The most dangerous alteration you've seen?

Had a Colt Government that had been customized by some unknown "gunsmith" by altering the hammer notches and disconnector such that it had a sub 3 pound trigger pull and caused the hammer to follow through on subsequent rounds. Turned an otherwise decent 1911 into a single shot pistol.

1. aggressive trigger jobs on carry guns (hey... look... my 2.5 lbs M&P Shield! :banghead:

2. shooting stuff thu your gun for which the gun was never designed for (running .45 Super thru a compact .45)

I guess these are not alterations but reloading mistakes. Unfortunately three come to mind.

1. I was timing a shooter at a SASS match when the cylinder burst. Thank goodness Colt knew what they were doing with designing the top strap. The top strap held everything together preventing possible injury to the shooter and myself.

2. The second still scares ones. I was behind a shooter and timer at a SASS match watching them shooting the stage. The shooter was using a Uberti Schofield when the cylinder literally exploded. I saw a large chunk of the cylinder fly up narrowly missing his head. It was only by the grace of God that the timer leaned his head away from the gun as it exploded. I can stillsee the incident as if it happened yesterday.

3. The worst one? I was at a long range shooting match at our gun club and we were shooting our big bore single shot buffalo guns. The shooter to my left rifle exploded in a hugh explosion. He lost half of his hand that was supporting the forearm and we almost lost him from blood loss waiting on the ambulance. We never did find all of pieces of that gun. Horrible, horrible accident.

Causes were;

Incident #1; Shooter was cheating by using jacketed bullets loaded too hot for the gun.

Incident #2; Some people simply should not reload. He was a senior citizen and heck of nice guy. On prior stages some of his loads went poof! and others a loud bang! It was no doubt a double charge of smokeless powder.

Incident #3; Shooter someone accidently used a case full of smokeless powder instead of blackpowder. The interesting and sad thing was the gun held together for the first two rounds. If he had not ignored the warning signs and taken time to examine the fired rounds (the recoil would have been different, no large smoke cloud from the BP, flattened primers) the accident would not have happened. Those rounds had to be screaming down range and Lord knows how high the pressure was.

Can't say I agree with the comment about leaving guns as they come from the factory. Most guns are built to a price point, and some can be improved by adding higher quality parts.

My service Glock didn't come from the factory with night sights, but I thought they were a worthwhile improvement and had them retrofitted.

Same for my previous service revolver. Better fitting grips, and a wider trigger helped my accuracy.

Certainly fooling with the internals by unqualified persons is never a good idea, but not all mods are detrimental.

CraigC said:

I don't agree with this at all. There is plenty that can be done to improve a great many guns, if you know what you're doing. It's unwise and unfair to judge all tinkerers as incompetent.


I also wouldn't go around telling real gunfighters that their cherished fighting pistols are "unsafe". Unlike most of us, they didn't grow up in a time where there's a lawyer on every corner just frothing to get a big payday for every idiot who hurts themselves. Where people spill hot coffee on themselves and then sue for getting burned. It was a time of common sense, before barrel warnings, loaded chamber indicators and internal locks. When they did what they had to to win gunfights.

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I would even knowing they would probably laugh at me at the very least if not attempt to kick my ... for being insolent. I think these cut-off trigger guards can be most charitably be explained if the men had over-size trigger fingers too large to easily fit in the guard or expected to be wearing gloves creating the same problem. The second most charitable explanation would be they did this because they thought they needed it to be fast enough to win gunfights even though that is not true. The least most charitable explanation is they thought it was really cool, fashionable, and enjoyed over-awing rubes with the need to have a dangerously ready for action pistol.

I don't want this to stray too far from the OP but I need to put my two cents in about the Texas Rangers. The Rangers are given the option to carry the DPS issue pistol which has been a SIG of some flavor for many years or their personal pistol, which is usually a 1911 of some type. The Ranger in my neighborhood carries a 38 Super Commander. Never have seen one carry a 92.

One very dangerous and YouTube encouraged "mod" is to unhook the trigger return springs in a single action ruger. Remove one side and you get a nice light trigger...remove both sides and your neighbors passing gas hard inside their house might set it off its so light. Seen several of these with excuse that they are "raceguns"...which I guess maybe since mine was hard to lock the hammer back and hold or aim without the hammer falling when you didn't want it to.

The least most charitable explanation is they thought it was really cool, fashionable, and enjoyed over-awing rubes with the need to have a dangerously ready for action pistol.

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An easy judgement to make from the comfort of modern suburban life.

One very dangerous and YouTube encouraged "mod" is to unhook the trigger return springs in a single action ruger.

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I don't care for it but there's nothing dangerous about the "poor boy's trigger job" and it still leaves ten inches of creep.

