it's possible you might discover an exception and certainly, if you think about rimfire guns in general, free pistols become the exception as the only .22's that do commonly provide a means for dry firing with an empty chamber. With most .22's, dry-firing without something in the chamber risks damaging (peening or breaking) the firing pin and/or the area next to the chamber where the pin strikes. (Yes, it's true some manufacturers say you can dry-fire their .22's with an empty chamber, but most folks interpret this to mean you can do it occasionally.)

Some guns (e.g., the Pardini SP) are designed and shipped with a special plug you can put in the chamber that prevents the action from fully closing but still lets you dry-fire. Unfortunately, if the design of the gun requires that you close the action before you can fire it, there's not really a good answer because anything you put in the chamber to cushion the blow quickly gets beat up. For centerfire guns, you can buy Snap-Caps (dummy ammo) that actually have springs in them to take up the blow where the firing pin hits and, from what I understand, they last through thousands of strikes. You can buy .22 Snap-Caps, too, but there's no spring there, it's just a little bit of plastic forming the rim and after a couple strikes, it's flattened down to nothing and you have to rotate the Snap-Cap or put in a new one. Setting aside the inconvenience, they're about $5/dozen, not cheap considering the little bit of plastic that goes into them! Otoh, they have advantages over spent cases: They go in and out of the chamber easier and they do allow visual inspection when they're in the chamber that the gun is not loaded.

I have a Steyr FP, which has the barrel attached to the front of the trigger guard so it really recoils straight back.

The striker hits the top of the same straight bar that raises to cover the back of the case in the falling block action. The firing pin is just a little bump on the bar.

So the metal bar hits the back end of the barrel (large surface area) every time the striker fires, and the firing pin never touches the chamber wall no matter what.

As a result, this gun can be dry fired without harm, just by omitting the loading of a live cartridge! It's the only .22 I know of that works that way.

Some other .22 pistols, especially those designed for plinking, claim to have similar idiot proof dry fire capability, but my experience with them is that the firing pin stop is not strong enough so it wears down and hits the chamber anyway after a while.