I picked up a new Canik TP9SFX with a Vortex red dot on a decent deal and have found it to be a jam-o-matic with 115 grain 9 mil. I have put about two hundred rounds through it from a few different manufacturers and it fails to eject every few rounds with the spent casing getting caught by the slide.

I've read that this gun prefers 124 grain NATO rounds but I'm wondering if it needs to go back to service work with Century, which I'm not confident about, or if I just need to try a few hundred more rounds to get it broken in.

It is a soft shooting and accurate pistol, but not much fun when it jams all the time. Any advice from the forum collective? I'd be willing to try more rounds or a different spring to get this thing to work. I have Glocks as my other pistols and they just work everytime so I guess I'm used to pistols actually working.

Question:
What should I do with this pistol?

Choices:
Keep shooting it to break it in
Try a different spring
Send it to Century for warranty work
Just trade it in towards something else

 

Sounds a lot like the issues one of my buddies was having with his SFX. He was using cheap 115gr target Ammo and it would jam on him all the time. I told him he should send it to canik, but He just sold it and got something else.

Had a Sig Ultra Compact do the same thing. Advice I got on here was to run a few hundred 124 and 147 gr rounds through it.
Did it and after it had no problems with 115 gr rounds. Worth a shot if you want to.

Failures to eject, especially when they occur with 9mm pistols, are usually due to low slide speed and that’s usually caused by low powered ammunition. Because 9mm ammunition is offered in so many different loads, it may be difficult to design a pistol that works properly with the wimpy stuff, but doesn’t get battered to death with hotter rounds.

If the pistol is well lubricated and you can’t change the recoil spring (I know nothing about the gun you have), then yes, you probably need to shoot more powerful ammunition. I certainly wouldn’t seriously consider trying to send the gun for service until you’ve tried that. One shooter I know has a pistol that consistently malfunctions with the typical low powered 115 grain FMJ training stuff, but works fine with Winchester 124 grain NATO spec ammo. That’s not the hottest load available, but it’s more potent than many other American manufactured FMJ types.

I had the same gun minus the red dot and it ran perfectly fine with 115 gr. Maybe the added weight of the red dot is slowing down the slide enough to cause the malfunction. Maybe try it without the red dot.

My experience with it was the same, it truly is oversprung on the recoil spring. It needed hotter ammo with the 115s for mine to be 100%. I have the blue spring in it now but only shoot it with the 147s. There a number of posts on the SFX model and what you can do to swap out the recoil spring to get it to feed lower recoil loads reliably or you can feed it 124s/147s. For the money (489 brand new) it's a heck of a deal but lacks some of the after market support of other guns.

quote:

Originally posted by Dusty78:
I had the same gun minus the red dot and it ran perfectly fine with 115 gr. Maybe the added weight of the red dot is slowing down the slide enough to cause the malfunction. Maybe try it without the red dot.

Ditto for me. I had the same gun and never installed a RMR on it. I didn't shoot it much, but what I did was 115gr range ammo like WWB and Blazer brass. Didn't have any problems.

I have a HK VP9. First time I shot it, I loaded up a mag w/ 115gr range ammo. First shot - stovepipe. Second shot - another stovepipe. I think in my first ten rounds, over half had FTE issues. I thought, "WTF, this is the HK quality ppl rave about?"

I put the gun away in disgust and started making plans to sell/trade it. I then found advice that HK's are designed around NATO spec ammo and to break them in w/ heavier bullets. Next time I took the VP9 out, I fired 15-20 rounds of 124gr through it. After that, zero issues shooting 115gr. It's now one of my favorite guns.

I will order some 124 grain ammo and run a few hundred rounds through to see if it helps. I've also reached out to Canik to see if they can ship me a softer recoil spring. Thanks all for the advice.

Try something like Fiocchi or Sellier & Bellot 9mm FMJ, it's high quality and tends to be a bit hotter loaded than American stuff. Price is good too.

Century Arms is shipping out a lighter spring for free. Same day response and no questions asked, that's better customer service than I had expected. Hopefully that works, otherwise I will try the hotter ammo route.

I have a TP9 sfx that has about 10,000 rounds through it.
It runs everything, including my low powered reloads.
It is very reliable and accurate and I've never had any issues with it.
I think you'll enjoy it once you get your problems ironed out.

Get a Glock.

It will just be getting broken in after 200,000 rounds.

quote:

Originally posted by sns3guppy:
Get a Glock.

It will just be getting broken in after 200,000 rounds.

I have Glocks, they all go bang when I squeeze the trigger. That's why this pistol frustrates me so much.

Try this stuff.

I have the same set-up as you do. All I have shot through it is cheap 115 grain, fmj....so far only about 400 rounds. In total , have had 2 or 3 jams. Otherwise, completely reliable and accurate.

I remember being negatively impressed when I took the gun apart when I first bought it ( before shooting it) because I found a clean gun with no lube at all. I lubed it up and have shot it with only those couple of jams early on.

If it were mine , I clean and lube and also contact Century arms for the new recoil spring. It should perform a lot better than your's does.

Low power factor ammo. IF 9MM Nato works fine (it will), then there is nothing wrong with the pistol. It just needs broken in.

Store it with the slide locked back for a few months, that will help break in your strong recoil spring. And shoot 9MM Nato ammo through it for the first couple hundred rounds. Buy a case of the stuff. Its available for like $180 shipped right now.

A SFX only thing? My SF and at least two others I know of have had no problems cycling with 115gr. Mine cycled wimpy 115gr Blazer Brass, some of the first ammo I ran through the gun.

Thanks to all for the information. I have the same model TP9SFX which I recently picked up but have yet to shoot. This thread will save me a lot of heartburn and headaches.

Mine has cycled perfectly with any ammo I have tried in it. Only issue I had first range trip was that it wasn't locking back the slide after last round. This occurred with all 4 mags that I had. I took a little tension out of the slide lock lever spring (possibly would have corrected itself after more use) and have had zero issues since.

I'd run a box of +P though it. See how it likes that for size.