OK, I have an "original small ejection port" story.
Some years back, Turnbull did a reproduction 1911 pistol. WWI vintage, dates of 1918. A friend of mine got one. Fantastic work, all correct, spot on, as they say..parts of the period correct type, original markings reproduced, tremendous job, only Turnbull's logo mark on the slide to prevent it being passed off as original.
My friend had it about 6 months, it was simply a range gun, he'd shoot two magazines of ball, once or twice a month, and then clean and put it away till next time. NO issues .
Then he got a live round stuck trying to eject it. He got it cleared, and then, as he puts it, "like a dummy" he tried it again to see if he could tell what happened. Gun jammed up solid. THEN, he called me.
I got it cleared and we started investigating.
Gun would eject fired cases flawlessly.
Gun would eject snap caps flawlessly.
Gun would eject loaded JHP ammo flawlessly.
Gun would jam solid trying to eject factory 230gr ball ammo.
Nose of the bullet was jammed hard against the inside of the slide just below the ejection port edge, jamming the slide preventing forward or backward movement.
I'd never seen that happen before, and i worked on 1911A1 for the Army....
My friend had never had it happen before, because of the way he had always used the gun. He'd never tried to eject a live round from it. He always just shot a couple of mags empty and then put it away.
The JHP ammo we used to test it with worked normally but was shorter than GI ball, so it cleared the port just fine. The snap caps were the same approximate length as ball ammo, and ejected fine. But, they were significantly lighter than loaded ball ammo.
I identified the likely culprit as the ejector,, it didn't look "right" to me, and it turned out I was right. Gun went off to Turnbull and was fixed and back in a week, all on their dime. The gun had mistakenly been fitted with one of the long ejectors used on other variants of the Govt model, not the proper GI 1911 ejector.
Point here is I have personal experience with an instance where the small port combined with the wrong ejector tied up the gun with 230gr ball ammo.
Literally what happened was that the round was pushed sideways too much before it got lifted up enough.
Never heard of any well documented problems with the original small ejection port, but that only means I never heard of them.
The other point to take from this episode is SNAP CAPS are NOT DUMMY ROUNDS.
Even if they have exactly the same dimension as live ammo, they should not be 100% trusted to ensure proper function with live ammo.
A correctly made dummy round does.
