Would using a solid steel pin instead of a roll pin for the charging handle latch be a good idea? My only concern would be that the solid pin is not compressible so you’d have to find a pin that fit snugly in the hole exactly or you’d have walk-out problems. Anyway, where would you find steel rod stock that’s 1/16th or 2/16ths in diameter?
I found 3/16ths but I think that might be too big.
Any suggestions?
What’s wrong with the roll pin? 
A roll pin is used because the expanding tension of its design keeps it in place. A solid steel pin would solely use friction to keep it in place. That might be fine in a fixed part but the pin is the fulcrum point of the latch. Every time you work the charging handle, the latch would work against the pin and the pin against the handle, eventually it would start turning, then work itself loose, then out. If a solid pin is what you want then a solid steel rivet would be a better solution because one end would be capped and the other peened over, it could not work itself out.
I myself have only ever seen a pin fail on a Badger latch but that is a design issue, not the fault of the pin.
Nothing’s wrong with the roll pin, I just heard other people using a solid pin and thought I might give it a try.
But seeing as how kmrtnsn just reaffirmed my suspicions anyway; I’ll be sticking with roll pins.
After I broke one with a PRI latch, I found some 1/16" coiled spring pins at Graingers. Fortunately I was able to get a couple that fell out of a bag instead of buying a hundred. No problem since then.
How do you keep the pin from walking out?
A coiled spring pin works just like the roll pin in your charging handle. Instead of being “C” shaped its spiraled.
Coiled spring pin
http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/items/5EA60?Pid=search
normal Spring pin or roll pin
http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/items/5CA24?Pid=search
What I just noticed is that the regular roll pin has a higher shear strength than the coiled pin. I picked the coiled pin because I thought it would be less likely to collapse and fail, but this may not be the case.
Thanks for the links.
Does the regular spring pin only come in packages of 500?