Different length firing pins?

[Rasmus]

I have been cleaning up some parts to send out to be titanium nitrided and when I came to a couple of firing pins I realized they weren't the same. One was 1.5mm shorter at the back area but still the exact same length from the spring collar to the tip. I initially chalked this up to wear/battering from the hammer just peening it down a little over time.

So I ordered a brand new pin from RTG Parts because I wasn't going to waste money plating a wore/iffy firing pin. When I got the brand new pin today I noticed it was shorter too, by the same 1.5mm!

Different lengths at the hammer end

I wonder if the newer version with the triangle hammer shortened the spec of the firing pin? Maybe the enginners at Radom were worried about an accidental discharge if the hammer were pulled back slightly on fire and released and wanted to make darn sure that tolerances could not stack up so that the FP stuck out too far? This might be related to why some people could get their P64's to pass the pencil test when fanning the hammer and others failed?

https://p64resource.com/forum/viewtopic ... 639#p13639

Anyhow, has anyone else noticed that there are two different firing pin types -longer & shorter at the hammer end? I have 5 pins right now here and I measured them all and there are two different lengths that differ by 1.5mm with no other deviations of the slightest bit. One of the shorter ones was brand new old stock from RTG so I am sure that one wasn't wore.

I have two running guns -one is an early model and the other is a late. The late model had a KB! With Wolf ammo early on where it blew the slide right off and this damaged both breech face lugs so that slide was replaced with another late-model I got off of ebay. The early model I put on a triangle hammer to match the late one. I've got 4 safety barrels too, and they don't look any different to me at all. I've long since lost track of what parts have come off of which gun if they weren't serialized but nothing so far looks to be different other than the hammers and the firing pins.

Anyone else have any info on this?

[GuitarmanNick]

I have found that it is best to keep parts marked with what gun they belong to. Many firearms have firing pins that are fitted to the slide and will not always interchange with another of the same make and model.

Not sure about the P-64s.

[Rasmus]

True, but I've done quite a few parts swaps on my P64's without much trouble -slides, hammers, triggers, mainspring/hammer guide rods, springs aplenty and a bunch of other stuff. I do always carefully check the fit and function every time and the only time I've ever noticed any problem was the second time I did a slide swap.

The first time worked really well after the original slide kB!-ed from the bad Wolf ammo. But when I later sent that cosmetically-challenged replacement to be hard chromed I put a third slide on temporarily so I would still have a running spare. But this time the disconnector needed a tiny bit of adjustment to get the DS trigger to engage. A tiny bit of stoning brought it back into perfect functionality.

The firing pins have been swapped around too over the years as did refinishing and polishing to snazzy the gun up and reducing DA pull.. They always worked in whichever gun they were in and passed the function tests before shooting them. It wasn't until I held two next to one another under magnification that I noticed any difference.