Admittedly I am new to “Ol’ Slabsides” and was recently able to purchase a NIB Colt Goverment XSE; it has performed flawlessly so far chewing through over 300 rounds of mixed variety - UMC, American Eagle and Blazer Brass. I have had zero stoppages and the ejection pattern has been predictable. I performed the 10-8 extractor test upon purchase and again, passed with flying colors.
There is one small potential nit, that has me curious -
Is this extractor “clocked?”
Most of me wants to just continue shooting it, until a malfunction occurs; but if it is something I should fix now, I would like to do so.
It doesn’t seem to be sitting perfectly vertical, but since the gun seems to be running find whatever slight clock it has doesn’t appear to be affecting function.
If it bothers you you can try disassembling the slide and checking the fit of the firing pin stop. If the firing pin stop grove in the extractor isn’t cut deeper than the grove in the slide you could buy a slightly oversize firing pin stop and fit it to your gun which should keep the extractor from clocking. If the grove in the extractor is deeper, then you would need to replace the extractor itself.
If it truly “clocks” (this is, rotates because of a bad fit with the FP stop) I would fix it, it can move around and what is reliable now may not be in the future. But perhaps it is just a bad machine angle in the FP notch and does not rotate.
Can’t really see it all that well, but I don’t think you’ve got anything (at all) to be concerned about here. Why not just take it out, give it a quick once-over and put it back in straight to remove all doubt? Not that it will make any practical difference performance-wise, but at least you won’t have to continue wondering about it .
If it can rotate (perhaps it is held in position only by friction currently), then performance may suffer when it changes position. The “clocking” does not necessarily occurs in a relatively short string of fire.
As was said, if it is functioning, then there’s no problem.
“Clocking” is a root cause for a kind of FTE malfunction; if your pistol isn’t experiencing that malfunction, then there’s no reason to be concerned about the aesthetics of the aft, non-functional part of the extractor.
If it shoots, then OK. But it it were me, I’d fix that. Go get a gunsmith fit FPS from EGW, and go get one of their HD extractors as while you’re at it. You can get a perfect fit in about 1-2 hours with a couple of hand files.
At the same time, you can do a small radius on the FPS, which will increase the accuracy (keeps the barrel locked up longer), and felt recoil as well (it takes more energy to move the slide with a small FPS radius, so less gets to your wrist).
In addition to FTE failures, clocking can cause some feeding issues as well, as the clocked extractor may make it harder for a round to slide underneath the hook from the magazine.
