After winning an auction, I have a nearly-LNIB Star M43 Firestar (9mm) inbound. Scouring the internet for the last 20 years of posts in a search for well-known problems, it appears these are typically reliable, but occasionally one sees complaints of a very specific failure to extract, with the frustrated owners replacing the extractor / extractor spring / ejector, which almost never fixes the problem.
What one doesn't see are cases of the owner giving the chamber a light polish, which would seem to be a fairly obvious thing to do. I'm guessing that in the 1990's, some fraction of Star pistols simply had a rough chamber, leading to extraction problems (particularly when combined with a bit of powder/lead/brass residue from shooting -- sometimes owners complained that FTE problems appeared after some amount of shooting).
So, I'm thinking about the following action with my example. Test fire a few mags, just to establish baseline behavior. Then, regardless of the outcome, preemptively polish the chamber (lightly) with a felt dremel wheel and Flitz. I'm not talking about a full sequence with sandpaper -- just felt and Flitz.
My question is, has anyone out there ever seen a light chamber polish of this kind lead to problems in handgun calibers (I understand the issue becomes more complicated in rifles)? I occasionally see general advice not to do anything that isn't desperately needed, but I have also never seen a single complaint that a light chamber polish messed anything up in a handgun caliber. Has anyone out there seen it happen?
What one doesn't see are cases of the owner giving the chamber a light polish, which would seem to be a fairly obvious thing to do. I'm guessing that in the 1990's, some fraction of Star pistols simply had a rough chamber, leading to extraction problems (particularly when combined with a bit of powder/lead/brass residue from shooting -- sometimes owners complained that FTE problems appeared after some amount of shooting).
So, I'm thinking about the following action with my example. Test fire a few mags, just to establish baseline behavior. Then, regardless of the outcome, preemptively polish the chamber (lightly) with a felt dremel wheel and Flitz. I'm not talking about a full sequence with sandpaper -- just felt and Flitz.
My question is, has anyone out there ever seen a light chamber polish of this kind lead to problems in handgun calibers (I understand the issue becomes more complicated in rifles)? I occasionally see general advice not to do anything that isn't desperately needed, but I have also never seen a single complaint that a light chamber polish messed anything up in a handgun caliber. Has anyone out there seen it happen?