On the last hunt of this duck season my old trusty Stoeger started not dropping a shell from the magazine to the lifter. Even when I manually try to drop a shell with the cartridge drop lever all I was getting was a click.

I have played around with it and narrowed the issue down to the carrier latch assembly not moving out of the way enough for the magazine to drop a shell. However, I cant for the life of me figure out how to get the cartridge drop lever out of the gun. This is a very similar assembly to the SBE line. The part I am trying to replace is the 96 assembly in the schematic below. Any help is much appreciated:

Part #2 is the cartridge drop lever. #49 is the carrier latch. There's a roll pin that runs vertically that holds in the carrier latch. You'll also have to take out the trigger group first then drift out that roll pin. You can just bend the carrier latch instead of replacing it to give it the correct amount of engagement.

Before you bend/replace it, did it stop working while shooting or after you took it apart or changed anything else out? If you added a carrier latch button sometimes that can hit the receiver before the carrier latch fully releases the shell.

It stopped working while I was shooting it. I feel like I wont be able to get anything small enough inside the receiver to bend the carrier latch.

I have taken the trigger assembly out I cannot find the roll pin that allows the carrier latch assembly to be taken out.

Yeah you need to take the latch out to bend it. The roll pin is right here:

How in the hell do I take that pin out? lol

Mine is almost flush with the bottom of the receiver and looks like it 90's over and up. Almost looks like a bobby pin

Take the bolt assembly out of the gun and you can drift out that roll pin from the top. Should be able to see the top of that pin when looking down through the ejection port. Had to do this on my SBE2. It was a pain but did fix the issue.

How / which way do you bend it, or should it be obvious? I have a Vinci that has a similar issue with feeding the second shell during skeet. I've laughed it off as the gun needing it's annual cleaning, and haven't broken down the occurrences well enough to know if this is a potential contributor.