Originally Posted by
TCinVA
Mine has gone through several 550 round boxes of ammo. It still functions about as well as you can expect such a device to function in the first place.
Rimfire ammo is notoriously unreliable in terms of ignition and consistency, so you can expect to experience quite a few dud rounds or rounds that need a second strike to fire if you shoot the bulk stuff. Also expect malformed rounds.
My 317 needs to be cleaned at least every couple of boxes of ammo as the crud builds up on the gun to the point where it begins to impact the ability to fully seat the rounds in the chambers, which causes them to stick up from the recesses in the chambers just a bit, which causes the cylinder to bind. The gap between the frame and the cylinder is very tiny so you don't have a lot of room to play with there. My 317 got grody enough after several boxes of ammo with no PM that the cylinder locked up tight and I needed a rubber mallet to get the thing open again.
As for the trigger, the trigger on my 442 is actually smoother than the trigger on my 317. As the gun gets dirtier the quality of the trigger pull degrades because the cylinder gets that much harder to turn.