Give up on P380?

Some 380 that have been 100% reliable for me.

Sig P230
Sig P290RS
Remington RM380 (two of them)
S&W M&P Bodyguard 380
Beretta Pico
Beretta 1934
and bringing up the tail end a Ruger LCP most recent iteration.

Two LCPs
Zero malfunctions .....(that weren't ammo related)
I don't think you should give up yet. There are too many good .380s to choose from.
It is a potent round for up close SD, and nothing carries like a .380.

If it's that bad, even if they fix it and you run 500 of your carry load through it - will you trust it? I am a fan of the Kahr pistols but any pistol regardless of brand has to provide a level of confidence in it's reliability.

That said here is what I can offer (I own the Kahr in service calibers only, PM9, PM40, TP45 (chopped to take 6 rounders).

The best I can suggest since you mention the slide stop spring (D spring) is NOT to tighten it down so it operates like two independent springs. Tighten enough so the screw clears the slide and holds but does not bind the spring. Also remember you are screwing steel into the plastic frame.

Also - detail strip the slide and totally clean out the striker channel. My TP45 brand new had metal shavings in the channel which certainly would deliver light strikes. I cleaned it first and have never had a failure of any kind. You should check for smoothness of striker movement manually in the channel, anything that slows down the striker can induce light strikes. No lube in the striker channel.

As to feed reliability the smaller light pistols are hard to hold onto if your hands are not small. The slide is very short and so the timing between slide retracting, mag spring forcing up a round and slide picking up that round is critical. This can show as a problem when the mag is almost empty as the spring will be at lowest tension then.

If you can't make the p380 fit your needs, size up for better fit or maybe try the LCP II.

My friend bought a cw380, he said it was the worst gun he ever had because of the failures. He finally ended up with a Sig p238 and he was in love with it. Kahrs have taken a step back with me after that.

I tried two cw380s and they were very susceptible to limp wristing so I moved them along. Really liked them for the attributes you mentioned, but I won’t keep a gun that is susceptible to limp wristing.

Have found my Colt Mustang and SIG P238 to be totally reliable, accurate, and very easy to conceal carry. Likewise I have had the same great results with my Kahr CM9.

Maybe there's an inherent design problem with downsizing the Kahr platform to the .380 round.

d'zaster said:

Ive seen reports of flawless reliability w the P380. Before I completely give up, I am humbly asking for suggestions.

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I think the only way to fix the problem is to sell it and buy a new P380, and repeat it until you find one that works. This is the way of buying a Kahr: it's a lottery. The ones that work are unstoppable. But not all of them are. The sad part is that the factory is not always a great help, as you already discovered.

One of my biggest frustrations with Kahr was their magazines. I would buy 3 factory magazines, and one of 3 just FTF. No matter how I looked at it, or how I measured it, it was a perfectly fine magazine body. Swapping followers and springs made the problem stay with the body. So, believe it or not, their gun design requires magazines to be extremely precisely made, and perhaps match a particular gun. Their design is too fine for their factory to reproduce it reliably when in mass-production.

d'zaster said:

Ive seen reports of flawless reliability w the P380.

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On the ol interwebs? take with a grain of salt.

My simple rule for guns.
If it doesn't run get rid of it and move on to something else.

Armored farmer said:

Two LCPs
Zero malfunctions .....(that weren't ammo related)
I don't think you should give up yet. There are too many good .380s to choose from.
It is a potent round for up close SD, and nothing carries like a .380.

Click to expand...

I agree. I have an LCP I improved edition that shoots Hornady Critical Defense HP and several different brands of ball ammo without any malfunctions. Give one of these a try. tom.

I'm a little skeptical of Kahr as a whole. I have an MK9 that I picked up used and has been flawless for the 500 or so rounds I've put through it so far. But a while back I shot a couple hundred rounds out of a buddy's P380 because I was interested in replacing my LCP with one. I had a lot of failures to go into battery with a couple different brands of ammo. It was accurate, but it stained my view of the brand.

Since then my LCP failed and was replaced by Ruger. The new one is much, much more accurate than my old one was. I think it it had better sights the accuracy would rival the P380.