Smith&Wesson trigger improvement

Trigger will smooth out after thousands of dry fires. Just watch TV and dry fire a few thousand times.
Changing springs is an easy task. Use the right screwdriver so you don't bubba the screws and do not pry off the side plate. Tap with a wood hammer or handle and the plate will fall right off.

Look on You Tube for Jerry Miculeks How to do a trigger job.

Howdy

Generally speaking, the rebound slide spring is the spring that makes a the double action trigger pull stiff on a Smith and Wesson revolver. Replacing the spring is simple if you know how to take a S&W revolver apart. It's pretty darn difficult if you don't.

I have used replacement spring sets from Wolff in a few of my Smiths, both a lighter main spring and a lighter rebound slide spring. But in truth, lightening springs is only half the answer to any action job in a revolver. If the springs are too light, particularly the main spring, ignition may become erratic. Removing all the extra friction from inside the action is the real answer. Just working the action a bunch may help, but taking it apart and smoothing a few important surfaces is a more controlled way to do it.

Here is the inside of a typical S&W revolver. The rebound slide is the part behind the trigger and below the hammer. You can see the rebound slide spring peeking out from inside the rebound slide.





If you want to learn how to take a S&W revolver apart, this is the best book on the market. You can also find it at Midway, Brownells, and Midway USA.

http://www.gunbooks.com/sw.html

You could cut a coil off the rebound spring. Do not remove more than 2 coils!

I recently bought a bodyguard airweight. Trigger pull from the factory was 131/2 lbs. Gunsmith polished all contact surfaces and put in a set of apex springs. It now has a 9lb trigger pull and is smooth as glass.

Polishing the bearing surface of the rebound slide helps a lot! Also treating those surfaces with molybdenum dry lube works well. I chose not to replace springs after polishing the rebound slide. My trigger is smooth as silk in SA & DA now and feels considerably lighter.

Don't cut up or bend your original springs. Wolff springs makes target
trigger springs for just about every thing. They are on line.

https://www.gunsprings.com/home

Zeke

Dry firing (be sure to have snap-caps in the chambers) does smooth the action and make the trigger pull feel lighter.

Polishing the internal parts makes the process faster, but if you make a mistake and go too far you may find that fixing whatever is expensive and if the revolver is returned to the factory and they detect evidence of your work it's quite possible, if not probable you'll find they won't do anything under warrantee - and maybe nothing at all under any circumstances. Dry firing will burnish the parts where they're is contact under pressure between them, and not cause any upsets at the company. It also doesn't make any changes in tolerances between different parts.

Most everybody dislikes the factory springs. But they are as heavy as they are to insure that in an emergency they will go BANG! and not CLICK. This regardless of what brand of ammunition and/or primer the gun is loaded with, and the condition it's in. No excuses, period! You mess with them at your own risk.

Part of the reason the D.A. trigger pull is so heavy in the small J-frame guns is because of the small size, that limits the amount of leverage the trigger can provide to help rotate the hammer backwards, and without a substantial re-design they're isn't much that can be done to change that. Moving to a K-frame or larger can work wonders.

Takem406 said:

I'd like to help out the heavy double action if possible and still keep it reliable. Is this possible with the springs? How hard are they to change out?

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I'm a little late to the party, but I'll just throw out some comments I think are worth mentioning...

First, replacing springs changes the pull weight of the action, but it does nothing for the quality of the action. If it needs an action job, it needs an action job (see my comment below on dry fire)

Second, as Old Fuff advises, tread lightly. Here are some guidelines you might find helpful: Your DA trigger pull is likely 10-ish lbs. Replacing springs, while maintaining the factory action and stock hammer, my guess is that you won't likely get much below 8 - 8.5 lbs before you start getting into reliability issues with some ammo. If you reload and use Federal primers, you can likely go to about 7.5lbs. Bobbing the hammer (or replacing it with an Apex DAO hammer), can buy you another half pound or so. Spending time smoothing the internals and making sure everything's straight and centered inside the gun can buy you a little more yet. Those who are handy, careful and patient can get their DAO revolver down to 6 - 6.5lbs, and it'll run reliably on Federal primers. Lower than that, and I'd look to a very experienced revolver 'smith to do the work (i.e. Apex), and even then you'll have to use Federal primers and accept some compromises. You'll have to decide how low you're willing to go, based on it's use, what ammo you'll be feeding it, and what (if any) modifications you'll do to the gun. A lot of revolver shooters seem to get glassy-eyed when they read about 5 & 6lb actions, but in reality, even going down a little will make the action feel like noticeably lighter and more enjoyable than the factory weight; so unless you're a hard-core competitor, there's really no need to go very light (I'd take smooth over light any day).