I always thought 'Release Triggers' favored by some Trap Shooters years ago was a dangerous idea.

You load the gun, pull the trigger, and nothing happened.

Until you released pressure with the trigger finger.
And the gun fires!

I guess it was alright if you knew it had one.
And could overcome a lifetime of ingrained shooting habits to learn to use one.

But to the uninformed, finding Granddads old Model 12 trap gun has a release trigger installed in it is a real eye opener!

rc

CraigC said:

An easy judgement to make from the comfort of modern suburban life.

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You are absolutely right Craig. It is an easy judgement to make from the comfort of modern suburban life. A life I am greatly enjoying in my late middle age. Of course my young adulthood was spent in anything but the comfort of modern suburbia. During that life I spent plenty of time in the company of men who make the Texas Rangers look like Boy Scouts so I have some idea of the mentality of men who do the necessary killing for our nation. If you don’t think these men are the same as all people in having emotions that can be expressed by what is cool, fashionable, and fun to over-awe rubes with, you clearly have not spent much time with them. So my now easy to make judgement is based on hard earned experience. By the way there are still plenty of men doing the killing for all of us that if they wanted pistols without trigger guards they would be supplied by the gross without concern for “a lawyer on every corner just frothing to get a big payday for every idiot who hurts themselves”. When I read this kind of rhetoric about Texas Rangers and all the other icons of bravery in our World it makes think it is as influenced and motivated by hero worship as it is reality. When we embellish our hero’s characters and actions we do them and society a disservice by distorting the truth and giving posterity unrealistic role models they can never hope to equal.

When I read this kind of rhetoric about Texas Rangers and all the other icons of bravery in our World it makes think it is as influenced and motivated by hero worship as it is reality.

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What rhetoric? I see no evidence of hero worship. It's called respect and a little perspective. I'm just not going to stand and judge those who lived and died by their skill and speed with their sidearm. Or sit idly while others do so. Regardless of their time spent "in the company of whomever". Those guys worked a dangerous job in a time without cell phones, instant backup, safety regulations and every other modern technology law enforcement now enjoys. They usually worked alone and in a world much wilder than this one. So I wouldn't sit here in the comfort of my office and judge the way they did their job and survived.

See this about different men in a different time!

No Hero Worship from me.

Just hard men doing a hard job nobody else wanted, or could do.

http://sheriffjimwilson.com/2011/10/14/texas-ranger-tales/

Miller got the idea after a wrestling match in a police car over his gun, and he could't get a proper grip on his gun to fire it!

rc

CraigC said:

What rhetoric? I see no evidence of hero worship. It's called respect and a little perspective. I'm just not going to stand and judge those who lived and died by their skill and speed with their sidearm. Or sit idly while others do so. Regardless of their time spent "in the company of whomever". Those guys worked a dangerous job in a time without cell phones, instant backup, safety regulations and every other modern technology law enforcement now enjoys. They usually worked alone and in a world much wilder than this one. So I wouldn't sit here in the comfort of my office and judge the way they did their job and survived.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate. You are equating my evaluation (you first used the word judgement and I should have corrected that) with condemnation. In reality I think I have more respect for these men than you because, while we may possibly both have equal perspectives based on experience, I respect these men as men who are just as endowed with all the emotion, flaws, reason and perfections of other men. The difference being that most men don't get the experience to so brutally test their ability to have their reason and perfections triumph over their emotion and flaws in the gravest extremes and succeed at doing so. Some of the "killers" I knew were quirky and had flamboyant personal styles and could be influence by what peers considered fashionable. I think if you do some research going back over the last century of conflict you will discover this is often true. One of my favorite examples is the late Larry Freedman. Larry was the first american casualty in Somalia in 1992 and my boss in 1987. You should check-up on Larry, his story is well known at Ft. Bragg's SOCOM, and he has a star on the wall at CIA in Langley, VA. He was a helluva guy.

Arisaka Type 38 with most of the firing pin catch filed off to "improve" the trigger pull. Fired on closing about half of the time.

My uncle's jean shorts, those things could cause ppl to try and suck start the nearest firearm in mass.
but all joking aside it was some ones home made bolt action with a solid aluminum skeleton stock that looked like it was milled out with a angle grinder operated by a man with parkensons (made a rough cut file look smooth) and the area around where the barrel mounted into the action wasn't much better

In the gun safe back home is an old, 22 revolver that I can't remember the make of. It's a mini revolver with a 2.5-3 inch barrel, and it was carried by my great grandfather as a back up gun when he was a cop in San Franscisco a long time ago. We took it to a gunsmith, and it turns out the cylinder had been replaced with one that "apeared to have been made by hand with a drill and file"

craigc said:

I also wouldn't go around telling real gunfighters that their cherished fighting pistols are "unsafe".

