Crashman

I just read an article on marksmanship and the writer was promoting dry fire practice. I was always lead to believe that if you dropped the pin on an empty chamber it could damage the firing pin. Please help as I am trying to improve my skills, and would like some " quiet" practice. The firearm in question is a new Tikka 595 in 308 win. Thanks for the help!!

Briman

Dry firing your rifle will not hurt it a bit, have fun.

MBuckH72

I don' t like to dry fire any rifle (I use snap caps) , but it wont hurt a center fire rifle. Don' t ever dry fire a rimfire rifle.

Mark whiz

Dry firing is an excellent way to improve your hold on target and to catch any " anomalies" (twitches, trigger jerk, etc) that you may have developed over time. All of the top shooters HIGHLY recommend it.

Personally, I prefer to use snap caps or other tools rather than just popping the trigger. As a cheap tool, if you can pop the primers out of a few fired cases - you can cut pieces of eraser from pencils at work and insert them into the primer pockets.......viola - free snap caps .

driftrider

I can' t speak for rifles, but I know with pistols dry-fire practice is not only harmless, it' s highly recommended. One coach I remember reading about stated that one should dry-fire their pistol 10 times for every one live round. To refine my trigger control I dry-fire my pistol almost every night while watching TV. After making sure it' s unloaded (twice), I just load up a snap cap, pick a spot on the wall and " shoot" at it a couple dozen times being careful not to twitch or jerk the shot.

I don' t know how well it' d work with a rifle, but one trick I picked up from a more resourceful Marine Corp pistol coach is the use of snap caps during live fire practice. If you had a problem that the coach couldn' t pick up while shooting live rounds, he' d take you aside and load up a magazine with one to three snap caps with the live rounds but not let you see where he put them. He' d then watch you fire and when you came to a snap cap he could see what you were doing at the moment the shot would have broke without recoil getting in the way. It also made a really good way to practice react drills to clear a " malfunction" (tap-rack-bang).

It' s my opinion that snap caps should always be used when doing repeated dry-firing. I think about it like this, without the snap-cap the firing pin is drove full-force into whatever part of the that bolt stops it. There is usually no buffer to allow the pin to gradually decellerate. This means that you have one hardened piece of metal slamming into another piece of hardened metal every time. The primer on a live round, and the spring in the snap-cap, give the pin something relatively soft to run in to, which cushions the blow considerably. For a couple bucks I think snap-caps are a good insurance policy against premature wear or failure due to repeated dry-firing.

Mike

RedAllison

Crash it might not " hurt" anything to dryfire them, but it wont help anything either. Some actions simply arent designed to be dryfired, a few times and you could crack the pin mechanism. The cheapest and easiest " snapcap" is simply keeping a spent shell for such occasions. The brass primer will continue to bend/give and absorb the slight amount of shock from the pin falling. That is better than banging the stops on the back of the boltface. Steel on brass is much preferable to steel on steel.

Good luck,
RA

thenuge15

I used to dry fire my rimfire .22 and was wondering how to tell if i damaged anything. How many times do you think it would take to damage?

Jorgy

The whole " dont' dry fire" came from the early days of steel when they didn' t know how to make it less britle. Just about any firearm made in the last 80 years won' t have any problems being dry fired 100 times a day. I totally understand the principle of " better to be safe than sorry" and using a snap cap though. But me, I dry fire all of my firearms

Briman

Most rimfires will have a way of stopping the firing pin short of the chamber. If its a really old rimfire, it might not have this design. Since the steel used to make barrels is much softer than the steel used for receivers and firing pins, it would only take one strike from a firing pin on the edge of the chamber to ruin it. You woul dbe able to tell because you would have a hard time chambering a round- if you could chamber one at all, and you would certainly have extraction problems and possibly burst cases. You would also be able to see the edge of the chamber peened over. I doubt that anyone here would run into that problem in their lifetimes, unless they were modifying their firearm in a way they shouldn' t be.

Vapodog

I' ve broken two firing pins due to dry firing.....both was imported guns.I' ve never had a problem with mauser 98 winchester 70 Remington 700...personally I feel that if you must dry fire, use a snap cap.