Hello Scott and Welcome to the forum.
I'm sorry for not responding to your inquiry earlier, but usually folks put questions like this to me under "Ask ECR". (For the future I guess). I decided to look around some other threads this evening and found your question. Anyway, to answer the questions, the very early ones were much tighter than say from serial numbers around 3000 or so up. The earlier slides had an issue of cracking. . . .Let me be specific here: "Not every early model R9 cracked their slide!" . . . .We found the issue quickly and rectified it. We had, oh, I don't know, somewhere around 15 to 30 or so. . . . I can't really remember the exact number, but we took notice immediately. It ended up being a heat treat issue with one batch of slides which made them a bit brittle. No rhyme nor reason. . . some still worked fine and some developed a crack, which we changed out even if not the original owner. . . that was simply the right and safe thing to do. Originally we thought there may have been a bad mill rum of stainless that we received, but that was not it. Heat treating Rockwell number was too high. Yes, the early models were tighter than later models from around 2500 - 3000 and up. I noticed we were having issue with the slide to frame fit being too tight. I suggested to Karl that we open that dimension up by about .003" - .004", i.e. about a thousandth and a half to two thousandths per side. That did the trick! Much better and more "forgiving" if not cleaned and oiled on a regular basis by the owner. Other than that. . . . ALL R9s seemed to run well. Yes, if you find one that is a bit tight in the slide, when dirty, it gets sluggish and may jam. . . . That's a fact. However, if you kept even the tight ones cleaned,
and oiled properly, we had no issues at all with them either. So, with all of that said, find a nice clean one and buy it. . . . . . and give your other "pup" a friend.
See you around the forum Scott. . . . . Best of Luck on your quest.
Regards,
Eric R.
