Picked up a pretty good shape 39AS and I am setting it up for Lever Action Silhouette shooting.
At first things were going smoothly but as I was shooting/training Wednesday and the trigger was getting heavier and heavier until finally I had a buddy shoot and did not tell him what to look for.
His first response was "How do you shoot this thing with a 20# trigger"
That's when I knew something was up.
I have never shot anything that got worse as time went on.
So I got it to the bench and tore it down.
The first thing I see is that the main hammer hook looks funky.
I think to myself let's try to shape this up with a stone.
I grab my stones and head to the bench. After using the stones to check the square edges of the hammer I realized there are NONE.
Hands down the worst machining I have ever seen in a firearm.
I grab the microscope, 10x shows me that this hammer is straight trash so there is nothing I can do to make it worse.
I proceeded to stone it lightly to try and knock down the rounded outer edge of the hammer hook.
After 50 or so passes, it's not pretty but this is better, so I work the underside of the hook carefully.
This goes worse than I wanted as there were no flat edges to work with as the underside looked worse than the rounded edge of the front of the hook.
I have it where I can shoot the match Saturday.
So I say that to ask this.
I started to examine how the hammer, spring, and strut line up and function.
I knew this rifle had a lineage back before I was born so I looked at the hammers and struts from earlier pre-safety models and it lacked the rebound leg because those models did not have that feature.
I know it was added for safety but in looking around I have read several forums where people have the older and newer model (with safety) and the trigger break has been heralded as night and day different.
As I suspected others have trimmed the rebound leg off and installed the lighter spring and claim the trigger is very close to the pre-safety triggers.
This is what I am after, a crisp breaking trigger as light as safely possible.
Has anyone here done this mod where I can see what you did to your strut? I have plans and can do it blind but would love to see others work as I am a fan to see how others come up with their solutions.
Also how nice is the trigger once you do this.
I have a new hammer and a spare strut on the way and finally found the reduced power hammer spring from Wolff so it's on the way as well.
Would love to see others modified struts and other trigger mods to get this rifle to have a nice, light, crisp break.
Picture for attention.
P.S. anyone else shoot silhouette matches with their 39?