Ruger P85/89 Trigger Spring Swap

I posted this up at Rugerforum. This procedure is probably valid for the P90 / 91 and other P-Series guns.

I have had an old school P85MKII for a few years now and I have been putting up with it's heavy-Effing trigger for the whole time. It has always been pretty smooth (probably because this particular gun has been ridden hard and put up wet for years...it feels almost worn out), but its spongy and relatively heavy. This makes it hard to shoot well, the harder you try the worse it seems to be because you are fighting the trigger. If you give up and just blaze away like a gangster, its actually pretty accurate but it sucks when shooting from a rest.

Well, tonight I got ambitious and did something about it. A while back I had ordered a replacement spring pack from Wolff which showed up today. The springs were 8.69$ (plus shipping) from MidwayUSA. As usual, Midway was fast and correct. No BS and good pricing.

Installation was straightforward.

Field-strip the gun.


Take the grips off and drift the little retainer pin out. This is the pin that retains the lanyard-ring/spring plug thingy.

Before you drift the pin out - Take Note of where the hammer strut lives. You want to be able to put that back where it came from. Its the little do-hickey that the hammer spring rides on in the backstrap of the gun.


The pin is pretty easy to pop out. Make sure you take care not to let the lanyard ring/spring retainer plug go flying when you pull the punch out.
(I used a Glock tool for a punch)



Once that is done, the spring, and hammer strut come right out.


Here you can see my original spring (top) and replacement spring (bottom). For some reason the replacement spring was longer than the original. I am not sure, but I think the spring that was in the gun might have been shortened. The replacement spring was a bear to put in until I put my multi-tool to good use and clipped a couple of coils off it so that it's length matched the spring I pulled out of the gun.



Once that was done, re-assembly was a breeze. The trigger pull is now lighter than it was in both DA and SA modes. Everything seems to function properly, but the final test will have to wait until later when I can do some shooting.

Until then,

It's Miller Time.


Cheers,

Nakanokalronin said:

Thanks

I've only seen one other picture of a P-Series on the net with a set of wood grips. Usually people either leave the plastic type on or add the Hogue rubber grips with finger grooves. I shaved off the finger grooves on a set of Hugues for my Dad's P89 and they were a big improvement but the wood type really slim things up while providing plenty of traction.

To the OP, do you plan on doing any more mods in the future?

Click to expand...

I'm considering doing the full Monty and taking it down to bare frame and blasting/duracoating it.

A guy who goes by the tag truthnotrelative on Rugerforum.com did a really nice job on his P89. He Duracoated (actually Durabake) his frame after he de-horned it and gave it a carry-melt type treatment. He cut some serrations into the grip for traction, rounded off the trigger guard etc. It came out looking super nice. He also added the P95 Trigger blade too.

Its a nice piece of work and it looks to be a fairly simple set of mods.

I am considering doing the P95 trigger blade and the duracoat on the frame. We'll see what I have time for.

If I do any of that stuff I will definitely post pics and a writeup.

gotigers said:

I have a P89 that I inherited from my father 10 years ago. He bought it new in the early 90's. It is the most reliable handgun i have owned. If feeds, fires and ejects everything without issue. It is my night stand go to home defense pistol.

My comp M&P 9 pro was at the shop the month before last, so i used the P89 in our monthly club 3 gun match. I was hitting 6 inch plates at 25 yards first shot every time. I don't remember it being that accurate, but it could be i am a better shot than i was. I was surprised how accurate the P89 is. I have ignored the P89 because of the long heavy DA pull. I have always liked the SA it has, but the DA is way to long.

So, do any of the mods reduce the travel? What is the trigger weight after installing the springs?

Click to expand...

I have always found my Ruger P to be acceptably accurate. Not a tack driver, but that may have something to do with me using the cheapest ammo I can find.

I dont know of any mods to reduce the travel. The P95 Trigger swap might because the P95 trigger has more curve to it and it might bottom out on the frame sooner...but I dont know that for a fact.

As for the trigger weight...Dunno. I can say that it is lighter. It might have been 6-7lb single action before and it might be 4-5lb now. It is noticeably less but not super light. I know, unsubstantiated anecdotes....not very helpful. I dont have a trigger gage.

I can say that it feels better and it is a cheap easy mod that makes a noticeable difference. You will be hard pressed to find something else you can do for about 10$ that makes a similar improvement.

I think my next step is to detail strip the gun and look into polishing some surfaces to try to make the whole mechanism more smooth.

So, I have had the reduced and shortened spring in for a while now and have found that the gun is not 100% reliable.

My wife and I did some range time today and I was getting occasional misfires that I believe were caused by light firing pin strikes on the primer. I was using Tula cheap stuff from WalMart. Its not the best ammo and I tend to think I probably has the harder military style Berdan primers, so this may have contributed.

So, tonight I put a full length, though still reduced spring rate, spring back in to see if that cures my reliability issues.

In other news, the reason McWife and I were at the range was we were taking the Maine CWP class. It was a reasonably good class and most importantly my wife had fun. She felt like the class was generally informative and came away with a much better feeling and more confidence about guns in general.

And she positively kicked @ss at the shooting portion. At one point the instructor told her to speed up because she was drilling one ragged hole thru the target at 7yds using my MkII .22lr. "Thats a very nice group Mrs. Sargent, now speed things up and lets see what you can do rapidfire."

This is called "Winning".