Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Sear for B

I promised commenter "B" I'd try to show him a munged up sear caused by too much jarring inside the lockwork of my 1911 wearing a Ciener conversion kit.

Though you can ruin a sear engagement by dropping the .45 slide on an empty gun the same way.

The 'bad' news is, my sear isn't as bad as I thought.  It does only engage on the one side, circled.  You can tell because that side is shiny.  There are some point of shininess on the other side, but that might not even be getting there in the normal cycle of operations.  It could be the aforementioned clanky.



When the trigger is pulled with this sear, it's only touching the hammer hooks on the one side.  The gun functions, but this is suboptimal for a good trigger.  There is creep after the takeup, for starters.

This sear is the factory sear.  It is a MIM part.  I'd replace it with an aftermarket sear if the gunsmith ever does a sear-only class.  I have another gun I'd do that with too.

There is some rounding over on that knife edge that is hard to see.  Also not optimal.  Sloppy trigger at the most optimistic.  More, an unsafe gun.

"Whadaya mean unsafe, T-Bolt?  What's the worst that can happen?"

Well, the WORST is your 1911 goes full auto as your gun goes into battery that vibration is enough to let the sear go and then the hammer falls.  Repeat x7.  If you still shoot it, and the sear gets worse the hammer will just follow the slide in and never let you cock it.  This is after it's been brrrrrrrrrrapping all over.

But before it does that catastrophe.  You'll pull the trigger a little bit, then decide not to shoot, but the trigger doesn't reset.  The sear doesn't go back to it's former state securely holding up the hammer hooks.  Then someone calls a cold range and your sear is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaarely holding on and any vibration will fire it.  Picking it up off the bench.  Pounding on the bench.  A good sneeze.  Bang.  You get a bang when you aren't expecting one.

2 comments:

B said...

Cool. Thanks!

B said...

Now I gotta get out the sharpie and do a detail strip.....