My nephew brought over his Model 36-9 last night and said a tiny piece of metal came out while shooting last weekend. He had the part and showed me where it came from...it was the top part of the hammer block that goes between the hammer and the firing pin area. It just snapped off. I took the rest of the HB out of the gun and told him he needed to get a new one from S&W and that we could put it in. My questions:

1. What would cause a hammer block to fail? They don't normally get much stress on them from going up and down in that track, right? Is there any way he or his wife could have accidentally done something to cause this to break?

2. What is typically the best option for fixing such an easy thing? I thought sending the whole gun back to S&W for such a small thing would be a terrible inconvenience...so is it OK just to call S&W and tell them what happened and see if they'll send you the part? It is about a $5.00 part on their web site...

Thanks in advance for your help and advice! B

i bought a s&w 337 titanium that had the hammer spur broken off and was locked up due to the hammer block being broken in three pieces. i removed the parts of the hammer block and smoothed the hammer spur and the gun worked fine. i called s&w and they sent me a hammer block for free. i have heard of the hammer blocks breaking as these guns have a differently designed block than the older models. i put the new block in the gun and fired it,but since i have the bobbed hammer spur i am thinking of taking it out as the gun won't fire if dropped since the hammer sput is not exposed, and i keep hearing of this part failure. the conceled hammer guns do not have this part anyway.

He could have recently opened it up to clean and not reassembled correctly? Or had he never cleaned or oiled the internals?

I can not give you the reason the hammer block broke (it's rare), however it is a very easy fix. All you need to do is to get a new part, open up the side plate, remove the old one and drop in the new one, close it up and you are good to go. It is literally a 5 minute job, and easy to accomplish.

If The factory does not have one, you can try Brownells or Gun Parts.

Regards,
chief38

Makes me wonder if the new hammer blocks are MIM. I am not a big hater of MIM, but it's a very poor choice for long thin pieces because it's likely to break with any kind of grain imperfection.

Hello,

I need to buy Hammer Block for my S&W Model 36. Where can I get it ? Do you know some online shops ?

Thank's 4 help!