Quote:
Originally Posted by Kenneth07ex
Just an update here, I'm happy to say that the little guy is back home. S&W included a couple of old parts that were replaced. Looks like the extractor, along with the spring. And what appears to be the ejector. They were a little vague on what exactly was done, but it appears to have a clean bill of health. I suggested that they replace all the springs in the gun, but the nice lady in customer service kind of side stepped that by saying that the technician would give it a full evaluation, and replace anything necessary. As long as this thing works flawlessly as intended, I'll be thrilled.
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Depending on the age of the 5906, replacing the ejector at the same time as the extractor & spring wouldn't be unusual. The older ejector design had a short tip with a very sharp corner angle under the tip. That sharp corner could sometimes develop a stress riser over time which might lend itself to a broken tip.
If the returned loose ejector looks like the one on the bottom of this pic, it was likely replaced with the most current revision (top). It had a longer tip and the sharp corner angle was replaced with more of a curve. The longer tip was intended to aid in sooner/faster ejection (especially if hooter loads were being used, like when LE might be using +P or +P+).
Extractors can eventually start to become brittle/work-hardened on the hook edges, and might develop chips or breakage after a long enough time. Or, abusing them by letting the hooks repeatedly snap forward and over the rims of rounds dropped into the chamber, instead of loading them from a magazine, was a good way to risk breaking an extractor hook.
In this pic the broken extractor is an early 3rd gen extractor, and the other one is new/revised. You can see how the new style extractor has a tall, raised "pad" located to the rear of the hook, which was intended to be filed down to make the extractor fit in the particular slide, using a couple of bar gauges to determine when it "fit". It's hard to tell in this pic, but that narrow raised "pad" is taller than the older "flat" part of the older extractors.
Extractors and ejectors both came in plain stainless and black (carbon steel) finishes, to better match the finishes of the light stainless and black/blued models.
The spring is probably the old extractor spring. Short unpainted coil spring? Probably a darker plain steel color? The various optional single coil extractor springs that were available for techs/production and armorers to use were painted different colors to help code them for easy reference.
Congrats. Now go enjoy the 5906.
