The picture on the left is a new STI 2011 grip safety. The one on the right is the one out of my STI DVC Limited.
See a difference?
Yeah. The one on the right is missing some material. I don’t know if it came from the factory that way or it broke and I just now noticed. Part of the edge is very clean and part is ragged. It’s ambiguous from looking at it with the naked eye whether this is as intended or a failure of some sort.
I contacted STI via email and within minutes they said to return the gun and they would fix it.
Before you return it, it might be interesting to see if that causes the safety to not work. It obviously fires when properly gripped, or you would have noticed it right away. Does it still fire if you’re *not* gripping it properly and thus not depressing the grip safety?
The grip safety works by blocking the trigger bow at its rearmost from further travel back to trip the sear. Its possible from the photo that it does not actually block it, or blocks it with a very small margin.
Correct. The gun fires even with the safety is not gripped. It doesn’t come even close to touching the trigger bow.
For a bit of data on grip safeties:
http://jovianthunderbolt.blogspot.com/2016/03/gunsmithing-report.html