My Stealths performance and some questions

[jarcher]

Hi All…

Months ago, I bought a R9 Stealth from TheIrishGuard.  Unfortunately, this one came without the magic dust and with the old magazine springs.  It jammed about every other round with every type of failure it could think of.  Rohrbaugh sent me two new magazine springs right after the last SHOT show.  I promptly installed them into the magazines and the let them sit until today.

Finally, off to the range.  I loaded a magazine full of 115gr Winchester white box (ball ammo).  The first round double fed.  Very frustrating.  After that I had much better results.  It went through the rest of that magazine plus 3 more with no trouble.

Then, I had the slide not go fully into battery, which caused a primer strike on the rim of the cartridge.  No idea how that happened.  It fired the rest of that magazine fine.  Then, the slide got stuck closed after firing the last round in a magazine.  After a bunch of playing it finally came open.  Upon hindsight I am guessing the pin came loose, but I’m not sure.  That is not a good sign at all.  

A friend of mine had his wife fire several magazines and she fired them all one handed with no trouble.  Finally, I fed it two and a half magazines of 147gr Ranger and it ate those perfectly.

So I’m not fully convinced the pistol is 100% reliable but the improvement is vast.  I just cleaned it up and I’ll probably actually carry it at this point.  Still, I would prefer 100% reliability.  

Several questions…

At one point there was a rumor on this board that Rohrbaugh was replacing the recoil springs with a new design.  Is that true?

I also think I read that after the initial release of the new mag springs, they were again changed to a slightly lighter spring.  Any truth to that?  I hope not.

Finally, if I load up a magazine for several months, will the mag spring still be strong enough to do the job when I shoot?

Thanks everyone!  I’ll continue to post my progress.
 

[jarcher]

Thanks WS6, is the new recoil spring different from a tension standpoint?

[jarcher]

Thanks.  I guess I'll order a few, along with more mag springs for the original stainless R9.  Although, I am thinking of trading that one for an R380, although I don't know why I would want one when I have an R9.  I collect guns, but not these.  So I should do something.  Still, I might want to wait a bit until the R380 has been shipping for a while.  The 1.0 release of anything can be buggy.

[JohnBT]

"is the new recoil spring different from a tension standpoint?"

I don't know about the measured spring strength, but when I ordered springs a couple of weeks ago I was told they were good for 250 rounds instead of the 100 rounds I was expecting. I went ahead and got 5 anyway.

The new mag springs are looong, but I haven't put them in the 2 mags that came with the (used) gun since they work fine so far with the ammo I've tested. I haven't even tried my 2 new mags. I have some work to do.

John

[theirishguard]

jarcher, sorry, I thought I had put the magic dust on all of my guns. Have you tried Gold Dot 115 or 124 gr. HP?   Tom

[jarcher]

jarcher, sorry, I thought I had put the magic dust on all of my guns. Have you tried Gold Dot 115 or 124 gr. HP?   Tom

Hi Tom, not yet.  I'll be running more ammo through it and I will try those.  I do like the GDHP.  Still, the Ranger RA9T worked nicely, although I only had a few magazines worth to test.

The most disturbing failure, to me at least, was the failure to extract and resulting double feed on the very first shot.  That was with the ball ammo.  Combined with the failure to go into battery, I suspect the recoil spring.  I'm going to get some new ones from Rohrbaugh and try again.

Over all though, the pistol did well.  The magazine springs made an enormous improvement from what I told you about last September (or whenever it was).  I do want to get to the 100% reliable mark and I do think I'm closing in.  If I can;t, I'll ship it home and see what Karl can do with it.  But I doubt that will be necessary.

  

[Aglifter]

The only problems I ever had was w. WWB -- it's always eaten the various HPs just fine... of course, it was fine w. the WWBs after the first couple mags -- I'm 99% sure that it was just me getting used to shooting/shooting the pup again  (I've gone from shooting several times/week to not even once a month.)