OP
The Viking
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- Aug 18, 2011
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Herbert:
Couple of other things to look at.... The drop safety could be mucked up - sticky, congealed grease, manufacturing crud, etc. That can retard the striker, but not necessarily consistently.
The other thing that pops into my head is that the chamber is a hair too long, and normally the gun only fires because the extractor is holding the case head to the bolt face. Interfere with that (a little dirt or tramp metal someplace) and reliability goes away.
The pure "dead trigger" issue is really something else, I think, in this case. Easily fixed with the updated sear block. You can search on that here and get an earful.
I had a funny one with a Llama in .40S&W some years back. A club member turned up with it. Good price, too, but the fool thing just didn't always fire. Checked what we could and found nothing. (This particular gun is a copy, but not a clone, of the Colt "Officer's" sized guns. Lots of parts do the same job, but don't quite work the same way. Not a lot of interchangeability, either.)
After much cursing, we noted that it had a Swartz safety (Kimber uses them), and I pulled the firing pin block out of the slide. (Remove the rear sight to do it!) Turned out that the mechanism was out of time, and the hammer would hit the firing pin at just the wrong time, whacking the pin into the edge of the block instead of moving the block out of the way. Eventually a burr was raised on the bottom of the block (it's a "bar" across the top of the firing pin), which retarded the firing pin. Easy enough to fix, but the joke was that the gun was happy as a clam with another club member's reloads, but didn't like factory loads at all. The reloads had softer primers.... Which, of course, resulted in an essentially non-functional gun for "self defense" purposes that shot well on the range....
(We discovered the problem when he tried to shoot some other reloads.)
FastBolt knows about as much about the insides of these things as the S&W gang do, if not more. If he tells you it's the modem, it's the modem....(OK, the striker
BTW, the drop safety requires that the little flag on the rear of the trigger bar raise the plunger far enough. If possible, compare the height of the ones you have. The bar could be bent enough to keep that flag from going high enough while still letting the sear work. Just IMHO, that trigger bar is a kludge. Simple, throwaway, part, but lots of little zingers hiding there.
(FB: I finally got one of my Para LDA's actions about half apart, and back together successfully. I popped out a pin while trying to stake it - sear pin likes to wander a little - and all kinds of little bits moved out without permission. Four hours.... My "schematic" showed the grip safety lever going into the frame the wrong way. Took a while, and a look at the insides of another LDA.... Someday, I'll try the rest of it. Meantime, I've had all three of my M&P's down to bare plastic in the frame. Still haven't bothered to try to remove an extractor, though.)
Regards,
I agree with you on the barrel. A friend of mine, who I walk with daily, is a Chemical and Nuclear engineer and he worked in a metal casting business his family owned for many years so he is somewhat of a metallurgist also and he makes his primary hobby firearms, said exactly the same thing about the barrel and the chamber being to long. He is very knowledgeable about firearms and one of the smartest individuals I ever met. He also mentioned something dragging the firing pin; but that may be a burr also. So you are on the money. I consulted with him before sending it back to Smith the second time.
I will have to wait for Smith to examine the pistol.
I discuss these things with a number of their folks back at the factory from time to time, as an armorer, but I have more classes and bench time with the 3rd gen guns than I do with the M&P's (or their revolvers).
