I decided to get another Colt LE6920 last week just because I could. It had a really nice finish and a "CR" prefix serial number--and knowing that people have gone Ape Shit on the net about not having an LE serial number prefix, I decided to make it a shooter that I don't care if it gets the pretty smacked off of it.

After two short 100-round-each range trips, I noticed the hammer pin had walked out of the left side.

This is not a slam on Colt. I painstakingly lined up the pin to the receiver hole and pushed it back in. The next day I made another 100-round range trip to see if it would walk out again. It did not. I even did a rapid fire 30-round mag dump to see if I could force it to walk out. It stayed. I'm guessing the factory worker who assembled the lower had simply not pushed the pin in all the way and it took two short range trips for it to walk out.

What I'm about to post next is mostly out of curiosity, and that's why I'm posting it in the tech section. I'm assuming the rifle is GTG at this point since the hammer pin didn't walk out again even with a rapid fire mag dump, but I'm now curious about some of the technical aspects of this.

1. Would the gun have functioned normally with the hammer pin out of the left-hand receiver hole? In other words, how many rounds did I fire with the hammer pin halfway out? I want to know this just as a kudos to the weapon's design, or to realize that maybe the hammer pin must have finished walking out on the last round or I would have had a malfunction. It's just my curiosity is killing me on this.

2. If it would have fired in that condition, is there any danger that the hammer pin in its half-installed state might have done some damage to the hammer pin hole in the right side of the receiver? Should I anticipate that I might experience a hammer pin hole ovalling out in a few thousand rounds? Or is the anodizing sufficiently deep enough and the nature of the weapon's design such that I probably can just rock on knowing that I "fixed" what a Colt employee should have done to begin with?

Just eyeballing things under a magnifying glass, it appears that the only obvious "damage" is that there is a minimal loss of finish around the inside of the hammer pin hole on the right side of the receiver. Under a bright light it looks as round as the trigger pin hole.

Again, I'm assuming all is well and thank the Lord I know enough about this type of thing to simply push the hammer pin back in all the way and soldier on as if nothing happened.

But I'd love to know more about some of the technical aspects of this.