Want realistic practice without damaging your gun’s firing pin? Here we take a look at Otis Snap Caps.
A lot of firearm designs have robust firing pins—but not all. Finding out the hard way is … well … hard. Still, even when I gunsmithed for a living, it felt wrong to dry-fire on an empty chamber using the firearms I knew to be robust. I ended up making my own snap caps with silicone goo in the primer pocket of fired and deprimed cases, with no powder but bullets in them. (I epoxied the bullets in place after I used them a bunch.)
Most snap caps have a short service life. The all-plastic ones usually break at the rim after even a modicum of use. The firing pin impact doesn’t help there, either. Ideal ones would be all-brass or copper, lathe-turned to shape and fitted with spring-loaded primers. Can you say $20 a shell at least? Ouch. Otis, to no great surprise, comes to our rescue here. Their PRO+ Snap Caps are mostly aluminum, because that’s an inexpensive and reasonably durable (when used properly) material. But what about the rims? Oh, the rims are made of brass. The body is lathe-turned out of aluminum and then anodized red, so it shows up among all the other rounds you might have. The rims are lathe-turned brass, so they won’t break like plastic nor wear your extractor excessively like steel. The two are then assembled into the appearance of a cartridge for your use.
Being made of aluminum also helps in feeding dynamics. Sometimes you need to dry-fire to check a trigger pull. I did that a lot back in the old days, and snap caps take a beating during that process. The other method is the “ball and dummy” drill. That’s a range drill where a friend loads your magazines and randomly includes a dummy round, or snap cap, in the magazine. You have to deal with the “click instead of a bang” situation when engaging the targets.
In this use, the Otis aluminum PRO+ Snap Caps will feed much more like a live round than plastic ones. And, as a bonus, the primer-like part is spring-loaded to soften the impact for the firing pin even more.
Otis offers them in .380, 9mm and .45 ACP, which are sized for most carry guns in use these days. A package of five snap caps has a list price of $25, which is $5 per unit. That might seem like a lot, but considering they’ll continue to work and not break (until you lose them), the per-unit cost is a lot less than the cheap plastic ones I remember from the not-so-good ol’ days.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.
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