MG2 Troubles.. need some brainstorming

[MG2-owner]

It jammed every 3 or 4 rounds. It was bursting cases... I was devastated.. I could not use it in a competition.

Yes. same problem here. Was not allowed to fire my MG2 during my clubs regular excersises, after repeated case bursts....

My local dealer brought a new barrel/slide/extractor in from Match Guns (they replaced it, no charge... new barrel, not milled down).. and that has solved the burst casing problem (and most likely some of the jamming).

As I wrote in a previous post, two of us got new slides, but re-milled barrels(!) Barrels that were too short, hence did not extend fully rearward. As a result from this the hammer had to move further forward to hit the cartridge rim. Unreliabel ignitions, in addidion to the usual unreliable feeding/ejection. Ummph...

My gun is in the 14xx range.

Both guns (mine, and the importers personal specimen) have just been returned to the MG-factory. Hopefully, they will arrive in working order.

Despite all the troubles, during two and a half years, I still believe that some sunny day, my MG2 will become troublefree. (That hope is slowly fading, though...)

[Mark Briggs]

Dear MG-2 Owner...

Keep your hopes up. The MG-2 is a wonderful pistol to shoot. Cesare and team has made some pretty ugly mistakes in production, but the basic design is sound. I can vouch for 3 MG-2's that work very well (my pair and the one owned by "David from Ottawa"). And I can attest to having a strong bias in favour of the MG-2 since the first time I held one in my hand. It took me about 30 seconds to decide that I needed to purchase one because it just felt right. And then I discovered that when a pistol feels that good it shoots well too.

So, be a little patient. The rewards in the end are worth it.

Oh, by the way, I don't think I've seen Brian James post back here so I'll throw a word in on his behalf. I think he's got most of the kinks in his pistol sorted out. He reported to me today that he replaced the Bullet Insert Lever after finding its pivot hole to be worn and a chunk had broken off the end of the lever. After doing this little parts change he reports the gun worked just fine over a fairly limited test run. Our provincial championships are this coming weekend so he's obviously hoping he's exorcised all the demons!

[Brian James]

Update on MG2

Mark Briggs stole my thunder a little bit. He is right that changing the BIL solved the problem, but what I think the true problem was the spring and the ball bearing that hold the hammer (which you can access when changing the BIL) was not fitted properly. Now the ball bearing seems to apply enough pressure to keep the hammer up consistently. I have only shot 100 rds, and they have all been without a misfire.

I would like to thank everyone who has given me advice and suggestions on how to fix this gun. I truly never thought I would get as many responses as I did - thank you all!

Brian James
Ottawa, Canada

[Mark Briggs]

Here is a slightly more current update on Brian's MG-2 situation. Last week he brought it to our local club and we found that it still wasn't functioning as it should. The hammer would often follow the slide forward resulting in a loaded cartridge in the chamber, but no way to fire it since the hammer was already in the fully-forward position.

By using my two MG-2's for comparison it was determined that trigger adjustment was way out of whack. Re-adjusted first and second stages of the trigger pull, readjusted overtravel, readjusted 1st stage travel, readjusted sear engagement, readjusted sear preload (the screw on top of the receiver), and got the trigger to work much better. We also ground a bit of metal off the curved surface of the hammer as it appeared to be several thousands of an inch thicker than my pistols, and appeared to be binding the slide between the hammer and the bottom half of the frame.

Test firing indicated significant performance improvement. While Brian took a bathroom break I went 55 shots straight without malfunction, using a variety of ammo. The only ammo the pistol doesn't seem to like is RWS Target Pistol. Other than that, it ate everything else quite well. In fact, I performed my usual function test of loading one cartidge of each of five different brands in one magazine and firing them off. The only time this failed for me was when we used the RWS Target Pistol, and once when there was an RWS Super 250 in the mix.

It looks like Brian's pistol is now up and running. I hope others out there achieve the same success.

[Brian James]

Mark,

I love how you gave such a detailed description of what occured, including my bathroom break... I'm sure the people on target talk appreciate those fine details...

The gun truely working much better. I am not at about 500rds through it with only a few stove pipes occuring. I figure once I am able to shooting the gun consistantly without any major issues I will be confident its fixed, until then... I hope and pray every match...

[Mark Briggs]

More updated info on Brian James' MG-2...

The saga continued with Brian having the odd malfunction. Since he's preparing to attend an international match in a few days, drastic actions were called for. We took apart my newer pistol and used its slide in Brian's gun. The net result is that he blasted through a brick of ammo without malfunction. More testing will be done before he flies off to the match on the other side of the earth, but in the mean time this is looking very promising.

