I purchased my Sig P365 early on and it has a sticker date of March 11, 2018. Due to life, work, kids, etc., I haven’t had a chance to shoot it very much. I had about two range trips and it was flawless. However, I remember there were all sorts of failures with the early models like mine, including bad strikers that caused striker drag and eventually broke, as well as other failures like triggers failing, etc. Ultimately, if I experience any of these issues in the future, would purchasing the Lightning Strike below fix these issues? Or did Sig modify the slides further for any customers who sent their guns in for repairs?

https://www.brownells.com/hand...iker-prod123392.aspx

quote:

Originally posted by aparoche:
I purchased my Sig P365 early on and it has a sticker date of March 11, 2018. Due to life, work, kids, etc., I haven’t had a chance to shoot it very much. I had about two range trips and it was flawless. However, I remember there were all sorts of failures with the early models like mine, including bad strikers that caused striker drag and eventually broke, as well as other failures like triggers failing, etc. Ultimately, if I experience any of these issues in the future, would purchasing the Lightning Strike below fix these issues? Or did Sig modify the slides further for any customers who sent their guns in for repairs?

https://www.brownells.com/hand...iker-prod123392.aspx

Just upgrade your earlier striker by buying the current P365 striker assembly. Less money and solves any potential issues.

This may be neither here nor there, but I'm one of the many who sent my early make G42 back to Glock for the fixes. They performed the upgrades along new magazines. Is there a similar program from SIG to do the same?

Mine was built in mid April. I bought the most recent striker from Sig. I had several thousand rounds through it already before I got the revised striker.

If yours is working, why worry about it?

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Originally posted by MWC:
If yours is working, why worry about it?

I haven’t shot it all that much yet so this may not be the case. And yes, I know you will say to just shoot it until I experience issues. I am just preemptively planning and wondering what I can prepare for myself instead of having to ship it to Sig and wait awhile. If all Sig does is replace the striker, I can do that myself for $30 bucks.

The firing pin breakage issue with the early striker design was at one time chiefly attributed as an end result of repeated dry firing by the owners of these P365, likely on an empty chamber (i.e., no snap cap use). If I had to guess, I'd say that most of these would've been with GLOCK(!) owners who bought P365s, since dry fire exercises is a real thing with this crowd (including myself); a often predictable consequence due to Glock's fairly mediocre factory trigger actions.

The premise was that the repeated strikes against the back side of the breech face was causing fractures at the base of the firing pin, ultimately leading to its complete break and separation from the rest of the striker assembly. In addition many of the early guns also exhibited a significant amount of firing pin drag across the case primers during live fire, which the contention was that this condition exacerbated the stress on the firing pin. Or so goes the conjecture. Whether it was one or the other, a combination of both or perhaps another factor altogether, its likely reason(s) is something that we'll probably never know for certain, since SIG redesigned the striker at the firing pin making the breakage issue more or less moot.

From what I remember, it usually took considerable amount of dry firing cycles to cause the firing pin to snap off ("several hundred", whatever that ballpark means). Again dry firing is a typical habit of us Glock owners with our pitifully mediocre factory triggers. Since SIG did replace the old striker design with a new one, you can always nip any worries about this issue in the bud by contacting SIG CS and protesting loudly about it. Pretty sure SIG will take care of the concern for you.

There were other fairly serious early issues that you'll need to watch for as well. One is looking for any telltale scuff/scratch(es) that shows up on the finish of your gun's box magazines, on the rear face towards the top end of the mag. Those scratches were initially presumed to be a result of the trigger return spring (TRS) that was improperly sized too long at the end that was facing towards the magazine. This lengthy end would as a consequence come into contact with the back face of the magazine, where the act of inserting and ejecting the mag were resulting in these scratch marks. Presumably with actual live fire, any 'loose fit' tolerance of the magazine within the magwell and the amount of 'rattle' movement the mag catch permits the magazine are factors as to whether the magazine could essentially be "hammering" on the end of the TRS to the point where the return spring finally dislodges from its connection point on the fire control housing, leaving a very dead trigger in its wake. SIG also fixed this issue by taking steps to make sure that the TRS is within proper spec prior to installation into the trigger group.

Generally it's been somewhat accepted that guns with birthdates in late summer/early fall 2018 were the first to consistently come the factory with the correct spec TRS. Earlier guns may also have the proper spec TRS and in truth the majority of these early P365s likely do. But where the issue lies is that they also have a greater chance that will not come with the proper spec return spring than later production P365s. So if your mags don't show any signs of a wire spring dragging down on the back of your mags, you're likely GTG on this issue.

