I thought I would share my experience over the weekend. I bought a new Bisley Blackhawk Hunter and I was noticing a LOT of gritty creep when I was trying to squeeze off rounds at a target. It would have been one thing if it was predictable, but it really was causing me some headache when trying to be precise. I honestly thought that I would just have to clean things up a little bit, maybe there were just some tiny burrs that needed to be dressed, but when I got it apart I realized it was going to turn into a full on trigger job. I am not sure if a thread like this is floating around on here or not, but I know there are some like it on other forums. All the information contained in here is what I learned from hours upon hours of web searching.
Here is the disclaimer - I am not a gunsmith, nor do I have all the traditional gunsmithing tools. I do have a good understanding of how the hammer and sear interface and what just a little bit of things being off could cause. 1) I could totally aggravate the problem and make the trigger pull worse. 2) I could totally ruin the trigger, making it completely unsafe, and cause myself some money having to purchase new parts. So what I am saying is, I am sharing what I did, but my personal opinion is that you should feel confident when doing this yourself, understand the risks, but most importantly understand how the action works. Without understanding how the action works, you cannot understand what is safe and what is not. That's my thoughts at least. I just do not want to make anyone think its impossible to do trigger work, but at the same time, I want to share how it can be done by a nonprofessional. Trust me, if I was a rich man, or had friends who were gunsmiths, I would gladly have let someone else work on the gun.
I started on it Sunday morning, got it apart in an hour, taking my time to make sure I did not lose anything and I also took a LOT of pictures of the disassembly. After that, Sunday evening, I spent 2 1/2 hours working on the hammer and sear. It actually took me longer to put the gun back together due to the fact I also messed with the trigger spring, and I tried to oil everything real good - which made for real slippery hands - and then add in the fact that some metal burrs came loose from the frame causing the upper frame screws(which are hard enough to deal with on a Bisley model) to bind. All in all, I would say it was a 5-6 hour job, but that is with me having NEVER taken a Blackhawk fully apart, or ever working on a hammer and sear.
The tools I used were; a screwdriver that fit the frame screws tightly so they would not mar, a 7/64 allen wrench(which having one with a ball head would have made things easier), a small flat blade screwdriver(used for the gate detent spring), a kitchen match to push out the hammer and trigger pins(the ruger videos show a punch being used, but my pins just pressed out once they were not being held captive), 1000 & 3000 grit stone(I used a large, two sided, sharpening stone as it is super flat and easy to hold onto), a buffing pad with jewlers rouge(I had a stick of white compound that I use to buff knives with to a mirror shine), and a small jewlers flat file.
A note on the flat file and rouge. The flat file was only used because, as you will see, I had some pretty major(relatively) work to do and it was quicker to use the file. The rouge will flat out make a piece of metal shinny - but don't think that it does not take metal off - it will. You could easily ruin a hammer/sear by overdoing it with rouge.
So, the number one thing that gave me the last bit of confidence to do this was a neat little trick for setting up a 'jig' to test and see how the hammer and sear interface. Without a jig, you are only guessing at what angles they meet each other. Guessing is probably not the best thing when doing trigger work. It's not my idea, I found pictures of it online along with pretty good instructions on how to perform the trigger job.
All you do is take the hammer pivot pin and trigger pivot pin, put them into their holes part ways, then secure them with the parts they are normally secured with - the long frame screw for the hammer pin, and the gate detent spring for the trigger pin. I put some blue tape on the recoil shield just to keep the hammer from scratching it so much. I used a very light rubber band just to make some pressure. I tried not to let the hammer just free fall when doing the testing. One thing about this is, each time you move the parts you should push them down flat because they will ride up the pins.
Here is what I found with regards to the sear.
Doesn't look too horrible, but after putting some marker on it and running it in the jig, things began to make sense.
Looking at it against a flat surface.
Obviously, it was not making full contact with the hammer notch. Which, a person might think would be helpful in regards to trigger pull, but it is not and was causing another issue as seen below.
It is my opinion that this burr is what was causing most of my gritty feeling. Not only that but because there is some side to side play between the hammer and sear, the burr and the raised portion of the sear would meet in different areas from time to time, which was causing the unpredictable trigger break when squeezing one off.
So what started with me thinking I would just touch up the hammer notch, turned into having to address the sear issue and dealing with the hammer notch. I'll continue that on in the next post, I am sure I am running out of room with this first post.