Hello Vic,
Your serial number was well before the issue with the cracking slides. The slides cracking was not a bad run of stainless steel, as we originally had thought. It was more an issue of the type of steel we were using in those early years, being 17-4ph stainless steel. We found out that 17-4ph gets brittle when the heat treat Rockwell number goes above 46. Some of the R9s with issues we tested were at 48 Rockwell. Those needed to be swapped out with a lower Rockwell number slide. We really did think it was a bad mill run of steel we got, so that is what the story was at the time. I am just happy that we caught it early on, stayed on top of it and there just a few that unfortunately made it out the door, but we were unaware of any problem because nothing had come back broken up to that point, so all was well. Like they say: "You can't fix what isn't broken yet." Thankfully no one had a bad experience with them overall and we exchanged them as they came in without charge to the clients. Many were fine, even with the higher Rockwell number. . . . Just luck of the draw if yours cracked along the backside rails. The Deer Park guns that had the 17-4ph stainless slides were the ones with script writing on the left-hand side of the slide. Those with issues were only found on about 17 R9s, so the number of cracked slides were few, however, with the Internet, it was all over the place as if every R9 was cracking. In our ten year run, we made close to 7,000 handguns, so the percentage was quite small. If it is a Deer Park slide with the block letters, those slides are of a different stainless steel called 416 stainless. Those are fine all the way through their production run.
Eric R.
