Plans: make it work first, then do a better job of fitting the rear sight and possibly a refinish, depending on how the parkerizing reacted to the Ed's Red.
No, have not tried electrolysis yet.
Range toy until it's established itself and she's comfortable with it, then her choice.
Yes it
looks mostly finished, but something is wrong inside and the sideplate/strain screws wouldn't come out when I got it.
I think that takes care of the questions for now....back to our story:
The two week soak in Ed's Red didn't bother the parkerizing at all. If anything, it improved it by deepening the color. The major advancement was that the soak allowed the strain screw to be removed. It still required some strength but it came out. Not difficult to see why it didn't want to come out. I've seen this before on a home-parkerized M1 that wasn't fully neutralized before assembly.
I didn't remember to get pictures of the sideplate screws...they were in similar shape but not quite as bad. With the strain screw out, the hammer spring removed, and the sideplate screws out, we did a little tappy-tappy on the grip frame with a hammer handle to float the sideplate off.
Well...that was the idea. Tappy-tappy didn't work so we progressed to whacka-whacka. After 487 whacka-whacka's the sideplate came off and the rebound slide and a piece of the rebound spring fell out onto the bench. Now we know why the action felt wrong.
Not only was the spring broken, it appears to have been trimmed also. There were 13 1/2 coils inside the rebound slide, and a bit over a full coil floating. This is probably the best outcome I could hope for. I had been mentally preparing myself for a broken off trigger stud, so this was a real gift.
The rest of the inside components were gummy and nasty with oil that was trying to turn back into dinosaurs. I'm ok with that because it meant that instead of a TrainWreck this was really just a deep clean and minor repair......so far.
There were only 2 semi-difficult tasks in the clean/polish/assemble part of the job. The first was figuring out what rebound slide spring was needed. The first try was an 11 pound Wolff spring with 2 coils cut off, which made it just a bit longer than the pieces of the spring that had been in the gun. The spring that came out had .035" wire and the replacement was .030". That experiment was a bust because even though the trigger would return, it was sloooooow. The next try was a full length, 17 coil Wolff 13 pound spring. That one gives a beautiful trigger return but concerns me because the visible portion of the spring appears to have the coils touching when the trigger is all the way back. If there is coil bind happening, it's occurring late enough in the trigger travel that the hammer will still fall in single action. I may have inadvertently created a trigger stop.....I left it alone at the time, but the more I think about it the more I want to go back in and take 1 coil off to make sure that there is still some spring left to sprong when the trigger is all the way back. The other reason I think that the rebound slide spring needs trimming is that it came out with a 7 1/2 lb double action pull (which doesn't fully compress the spring) and a 3 1/4 lb single action pull. I've never had the numbers that close together - usually a double action pull below 8 pounds is accompanied by a single action pull of around 2. That's on K and N-frames though. Perhaps I-frames are different. You'll find out right after I do.
The rest of the assembly was really just cleaning off several decades of gack that had built up inside the action.
The bore is a 100+ year old bore: not perfect, but shootable. It actually looked better before the deep cleaning. I've shot much worse. Considering that 15 yards is "long distance" for the intended new owner, I think it will be fine. I don't think it will keyhole but if it does I have a spare barrel set aside for Leroy Brown that could onto this one instead.
The other challenge was finding a set of stocks that would fit a round butt I-frame. I had a few choices available for J-frames, but the only I-frame stocks I had were a torn up pair for a Regulation Police and two sets of absolutely gigantic full size target stocks that had been re-inletted for I-frames. After seeing how they look on a gun I'm never going to use them, so if anyone needs these things drop me a line....
In the end, what worked best was a set of Herrett Shooting Star stocks intended for a J-frame. The pseudo round-to-square conversion that left the backstrap partially exposed and then brought it inside the wood fit perfectly, and the enclosed bottom hides the little bit of gap from the shorter I-frame. This picture really shows how the Ed's Red "softened" the grainy parkerizing texture.
And what does the HomeSmith get for his lady as an anniversary present? A used t-shirt from Ebay of course....what else?
I'm going to take one coil off that rebound slide spring before we hit the range this coming weekend. After the range trip we'll know if this TrainWreck was really just a fender bender or if we get to do a barrel swap.
Place your bets....
