Over the last 15 years, I've had increasing problems keeping them all running smoothly. Most of the issues centered around reliable extraction & ejection. I have all sorts of tweaks I've developed to make sure the grip of the extractor is secure, and that has helped, but on some pistols, it's not enough. Having this many pistol to work with, I began to observe a pattern. Pistols that worked fine would suddenly start jamming after I replaced a broken firing pin. I have seen issues where a broken piece has chewed up the slide or breech face, but I couldn't find any signs of damage in many of the pistols. They also would get fussy about ammo. My two personal pistols will shoot almost anything. Some of the Team pistols worked OK if they were kept super clean, and only fed RWS Target Rifle ammunition. That is no longer being imported into the US, and costs over three times what we pay for Aguila.
Recently, we had two more pistols that went south after the firing pins were replaced. The most common failures were either the slide closing with the fired case in the chamber, or the extractor letting go of the case with it only part way out of the chamber:
Because we have multiple pistols, I could swap assemblies around, and the problems followed the slides. I could understand the cases left in the chamber if the new firing pins added too much drag, but I couldn't figure out what was making the extractor let go with the case only part way out of the chamber.
About a year ago we needed to get parts for our sixteen Benelli Kite air pistols. I now have a contact at the factory who helped us with that, and he is also very familiar with the .22 pistols. I sent him an email with a description of what I'd observed, and my attempts to fix it. He immediately came back with an email that our firing pins were too long! They made a design change to the "head" a while back to try to reduce breakage, and at the same time decided to make them a bit longer. Here's a picture that shows the two versions:
The old firing pins were 31.1 mm from the front of the head to the tip. The new design was 31.3 mm long.
I inventoried all our pistols, and found seven that had replacement firing pins that were 31.3 mm long. All of them had a history of being fussy, or in some instances, completely unusable. I cleaned them, and test fired them with 20 rounds of Aguila standard velocity ammo. One had no failures, but the remainder had at least 3 jams. The worst one had 13.
Apparently Benelli had discovered this problem a while ago, because the newest batch of 6 replacement firing pins I had were all 31.1 mm long. They have the same head shape as the newer ones, but they are a silver color, rather than the brown finish of the older ones. I cleaned the six pistols that had jammed during test firing and installed the short firing pins.
Yesterday, we test fired those pistols. Five of the pistols did not jam at all firing 40 rounds of Aguila. One had some feeding issues, which were eliminated by swapping magazines. Afterward, that pistol also fired 40 rounds without a problem.
The hammer pushes on the back of the firing pin through the early part of the recoil cycle. The only thing I can figure is that the firing pins are so long that they are actually pushing the fired cases off the extractor. We have one pistol that can apparently tolerate that to some extent, possibly because its extractor has a larger gap, or other tolerances build up to act in its favor.
This has been driving me nuts for quite a few years, and I know some other Benelli owners who have struggled with the same symptoms. If you only have one pistol, it could be nearly impossible to track this down on your own. I also found that some of the firing pins made & sold by Larry Carter can be as long as the bad factory ones, and two of the pistols we fixed had those installed.
I hope this helps other Benelli owners out there. I know one local shooter who sold his two Benellis because he had so many problems with them. He has since discovered that he just can't shoot his Pardini as well as the Benellis, which matches my experience.