Click to expand...

Why not?

You think that they didn't know it? They said so themselves!

http://sheriffjimwilson.com/2011/10/14/texas-ranger-tales/

One time, during a firearms training session, a Texas DPS instructor saw Miller’s gun, with the tied down safety, and asked, “Mr. Miller, isn’t that dangerous?” Miller quickly shot back, “Son, if the damned old thing wasn’t dangerous, I wouldn’t be wearing it!”

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rcmodel said:

I always thought 'Release Triggers' favored by some Trap Shooters years ago was a dangerous idea.

You load the gun, pull the trigger, and nothing happened.

Until you released pressure with the trigger finger.
And the gun fires!

I guess it was alright if you knew it had one.
And could overcome a lifetime of ingrained shooting habits to learn to use one.

But to the uninformed, finding Granddads old Model 12 trap gun has a release trigger installed in it is a real eye opener!

rc

Click to expand...

I recently read a story about just this. A shooter was learning on a double barrel where a trigger pull shot the first, and unbeknownst to her, a release shot the second. After practicing with one round at a time she loaded 2 and apparently blew her foot off. I can't recall the source of the story or when it happened, unfortunately.

I always thought 'Release Triggers' favored by some Trap Shooters years ago was a dangerous idea.

You load the gun, pull the trigger, and nothing happened.

Until you released pressure with the trigger finger.
And the gun fires!

Click to expand...

I did not know these existed until about a year ago I went to our club to try my hand at trap shooting. An older guy had a really nice looking over/under. I can't remember who it was made by, but it was a beauty. I commented on it and one of the regulars told me that it was north of $5k, which I know is easy to do with a nice trap/skeet gun and that it was a release trigger. I had never heard of such but the guy had learned to shoot that way and still did. I can't imagine. I will say, he was lights out. I don't know if he missed that day.

I've know a few trap shooters that had guns with release triggers. As minimal good practice dictates, they had the appropriate warning stickers on their guns. Even with that precaution I would not own a gun with a release trigger.

Release triggers are said to help people with flinching problems. In my case, if flinching was a problem, I would just take the reduction in score over what I view as an increased safety risk.

http://lmlenses.com/product/release-trigger-stickers/

Any shotgun with a trigger like that really needs to be clearly marked some way. Yeah I know we should all be responsible and for the most part I'm not big on excessive warnings about common sense stuff. But this goes beyond common sense. Very few people would know it was even possible to have a release trigger and that includes people who grew up with shotguns. I grew up with a trap range in my back yard. We had lots of people coming to our farm from several states around. And I had never heard of a release trigger until this thread. I know I haven't been big into shotguns for quite a while but I saw lots of very expensive shotguns growing up including some that cost several thousand dollars back then which was the early 1960's.

Late revolversmith Andy Cannon was for a time boring out .44 Magnum Ruger Redhawks to .454 Casull. Now, when Ruger wanted a .454, they used the SUPER Redhawk, and even then, found they needed to switch to a higher strength steel and use a special heat treating process. Cannon just bored out & tuned his guns. IMHO it's not a bright idea to switch to a higher pressure cartridge when you're removing an appreciable amount of metal from the chamber.

Sheltered life

About the silliest thing that I have personally had my hands on was a .38 'belly gun' that had had the hammer spur 'bobbed'. If you really worked at it, one could, with difficulty cock the abbreviated hammer to the single action position. After that, the only way to uncock was by firing or disasembly.

salty

I once had an extended mag release installed on my Glock carry piece. The first day I carried it I accidentally ejected the mag in my buddies truck. I had no idea it was gone...he came in with it after we had driven somewhere. When I sat in the seat the mag release was long enough that my weight activated it, mag fell out, I left the vehicle with an empty gun.

I changed back to the factory release that evening.

Thinking back, the only gun I ever had blow the grips off and splinter my hands was a 1911 hard-ball match pistol a guy brought into to me to do a trigger job on at an inter-service match at Ft. Bennington GA in 1969.

I finished it, and went from the gunship truck to the test range to shoot it.
And the first round of GI Match ammo blew the case, blew the mag out, and splintered the wood grips in my hand.

The guy had done his own Dremel Tool throat &' eed ramp job back in his camper the night before.
Before bringing it in to the AMU gunsmith truck for me to tune the trigger for him the next morning.


At least the man Knew his Limitations!
Coulda had a Full-Auto Exploding Gun in my hand if he did his own Dremel trigger jobs too! :banghead:


And Yes, I should have seen the butchered chamber.
But I didn't look at it while doing a trigger job with 10 other people standing in line waiting for me to work on their guns before the first match started that morning.

rc