POLISH IT!

by JimT, Texas, Monday, December 12, 2022, 16:16 (648 days ago)

While I cannot speak for all guns, it seems that many of those that come in from other countries have been fitted with extra strong springs to compensate for the lack of polishing the internals. I have found this true on the Rossi leveraction rifles that I have owned and worked on as well as on black powder replicas of the early Colt and Remington revolvers. I found that by doing the polishing yourself you can somewhat lighten the spring tensions without sacrificing reliability.

Recently I bought an Uberti 1848 3rd Model Dragoon. The gun functioned perfectly and shot well, but the trigger pull was extremely heavy. John Taffin told me that I would need to polish the gun up some to smooth it out. In addition he mentioned polishing the "slot" in the hammer where it rests on the safety pin between chambers. If this isn't smoothed it can pull the caps off the nipples and possibly drop them into the lockworks of the gun.

Taking the gun apart I could see it was quite rough in the interior. Additionally, with the hammer spring removed the hammer would not fall all the way forward by its own weight. I traced that to the area that is milled out for the cylinder hand. The milling was very rough and left several "boogers" hanging. I started there with some small jewelers files and eventually got the area smoothed out.

I put a small thin leather shim between hammer spring and the frame where the screw that holds the hammer spring goes. This is to (1) provide a bit more flexing of the hammer spring, thus extending its life and (2) slightly reduce hammer spring pressure.

I polished the sides of the hammer where it rotates in the frame. I also polished the hand. The cylinder stop (the bolt) looked OK so I left it alone. The trigger spring/bolt spring was very heavy. I left the bolt side alone but on the trigger side I carefully straightend out the spring leg, reducing trigger pressure by about half.

The sear face on the hammer and on the trigger were rough. Using a fine stone I polished both, careful not to change the angle. The sear face on the hammer had a small "lip" on the forward edge and I removed that. Then I stoned the metal above the sear until it was flush with the face of the trigger sear. This removed the creep in the trigger. If the sear cut is too deep you cannot do this as the hammer will drop and hit half cock. There are several ways to make the cut more shallow so that the trigger will not go back so far into it that it has to move a long distance before disengaging the hammer. I am not going into them here.

The barrel wedge was so rough that the only way to loosen it was to use a brass punch and a small hammer. Going slow and using the "cut a little and try" method I removed the rough areas on the wedge and on the slot in the barrel that the wedge fits through. Then I stoned it all with a fine stone. The end of the spring on the wedge was cut without much of a lead-in and I polished that with the fine stone until it was rounded in front and behind. Working slow I go it to the place where it slips in much easier now - hand pressure only - and also comes out much easier.

My next project on the Dragoon most like will be a decent front sight.

I enjoy doing this stuff and am happy to have the stuff to be able to do it. And it sure makes the old sixgun that much more pleasant to shoot.

PS .. no .. I did not take any pictures .....