He also has established contact directly with Matchguns and appears to be receiving very good responses from the factory. I know that my experiences in dealing with the factory have all been very satisfactory.

[Richard H]

Good hear that progress is being made, maybe someday soon they'll make serial production guns that will shoot out of the box.

[ColinC]

Still sounds to me like the people who have forked out big dollars are the ones doing all the development and research to fix the problems.
I hope that Match Guns rewards them ;-)

[Mark Briggs]

Colin - you make a good point. Matchguns has definitely had some teething troubles with the MG-2.

But I think we can honestly say that every manufacturer has put the consumer in the same position. To whit, my AW93, purchased brand new, had to have its chamber reamed before it would function. I have no idea how they test-fired the gun to make the test target because it literally was a single-shot pistol until the chamber was reamed. Then there were the long-standing troubles that Pardini had with their electronic trigger module, and now their quality problems with shipping things like barrels with big burrs in them. And of course we can't forget the wonderful Hammerli SP20 that breaks so regularly that most shooters in our local area have simply given up on them.

Even the venerable Walther GSP had teething troubles, but that was 40 years ago so nobody remembers them any more. And the SSP is reputed to be going through the same kind of growing pains.

I think your statement about Matchguns using consumers to debug their product is largely true, but a little narrow in application as I believe ALL manufacturers of competition pistols are doing the same thing, and there's plenty of evidence from the field to confirm this. Let's face it, we shoot guns that have extremely limited production runs, and that push the limits of technology. Few manufacturers have the $$ to thoroughly test their products before taking them to market. And I think we can realistically assume this problem will only become more pronounced in the future as we demand ever-more technologically advanced pistols and are willing to wait less time to have them delivered to market. This just seems to be the nature of the beast! ;-)

[MG2-owner]

Two non-performing MG"s, ( mine, and the importers personal specimen), and a non-performing MG1 E (this air-gun worked ok for 20 shots only).
Trying hard to retrive the guns, that probably, for some to us unknown reason, have been "seized" during customs handling somewhere in Europe.

These guns have now benne missing for many months. By the start of the year 2008 I will consider the guns "lost" and unretreiveable, and buy replacement guns (no, a different brand, I recon...).

There is some difficulty clearing out this situation. The MG-factory have stated they have had one of the guns in for repair, then later states they have never laid their hands on any of the guns. (!).

Good geief....

[MG2-owner]

MG2s, in .22 caliber, not MG3 or MG".
Apologize for the misprints.

[MG2-owner]

Of the two packages containing two MG2-frames, two MG2 factour re-machined barrels (useless they were, it turned out) and a fixed MG1E, the package containing the two MG2 frames have now been released from seizure by Italian postservices, and have been returned to desender (importer).

The release caused by some assistance from the MG-factory, I recon. Good!

The outher package, containing two useless barrels, and, fixed an hopefully useable MG1E, is still in captivity.
The good thing is: we now know where the package is located!

I still hope, some sunny day, our MG2s will become returned to us in fully servicable condition. And perform as well as some MG2-owner claime his MG2 does. ...
Some doubt still persists, however....

[Mark Briggs]

Dear MG-2 Owner,

Sorry to hear you are still having troubles getting hardware to and from Italy. I'm sure once your MG-2's make it to Matchguns they will be repaired and will work very well.

I'll make two additional points here. Firstly, Brian, who started this thread, is still having troubles with his MG-2. Like you, he is sending it back to the factory for repair, and the factory has told him they will gladly do whatever is necessary to fix it. So far the level of support from the Matchguns factory has been very, very good. I hope his gun has a smoother ride through the Italian post office!

Brian opted to send it back to Italy because we had determined that his very early serial number gun simply needed more parts to fix it than we had available to us. If I put my parts on his gun it worked fine, but then I didn't have the parts to make my gun work. Good for Brian, not so good for me! LoL

The second point is about MG-2 reliability. In our last attempt to fix Brian's pistol we had both of my MG-2's torn apart on the kitchen table, trying to measure individual parts etc to see what was different. Some say the MG-2 can't be made to be reliable, but my experience shows this is not true. After we were done tearing my guns apart we put them back together and I took them to the range. No adjustments were made, just a standard reassembly of the parts. And both guns worked perfectly. The MG-2 can be made to function very reliably, and even after disassembly and reassembly they work, indicating there's no need for any special "magic" to make them work.