Thirdly, regarding the springs, the main and rebound springs mustn't be replaced willy nilly. They're designed to be balanced. Just installing a very light rebound spring, for instance, will reduce your DA trigger pull, but you'll get into trigger reset issues and a hair trigger in SA mode to boot. Conversely, if the rebound is too strong and/or the main too weak, you can get into a situation where you don't have the reliability you should for the relatively heavy trigger pull you've got.

Generally, I find the main and rebound springs are reasonably balanced when the DA pull is about 2.7-fold higher than the SA pull. A factory stock gun, for instance, will have about a 10lb DA pull and a SA pull just over 3.5lbs. The easy way to swap springs, then, is to decide what DA pull weight you want, then calculate the SA pull. Replace the rebound spring and check the SA pull, then replace the main with the one that give you your desired DA pull.

A word on the mainspring: I (and others) have never had luck with aftermarket mainsprings. They just don't seem any lighter than the factory main. What many do is to carefully introduce a gentle bend into the factory mainspring along it's upper third The important keywords here are carefully and gentle. A kink is not the same as a gentle bend, and the former will surely compromise the service life of the spring (read: it'll break). Bend a little, install, test, measure and repeat, if necessary.

Replacing springs is very straightforward, be here are a couple DOs and DONTs:

DO loosen the mainspring tension screw before you pop the sideplate.

DO remove the sideplate correctly (already mentioned in this thread)

DONT cycle the action with the sideplate off when there's any more than a tiny bit of tension on the mainspring from the tension screws. Definitely DONT screw the tension screw down with the side plate off, and definitely DO NOT cycle the action with the screw fully tightened and the sideplate off. When testing, reinstall the sideplate. It may seem cumbersome, but getting impatient here can cost you a bent or broken hammer and/or trigger studs.

Finally, DONT use the mainspring tension screw to adjust your DA pull. Some guys insist it's ok to do (usually meaning that's how they adjust trigger pull), but it's designed to be fully tightened down, and a tension screw that back out because it's not fully tightened is a common source of sudden unreliability. A little blue loctite on the threads isn't a bad idea, either.

Takem406 said:

Also I've heard Tom Gresham say you can smooth out the triggers by lots of dry fire, any truth to this?

Click to expand...

Dry firing can smooth out minor bumps in the action, but if the action's rough, dry firing's no substitute for a bona fide action job (which, btw, is much more than replacing springs). Pull a stick through some pickets long enough, and it'll just feel like a smoother stick getting pulled through smoother pickets.

MrBorland ...that is an excellant tutorial.....thank you for the post

"What many do is to carefully introduce a gentle bend into the factory mainspring along it's upper third"

+1

My 69 had a smooth, but very, very, very heavy pull. I did the appropriate bending on the mainspring incrementally until the trigger pull approximated that of my other L frames.

In the event it helps, here's a tracing of the bend I put into my mainspring from my N-frame 627. Looking at it, I'd say the bend is in the upper half, rather than the upper third.

As you can see in the notes, I tuned the DA pull to 7lbs - but the hammer's also been bobbed, and I reload with Federal primers. No reliability issues, but it's a range/match gun, and I wouldn't tune it so if it were a SD gun and/or I didn't reload for it.

That's solid Gold there Mr Borland. I'm printing that and squirreling it away for a future need. THANKS!

Up to now I've favored the Wolff spring kit for my S&W's. I shoot for fun and competition but I don't recall that I ever had any significant number of misfires with my reloads. And those I did get were more likely due to me not setting the primer fully or something along that line.

In my case all the guns use the Wolff mainspring and the lightest rebound spring that comes in the kit.

But there's much to be said for the idea of leaving a self defense gun alone. Or if you do massage the mainspring or fit an aftermarket spring kit then shoot it enough without issues that you KNOW you can trust it.