After 2000 rounds, I started experiencing the occasional light primer strike on my Daniel H9. I’ve had this happen from time to time on certain pistol designs, including the Glock 20, the Walther P99 and PPQ, and the Walther PPK. All of these designs have an open striker or firing pin channel.

In the case of the H9, to test it’s reliability after all the horror stories of the first generation from Daniel Defense, I ran a 500 round test with everything I could lay my hands on from high-end Underwood 90 grain +P Xtreme Penetrators through green & white box Remington 115 grain, Fiochhi, 124 grain (it likes this bullet weight best), Scorpion 124 grain, and the bargain basement 124 grain from Patriot. The latter had really hard primers that only the new Inglis Hi-Power from SDS could set off reliably; every other pistol I had experiences light primer strikes. And the Daniel only had them on this crap ammo…until about 14-1500 rounds in. I was getting a light primer striker every few boxes — usually in the first two mags. About a 1% fail rate. 

So I tried an old trick I’ve used for getting into trigger mechanisms and dirty firing pins: blow out that firing pin channel. Squirt a bunch of cleaner into the channel, let it sit for a few minutes, then used compressed air or one of these new battery-powered “turbofans” you can get off Amazon, and blow the crap out. It’s going to come out of every nook and cranny it can, so doing this first is generally a good idea. Once I’m done with cleaning everything else, I’ll give it one more blast to make sure I’ve got everything.

No more light primer strikes.