Preventing the Stove Pipe Jam - Part 1, Ruger Mark IV, Polishing the Bolt to Improve Bolt Timing

This is a quick 5 minute video, showing my polished Ruger Mark IV Bolt, or inner slide. Whatever you want to call it. Don't get all technical in the comments. Side note, I said Velorex for the extractor and the recoil rod and spring, I meant Volquartsen.

Getting stove piped on the firing line sucks. When shooting competitions, nobody wants to have to get an alibi as it eliminates your best shots depending on how many you have. So if you get two shots off then your gun stove pipes, you have what is called a two shot alibi. You then re-fire 5 more shots to get your total of ten for the round. You have fired 12 shots in total so you then have your two best scores removed. Ugh! Yeah, you don't want to have that happen. It's better than not scoring those 3 because of the stove pipe jam, but if you can prevent it from ever happening at all that is even better.

What is happening in the Ruger Mark IV, is that gun powder builds up on the bolt or inner slide. As the gun powder builds up on the slide it starts to slow it down causing friction inside the back of the gun. This messes with the timing of the slide or bolt however you want to say it. When the timing is off you then get a jam, typically on this gun it stove pipes.

The reason it is doing this, I think is mainly because of the finish Ruger has chosen to put on the inner slide. Gun Powder just sticks to it like glue and that really sucks. So by polishing the inner slide the surface of it is now so smooth it will be hard for anything at all to stick to it. This will allow the gun to continue to work any cycle in proper timing for much longer than the factory finish was allowing for.

I will update in the comments how may shots I take before I get my first stove pipe, but I think it will take a lot now based on how smooth the finish is now.

All it takes is a Dremel tool, a little bit of Mother polish and the cloth ring, I don't know what that is called sorry, and you are off to the races. I only had to do two rounds of polishing to it and the Dremel made light work of it. It took me about 2 hours in total and I think that two hours will be worth a lot more than buying an aftermarket bolt to improve the performance when the main difference I see in them is the finish. The factory finish on the Ruger Mark IV is mid at best, and the aftermarket ones are highly polished. So if you polish your stock bolt, bang, you save a bunch of money and hopefully I get the same results.

I will let you know in about 1 week from now, 5-13-24, so check back and I will have the answer as to if this worked or not.

Thank you and please like this video and subscribe to my page.

#rugermarkiv #gunmod #ballistixpro #polishing #pistolonly