View Single Post
Old January 30, 2009, 05:06 PM   #19
Wuchak
Senior Member
 
Join Date: June 1, 2007
Location: Shawnee, KS
Posts: 1,093
Quote:
Be very very very VERY wary of lightening springs on a defense guns. The reason guns come from the factory with springs of a particular weight is because most guns function most reliably with springs of the particular weight chosen by the gun's designers.
Maybe in the old days but now he spring weight is determined by the corporate lawyers. You can easily step down to a spring a couple of pounds below factory weight without any change in reliability on a revolver.

Revolver springs have also gotten heavier over time because the companies don't bother polishing the internals like they should. This results in more friction which requires a heavier spring. If you smooth everything internally and remove that friction a lower powered spring will get the hammer up to the same speed as the heavier one because it will not have to waste energy overcoming friction. Only when you start to push the weight of the spring down extremely far from factory do you run into reliability (light strikes) issues. Going to the 9lb spring in the SP101 for example will require everything to be super slick. Even then you might have to take a bit off the front of the hammer since you cannot get extended length firing pins for Rugers like you can for S&W's. The 12lb and 10lb springs should be perfectly reliable after just a normal polish.

I suggest shooting some of your defensive ammo and some ammo with hard primers like Magtech. Shoot a couple of cylinders of each with the gun as it is now and then mark them and label them in some fashion. You will use these later to compare the depth of primer strikes after the polish and spring swap. Once you finish smoothing things up and put in the lighter hammer springs do the same shooting drill as before and compare the depth of the primer strikes. They should look the same. If the new ones are not as deep take another pass at polishing and try again. If the new ones are still lighter and look like they may be on the verge of being light strikes put a heavier spring back in.

Don't forget to try different hammer/return spring combinations. They have to be balanced for it to feel right. The lighter return spring didn't feel right for me with anything but the 9lb hammer spring. After some extra polish and a touch off the top step of the hammer the primer strikes with this setup are the same on Magtech ammo as they were with the factory springs.
Wuchak is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.02235 seconds with 8 queries