Attachment 321092
Here is my rifle. I got it for a low price mostly because the photos in the Gunbroker ad were very poor and it did have some dings. That seemed to scare people away but I wanted a gun to hunt with so took a chance and got it for $305 plus shipping. This was 2016 or 2017 the best I can recall. It had a horrible trigger that was off the scale of my RCBS gauge. I ordered a Wolf low power hammer spring and installed it. The pull did go down, don't recall the exact numbers any more but it was still very high. But as so often happens when you start modifying anything, another problem crept in. I was getting misfires. Lots of them. So I got some of the little washers they sell for PopRivets to put on the hammer strut rod to preload the spring. It seemed to help but going from 50% misfires to 30% misfires is hardly a solution. So after several iterations of adding different washer thicknesses to the hammer spring strut with none of them giving 100% ignition I put the original spring back on. I had a 10+lb trigger pull of course but at least it went BOOM every time again. Then I saw an ad for the Wild West Trigger in a Brownell catalog and got one. Sucess! Pull weight was something around 4lbs which is fine for a lever action hunting rifle. Everything went well for several years until suddenly this Fall when I got it out to shoot some and all of a sudden, I was getting 50% or more misfires. Dadgummit!!! Most would fire on the 2nd attempt and all on the 3rd. On most of those I was also getting shoulder setback because the primers were protruding. How this suddenly happened after about 4 years of 100% reliability I'm not sure. Again I did some searching and found that Wolf makes Extra Power Hammer Springs for the Marlin 336 so ordered a couple. Not only was the spring stiffer, it was significantly longer than the original which took some creativity to get it installed. I had to use a large vice, two 1/4" sockets and a nail with the head sawed off along with a piece of small wire to compress it enough to install. Once installed it was immediately obvious that it took more thumb power to cock the hammer. I've shot it about 50 times or maybe more with the new spring and it has worked perfectly. I tell all this because a good friend who is also a gun nut warned me to not get a 35 Remington because of all the stories he'd heard like mine with 35 Remington chambered rifles. Many blame the tiny shoulder and say that it causes headspace problems. I can't pooh pooh that accusation either when I think back on my primer backing out problems a few weeks back. However, for now I have my 35 working reliably. For my money even if you do have to jump through some hoops to get a 35 set up, it's worth it because of that great balance between power with minimal recoil.