Snagged a cleaning cloth on the trigger play spring on my CS45 and bent it bad. That thing is the ONLY part of a third gen pistol I have never liked. Well it gave up when I tried to bend it back into place and I just finished snapping it off. Fact is, I see no immediate problems without it. I don't notice the play while shooting, and to my surprise, the trigger is not "clicking" without it. I don't plan to sell the gun so is there any point in replacing it?

nope. when shooting if you never take your finger off the trigger, you will never know its gone.

shoot away!

The CHP had all of the springs taken out of the 4006 and when they ordered new 4006TSW they had S&W leave them out. I too think just leave it be. I had mine brake in my 4566. Had to take the whole gun apart to put a new one on. That was a pain.

Thats the little flat spring doohicky thats rivited on isn't it?

If you are comfortable stripping the entire gun down it's not a bad fix. Once the trigger bar is out grind off the rivet with a dremal or file, punch out the old rivet and install the new spring and rivet. The bad thing is it's $1.30 worth of parts and usually $6+ shipping from anyone.

That's it. I've decided I like it better without it.

I had a 3913 that had a broken trigger play spring. Curiousity made me examine it a bit further, and it busted clean off!

I bought one along with a rivit, but never bothered to install it, gun worked fine without it, and questions here proved it unneccessary to function.

My 4046 still has one in it, however it's bent out of whack, doesn't do anything anymore. It isn't broken, just bent. I figure if I mess with it, it will just break off, and I have not worked up the courage to remove it or break it off yet.

Figure I'll just leave well enough alone.

S&W teaches its armorer to use a vise (jaws slightly open) as a working surface to install and remove the trigger play springs. A very small punch is used to knock out the rivet from the bottom, through the hole in the drawbar head, and then the spring comes off. The safety edge of the 6" #1 pillar file is used as a working surface to hold the upside down drawbar while a small ball peen hammer is used to flatten the bottom of the rivet so the new spring is securely held. (These aren't intended to be 'how-to' instructions, since they're obviously lacking in detail, but just to roughly describe the process.)

Since the same drawbars are used in the DAO guns as in the TDA guns, I've been told that S&W routinely just uses complete drawbars (with trigger play springs installed) instead of keeping one parts bin of completed drawbars and another of drawbars without the spring. (There are parts people who put the assemblies together, like drawbars, triggers, guide rods, striker assemblies, etc.)

Hence, the DAO guns can come with drawbars which use trigger play springs,, but the springs serves no function in DAO guns since their function is to tension the trigger when the hammer is cocked in single action. (Otherwise the trigger will have some extra play in its movement, hence the name 'trigger play spring'.)

Somebody shooting a bulls eye target match might notice the lack of a spring, Most folks don't seem to even be aware if the spring breaks. I once shot 800+ rounds through an older 6906 over the course of 2-days and discovered at the end of the session that my spring had completely broken off and disappeared. I replaced the spring because that's the factory recommendation for LE armorers, to restore the gun to original factory condition.

I've also randomly stopped by a cleaning station to check on folks as they cleaned their older 3rd gen guns and every once in a while I've found where a trigger play spring was broken off on one side or missing (the older springs weren't connected at the top but were essentially 'U'-shaped). None of the folks have ever reported having been aware of the difference in their triggers, nor have they reported any functioning issues prior to me noticing the spring was missing from their guns. Of course, that meant I had to take the gun to the bench and replace the spring, which took 5-10 minutes, depending on how badly the inside of the frame was gunked up and needed swamping out because of inattention from the user in the form of whatever they had considered 'good cleaning practices' ...

I was told that the CHP gunsmiths finally decided to remove the trigger play springs from all of their guns so they wouldn't have to replace them anymore, and someone from S&W told me there were ordering all of their new guns made without the springs being installed on the drawbars. I haven't personally looked inside one of their guns yet, but it would make sense considering the effort they took to remove them from their older 4006's (and slightly drilled out the drawbar head's rivet hole so they couldn't be installed by anyone else).

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Ret LE Firearms inst & armorer