[Tycho]

A remark on the side - after the latest update, many parts are not interchangeable with early series models. For example, the cradle is completely new and has a different axle position in the frame. The slide is completely new, new type extractor claw. Many little things, many improvements, but not per se compatible with earlier models. I've seen some specialists drop new type barrels into V1 frames and wonder why that didn't work...

[Mark Briggs]

Tycho - your observations are right on. The cradle is indeed very different between V1 and Vx (3, 4??); it's hinge point is different, and the spring balls no longer align with the holes in the frame. Brian's pistol actually has a V4 barrel and slide (very funky looking extractor on the slide, totally different design than previous ones, not just a change in width of the extractor or its hook angle). Even with these new parts it still didn't work according to plan so we'll let the masters at Matchguns do what's necessary to make it work. As mentioned in a previous post, they have been very willing to help, and they have responded very quickly to any questions or requests, so I'm sure they will fix this gun and make Brian a happy customer.

The down-side to all this is that Brian looks at my MG-2's with longing in his eyes. I need to keep them securely locked, otherwise I think he might be tempted to to steal one of them so he would have a pistol to shoot! ;-)

[Guest]

Matchgun is very responsive and helpfull, OK, that's nice. But I see that the first post of Bryan is dated May 19. We are now October 23 and he has still no working pistol. Now the pistol is sent back to Italy meaning that it will take at least some more weeks before it come back with, hopefully, the problems fixed.

Conclusion: Brian has been waiting for a working MG2 during at least 5.5 months !!!

[Brian James]

In fairness to Matchguns. I don’t think the previous poster's comments are quite fair.

I likely could have sent my pistol back to MatchGuns sooner, but I honestly thought I could fix the product locally. Plus loosing my gun in May wasn't an option as I had several competitions coming up. In hindsight I should have sent it off, but I opted not too.

MG - has been great to me, and I likely will purchase another one of their pistols because of it. If only I could get an MG Centre Fire pistol (look on Gahmen website).

What I think people should appreciate is every gun company has its problems, and growing pains. I'm owned a hammerli and Morini pistols that needed to be factory serviced for various reasons. The fact is these elite companies service their shooters, MG is no different now. If a World Championship or an Olympic gold medal is won with a MG, the shooting community will jump on the bandwagon.

Some people are willing to be early adopters for certain guns because they believe it offers them a competitive advantage. I was one of those shooters. I knew the chance I was taking, and don’t regret it.

If you have not shot an MG2, before you pass judgment on it please try it.

[CARL]

In fairness to Matchguns. I don’t think the previous poster's comments are quite fair.

I likely could have sent my pistol back to MatchGuns sooner, but I honestly thought I could fix the product locally. Plus loosing my gun in May wasn't an option as I had several competitions coming up. In hindsight I should have sent it off, but I opted not too.

MG - has been great to me, and I likely will purchase another one of their pistols because of it. If only I could get an MG Centre Fire pistol (look on Gahmen website).

What I think people should appreciate is every gun company has its problems, and growing pains. I'm owned a hammerli and Morini pistols that needed to be factory serviced for various reasons. The fact is these elite companies service their shooters, MG is no different now. If a World Championship or an Olympic gold medal is won with a MG, the shooting community will jump on the bandwagon.

Some people are willing to be early adopters for certain guns because they believe it offers them a competitive advantage. I was one of those shooters. I knew the chance I was taking, and don’t regret it.

If you have not shot an MG2, before you pass judgment on it please try it.

[Mad Max]

What puzzles me is why you all waste time and effort with this pistol? Are you a bunch of masochists? :-) Dont give me that bull crap about that the MG2 is soo special and gives sooo much higher scores when it works. Why doesn't anyone in the World Cup use it if it is so damn good as you say it is?

Think of all the time you could have spent on training instead of doing this never ending beta testing for match guns.

[Josh]

What puzzles me is why you all waste time and effort with this pistol? Are you a bunch of masochists? :-) Dont give me that bull crap about that the MG2 is soo special and gives sooo much higher scores when it works. Why doesn't anyone in the World Cup use it if it is so damn good as you say it is?

Think of all the time you could have spent on training instead of doing this never ending beta testing for match guns.

Plus the fact that since the design of the MG2 has been heavily changed so much that new parts are not usable on previous model, your MG2 has almost no value anymore, result:
- you loose a lot of your time trying to make it work
- you probably loose some points during competitions
- you loose some money since the MG2 you have will be almost impossible to sell or can only be sold at a very low price
- if some parts of you MG2 are broken, there is a big chance that no spare parts will be available for that model of MG2