I Said It Would Be a Saga

Right about three years ago I got myself a model B Super, with a broken slide stop. Gun ran fine, but for the lack of the last shot hold open, and generally having a floppy part on the side.

But no problem, I know all about this, and can replace a gun part. Well, wrong. 

Star pistols as a whole have been out of production now for over twenty years, and it is starting to show. There are simply no spare parts for many of the most common problems (and the slide stop nub on the Super series was apparently a bit of a problem), and especially for many of the Classic series guns generally. 

This is a truth we're going to have to start facing, as the stocks of parts dwindle, and there is no longer a go-to supplier anywhere in the world to solve our needs. It may be time to start considering our Star firearms to be more for fun, and for discount collecting, than for day to day shooting, as when that one part breaks the gun may be entirely unshootable forever. 

Regardless, I wanted to shoot my Super, and so started looking into repairing it myself. The overall plan was to:

• Remove the plunger, spring, and cap screw that sit in a channel under the broken off stop stud
• Weld (or solder, or braze) on a small piece of steel
• Lacking even good photos or drawings, file it to shape based on trial and error

And this seemed to be going well. But, it always failed. It is very hard to weld the small part, and too aggressive a weld will damage the slide stop or fill the plunger channel with weld. 

When I went to file off the bead so it would fit flush, or change the size of the stud to make it fit into the hole so the part moves enough to re-assemble the gun, it would break off. 

Three times. 

Well, yesterday, I was doing some other firearms work at a friend's house, and my pipefitter friend as going to be TIG welding an engine part, so said to bring the part by one more time. 

And this time we got enough penetration along the joint to work. About 10 minutes of filing when I got home, and it works. 

I have yet to shoot it, but cycling with dummies presents no issues at all. 

As you see, not the prettiest thing ever, from all the times clamping, welding, welding again, filing, etc. Bit it works. 

And the shape seems to be pretty unimportant. There's a lot of magazine follower, and the position is in a dead space sort of under the feedramp, so any size of stud will do, much to my surprise. 

The biggest shaping issue is making one that will pass through the round hole in the frame, and also move down enough to clear the slide for normal operation, but go up enough to lock the slide back. That's harder than I expected, and hand filing that roundness is hard.

Also, unlike many other firearms, the stud doesn't pass through a constant thickness part of the frame, so you cannot just file in a notch for it to engage into. The entire piece has to be the proper size and shape due to the tapered shape of the front of the magazine guide. 

One welding job did penetrate into the plunger channel, and it took a bit of drilling to clear it out. Frightening drilling as the cap screw is very tiny, so I feared ruining the threads especially. But, it worked just fine. 

So, if anyone else wants to try a similar repair, you have a tiny bit of a guide now for how to approach the work.