Trigger job for a friend of a friend

B

Boyd Allen

Active member
A friend of mine has a hunting buddy who is a fine old fellow, but he has gotten skunked on a couple of out of state guided elk hunts, missing what should have been gimmies. On the latest one, my friend finally shot the rifle ( a 700), to check the zero. The zero was fine, but it would have taken an Olympic finger wrestler to smoothly pull the 10# trigger. When his friend (who the rifle belonged to) tried it, he hit about a foot to the right (100 yd.). After they got back, and hearing of this, fool that I am, I volunteered to take a look at the trigger. It was an awful mess, dirt, varnish and poorly finished parts. When I had it out of the stock, my friend wanted to just spray it and blow it out with compressed air. I told him that it was too far gone for that, and that we should do it right. Man (pardon the Calfeeism), a shaky table, topped with a movers' packing quilt, none of my tools, and about four talkative observers. It took me twice as long as it would have at home, but it came out perfect, if I do say so. 'Cleaned up everything, and took a little 800 grit to the working surfaces, and surrounding edges, mostly to get rid of some microscopic burrs. I reassembled and readjusted it to what felt like a safe 3 pounds ( my gauge was at home with my other tools), did the bump and thump tests, and checked the safety. As an afterthought I did did the penny trick (another tool at home), pulled the striker assembly, which was a mess, cleaned it as best we could, greased the shroud threads, put it back in the bolt, and finished by greasing the cocking cam and lugs. I am pretty sure that that was the only time that the rifle had been apart. Being a hunter is definitely different than being a gun hobbyist. Next time I see him, I'm going to tell him if he connects next time, I expect to be eating some elk.
 
Actually, my friend's first thought, after I told him that I was going to take the trigger off the rifle and apart (possibly because he didn't realize that this was old hat for me) was that it might be easier to replace the trigger...a sign of the times. Back in the day, I rebuilt carburetors, figuring it out as I went. These days, I don't get the feeling that most of the younger crowd would go there. My motivation was simple. I couldn't afford anything else, and too dumb to think that I couldn't do it.
 
A contrary view, but I'm only telling it because it's funny.

Many, many, years ago, when epoxy bedding first became the rage, another fool and I decided to glass bed his hunting rifle. We had never heard of release agent - so you can imagine the final result - a one piece rifle!

After a few years we went our seperate ways and lost contact with each other, until about 5 years ago when he looked me up on the Internet. A phone call, and we made plans to get together for an old-times BS session. He had aged quite a bit which made me uncomforatable because I looked exactly the same after 50 years. Anyway, during our conversation he asked me, "Do you remember that rifle that we glued together?" I said yes. He said, "You know I still have it and I use it regularly to hunt with. It still works as well as it did back then."

So, regular maintenance may not be as important as we are led to believe.

Ray
 
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