One other issue that annoyed early P365 owners was with those examples of P365s that would not return to battery when manually chambering the first round off of a magazine, even when "slingshotting the slide forward." A swift 'nudge' forward on the back face of the slide was the required remediation before one could begin firing the handgun. I never heard if SIG actually bothered to offer up an actual 'fix' to affected guns but it also seemed to be one of those problems that cleared up with repeated use (aka a 'break-in period'). Not all early SIGs exhibited this behavior, not by a longshot. But somewhat famously, in Hickok45's initial review of the P365 he had a couple of instances after chambering where he to push the slide home to complete the initial chamber loading. So it's not just us relative nobodies who find these sorts of annoyances.

Thanks, monoblok, for that recap. I was vaguely aware of the early problems, but didn’t pay close attention because that was before I had a P365 and at the time didn’t anticipate getting one.

I seem to recall that at the time, the striker failures were speculated to be caused (at least in part) by the fact that the part itself was a MIM part made in India which brought into question its quality?

That would make more sense to me then blaming it on dry firing. IMO you should be able to dry fire any modern centerfire pistol (without using snap caps) as much as you want without having to worry about breakage.

What changes were made to the new striker to increase its reliability?

quote:

Originally posted by aparoche:

quote:

Originally posted by MWC:
If yours is working, why worry about it?

I haven’t shot it all that much yet so this may not be the case. And yes, I know you will say to just shoot it until I experience issues. I am just preemptively planning and wondering what I can prepare for myself instead of having to ship it to Sig and wait awhile. If all Sig does is replace the striker, I can do that myself for $30 bucks.

The other consideration is if you have no confidence in the gun, get rid of it and acquire something else. But before you do, please know, all guns have the potential for the striker or firing pin to break. Having a spare striker or firing pin on hand for any gun you own is good practice and inspection should be part of routine maintenance.

quote:

I seem to recall that at the time, the striker failures were speculated to be caused (at least in part) by the fact that the part itself was a MIM part made in India which brought into question its quality?

At the time that was considered to be a contributing cause but I didn't include that in my above explanation as a prime cause because the redesigned striker is also MIM and we aren't hearing about those breaking off their firing pins. So strictly speaking, the fact that the original striker design was MIM may have contributed to the first design's breakages, but the fix was to recontour the pin end of the striker to simply add more material at the base of the firing pin.

SIG's mistake ultimately was that they didn't engineer the striker correctly based upon the strength of the material they planned on using; the breakages laid that bare for all to see. As the aftermarket Lightning Strike striker seemed to have shown that a better, stronger base material with a similar striker design would have minimized if not completely eliminated the potential for firing pin failure. HOWEVER SIG's own fix came to market relative fast and has proven to be tough and durable enough to solve the issue, so I really didn't bother to follow how well the LS strikers were holding up over time, especially since the P365s that I finally bought had birthdates that were well past those very early iterations that had shipped with the problematic strikers.

To SIG's credit, they made the issue go away by quickly coming up with a striker design that held up to abuse (and in many circles, dry firing without using a snap cap to cushion the breech impact would constitute abuse; even Glocks have had slide breech faces blow out due to excessive dry fire "exercises"). That said, SIG should have done PROPER due diligence in more extensive testing PRIOR to release of the P365 onto the market, and this problem never would've been a faceplant kind of issue in the first place. Especially with their marketing dude going around to various internet gun forums (including here on SF) claiming that there's nothing wrong with the original striker design, then only weeks later to have a NEW factory design come along. But that's SIG Sauer NH for you in Century 21.

This is the sort of incomplete, rather shoddy design work that SIG under the Cohen regime has become infamous for with new gun designs. It certain explains their most current FUBAR with the Cross rifle, again a new design that clearly wasn't tested enough before being released to market. Instead this company seems to love to use its early adopters, whether intentionally or not, as their beta testers.

quote:

Originally posted by monoblok:

quote:

I seem to recall that at the time, the striker failures were speculated to be caused (at least in part) by the fact that the part itself was a MIM part made in India which brought into question its quality?

At the time that was considered to be a contributing cause but I didn't include that in my above explanation as a prime cause because the redesigned striker is also MIM and we aren't hearing about those breaking off their firing pins. So strictly speaking, the fact that the original striker design was MIM may have contributed to the first design's breakages, but the fix was to recontour the pin end of the striker to simply add more material at the base of the firing pin.

SIG's mistake ultimately was that they didn't engineer the striker correctly based upon the strength of the material they planned on using; the breakages laid that bare for all to see. As the aftermarket Lightning Strike striker seemed to have shown that a better, stronger base material with a similar striker design would have minimized if not completely eliminated the potential for firing pin failure. HOWEVER SIG's own fix came to market relative fast and has proven to be tough and durable enough to solve the issue, so I really didn't bother to follow how well the LS strikers were holding up over time, especially since the P365s that I finally bought had birthdates that were well past those very early iterations that had shipped with the problematic strikers.

