Looking for Advise on STI GP6

[Contondant]

I'm sorry, but frankly your experience with this gun doesn't suggest anything to me other than you may be a tad too dainty in handling one, and you got a dirty range gun.

Both of mine have worked fine, and your point about the slide stop is almost too funny for words. It's a slide stop, not a slide release. Although many people do thumb them down to release the slide, it's poor form.

Jaroslav designed this gun to release the slide with a sharp insertion of the magazine. It does it 100% of the time. In three years of competition, it's never let me down. If you order from the factory, and prefer the slide to lock open and remain open on mag insertion, they will cut the slide recesses deeper.

The magazine catch is a magazine catch. It holds full magazines tight. That's not a bad thing, unless you can't insert them to full lock. Like any new gun, the mag catch tip and the magazines cut out will work in after a bit.

My K100 was a bit less tolerant of dirt than the GP6, and as a result I switched to VV N320. I don't know what, if any dimentional changes happened from the GP K100 Mark 6 that Target was renting, to the GP6, but the current model just keeps on ticking.

I use a very small amount of grease on the roller cam, the front frame lugs, and that's it. Over oiling the chamber end of this gun could cause caking of fouling, and more problems than the oil would cure.

This is bloody rediculous. The purpose of this thread was to ask people their opinion on a given pistol. I have some experience and gave some anectodal details to indicate what I think are this pistols positive and negative traits.

My experiences with this pistol are in no way contingent upon the semantic nomenclature of the internal working parts, nor are they affected by your patronizing indication of where you disagree with me about these names.
You want to somehow infer that my opinion is worth less because I use the slide release to release the slide and chamber a round when the gun has run dry?? Yeah, I refer to the thumb lever one uses to perform this act as a slide release, as do a heck of alot of other people. FYI I would call the internal mechanism (the hook that catches the slide) a slide stop. Does that really have any meaning here? Or rather would you like to see the point of my statement: that regardless of what you call it, one had to press down on the damn thing with at least 20 lbs of pressure to get it to release. It wasn't right. The other GP6 I had bought didn't have that problem... it was specific this that pistol. The R/O / Clerk at the store obviously recognized it as not being right, because his reaction was something akin to "Well, that ain't right, obviously we gotta get you a different pistol", when I pointed it out to him. As for releasing the slide from the slide stop by racking it back, you can go ahead with that. But in hundreds (thousands?) of reloads, many of which are from the slide stop position, where I've pressed down on the slide release to chamber a round, it's never failed to chamber and it's a whole hell of alot faster to do that with your support hand thumb as you return your support hand to position on the pistol than reaching over the pistol, racking it, then repositioning your support hand. You do what you want. Don't fault me for doing what works 100% of the time for me. All of that was beside the point.

As for the magazine catch, again, there was an obvious problem there, as the range officer couldn't extract that mag (same reaction : "Well, that ain't right") Having played with it beforehand for a few minutes, I'd figured out that if you pushed the mag in hard while you pushed the mag release, you could jossle it free. And that was IF you managed to get the thing seated, which took a great deal of slapping effort. Again, not an issue the other pistol (or any other new pistol of mine ever) had. No further questions asked "We'll just get you another pistol".

If you guys' guns work, that's great. There's a guy shooting a GP6 in IPSC here that always kicks my ass me, so it's obviously working well for him. I indicated I thought STI didn't have their usual high level of craftmanship (or, given this pistol is foreign, at least quality control) with this pistol. I even said maybe we got a bad batch. I expressed my experiences and they don't indicate I'm "dainty" with guns. I can handle my other pistols in competition just fine, thanks.