Yes, this is not an uncommon problem.
Some people get relief by closing the magazine feed lips down to around .310 - .313.
I've done that. I also lightly hand-polished all the friction surfaces between slide and frame (especially the disconnector ramp in the slide), as well as the barrel ramp and inside bottom of the barrel hood. I used a little Flitz polish on a cloth. Mother's Mag Wheel Polish works too, I'm told.
Don't even think about getting a Dremel near a Black Label.
The last thing I've done is switched to a very light oil...in this case Rem Oil...and I apply it liberally.
Since doing those things I've had more than 500 cycles with only one seventh-round stovepipe jam.
You can, if you wish, send an email to
[email protected] and politely request they add replacement magazine and recoil springs for the Black Label.380 to their line of products. They are the people who sell Wolff replacement springs for a number of firearms and are generally regarded to be the one of the best sources for such things. They are very nice people to talk to, but as of this time they have not committed to supporting the Black Label .380. Maybe your e-mail will be the one that convinces them.
As an experiment, they sent me one of their generic .380 mag springs to test on a no promise, no obligation basis. Their spring appeared to be made from wire that is about one gauge heavier than the OEM spring and was noticeably stiffer.
I trimmed it to the same length as the OEM spring (16 turns) and, of course, the little loop that protrudes from the mag follower to activate the slide hold-back when the mag is empty wasn't there, but I found a particularly troublesome mag to work perfectly through 100 rounds with the heavier spring.
I reported my (admittedly unscientific) results to both Gunsprings and Browning. Gunsprings thanked me for my time, but remained non-committal. I never received a response from Browning.