To SIG's credit, they made the issue go away by quickly coming up with a striker design that held up to abuse (and in many circles, dry firing without using a snap cap to cushion the breech impact would constitute abuse; even Glocks have had slide breech faces blow out due to excessive dry fire "exercises"). That said, SIG should have done PROPER due diligence in more extensive testing PRIOR to release of the P365 onto the market, and this problem never would've been a faceplant kind of issue in the first place. Especially with their marketing dude going around to various internet gun forums (including here on SF) claiming that there's nothing wrong with the original striker design, then only weeks later to have a NEW factory design come along. But that's SIG Sauer NH for you in Century 21.

This is the sort of incomplete, rather shoddy design work that SIG under the Cohen regime has become infamous for with new gun designs. It certain explains their most current FUBAR with the Cross rifle, again a new design that clearly wasn't tested enough before being released to market. Instead this company seems to love to use its early adopters, whether intentionally or not, as their beta testers.

Great information here. Thanks monoblok! I was wondering about the Lightning Strike and if it holds up better than the new Sig striker but the price difference is so large that you can buy almost 3 Sig strikers ($35) to ever one Lightning Strike ($100).

The guy in this video does a decent job explaining the difference between the Glock and P365 internal safeties. He seems to make a good point about the P365 striker "single failure point" potential for disaster. I recently purchased a P365 for appendix carry to replace my Glock 19.

quote:

Originally posted by aparoche:

Great information here. Thanks monoblok! I was wondering about the Lightning Strike and if it holds up better than the new Sig striker but the price difference is so large that you can buy almost 3 Sig strikers ($35) to ever one Lightning Strike ($100).

I submit that the price is irrelevant: what you're seeking are results. If it's cost-based, then you're not seeking results. You're seeking cheap. The logic doesn't hold up: does anyone really think it's cheaper to buy three failed parts, rather than one that fails?

The question, then, is whether the P365 factory striker fails. Mine is an original, early part. According to Sig, the strikers do not fail, or the failure rate is so small as to be hardly worth consideration. Never ask a car salesman if the cars on his lot are great cars. Sig has a vested interest: they're selling you a pistol, and anything they say can and will be held against them in court.

In the early days of the P365, numerous posters gave first-hand accounts here, from their own personal accounts, of failures. Many posters dismissed it, saying the only examples were third hand, questionable accounts. I watched them mount with interest, and there was no pattern. Some broke with the first magazine. Others went several thousand rounds and broke. I decided to see if mine would break. Thus far, it hasn't.

The lightning strike part is a different material. People who talk about metal-injection molding this, and MiM-that, generally sound ridiculous. It appears to be a buzzword that causes panic. Fire, in a crowded theater of gun owners. "Oh, MiM. That's bad." But do they know why it's bad? It's not. But the buzzword seems to mean something. At least, they think it does.

MiM does not imply failure prone. MiM does not imply a weak part. MiM does not imply increased wear, pot metal, cracking, imprecision, or even undesirability. When you don your three layers of painters masks and a butcher's face shield to go over the tyvek body suit and get on that flight to go see Grandma (and give her Covid), that flight you're riding on has plenty of MiM aboard. The horror.

I haven't heard of failures using the Lightning Strike part. My failure to hear of failres doesn't mean they haven't failed, or that they have. Sig's failure to admit failures doesn't change the fact that they have, but it does seem that over time, we're seeing less and less reports. Does this mean the problem went away? Not necessarily? With far more numbers in the field, the problem may be less noticeable. Or less newsworthy. Or it may not exist. Or the striker redesign may have taken care of it. Or perhaps some are using lightning strike. Who knows?

It's a mechanical hunk of chunk. It may break. If you pay a hundred bucks for a lightning strike striker, you're paying for a part with a different metal that you might trust, or a beefier part, or a part with a lower failure history, or perhaps just piece of mind. If MiM isn't your thing, maybe stainless is. If you're concerned that Sig factory strikers break, however, then betting three strikers that break against one that may not, seems to be false economy.

You can probably buy a new P365 with all the latest revision parts, and offload your current gun on the local gun board for a good price right now...

I ended up buying a new P365 striker from SigSauer.com since they just came back in stock. It is definitely a newer revision than the striker that came with my early model P365.

OP: you've helped initiate some great information here.
Whether it helps any or not, my own experience with P365 was simple enough. I bought an early one, put around 1500 rounds thru it before Sig invited me to return it for upgrade.

No obvious problem to that point; sent it in to Sig, no charge, the repaired the issue. I couldn't tell for sure via feel of trigger, reset time, etc or via any means, exactly what had been done.
Now have added about 2000 more rounds down range, no problem now either.

While my anxiety level was a bit raised during the height of the turmoil, I inspect during each cleaning, and before/after each range session.

Seems to be not an issue.