My P380 slide got stuck too
Where did all the pictures go? This thread is helpful, but it would be a lot MORE helpful if most of its pictures hadn't disappeared.
My P380 slide got stuck like this too. Unlike the original poster K.C. back in 2011, I did NOT have the slide stop pin in mine at all. But as I reassembled my P380, the slide got stuck in exactly the position shown in his original photo. Trigger moving freely, striker clearly not cocked, slide stuck on something internally. I cannot fit a paperclip in under the back of the slide.
What worked for me, is to reach in through the magwell with a tool, and pull back on the striker to cock it. Then pull the trigger to release the striker, and pull the slide forward off the frame the normal way.
But when I try to reassemble this particular P380, OFTEN either the slide gets stuck again, or sometimes it's not stuck, but it will not go back on all the way! Note that when the slide stops moving, it is just BEFORE the slide stop barrel hole becomes visible in the slide stop window. So the slide stop cannot be inserted at all, because the barrel isn't far enough back on the frame for that. Interestingly, when the slide will not go back on all the way, reaching in through the magwell to cock the striker also fixes that problem, letting me reassemble the pistol. I can't figure out WHY this is sometimes necessary though!
Weirdly, I have a second P380 which never has this problem! So it's NOT just operator error. Visibly, the internals of the two guns appear identical. When I swapped frames and slides, the problem seemed to follow the bad pistol's frame, not the slide.
With the bad pistol, what SEEMED to help (but might have been my imagination) was not to baby the slide as I put it back on the frame, but to give it a good firm jerk all the way back, depressing the cocking cam (part 15) and trigger bar (part 13) all in one go, and fully racking the slide. Then let it return forward to the usual disassembly position, and insert the slide stop pin. Now that I've done that a bunch of times, the reassembly problem is happening LESS, but it still sometimes happens. I was going to take a picture of the bad P380 in its stuck position, but now that I have my camera ready I can't seem to recreate the problem...
Anybody have insight into what is/was going on with this problem P380?