MemphisMechanic

I like my III a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. However, I've never fired a Stock II.

I've been running my Wolff extra power extractor spring without cutting it. Getting it installed isn't fun, but it has been working great.

I have some that look just like my competition ammo from two years ago... ...With a 3/16" hole drilled completely through both sides of the case and deburred before they were loaded up as dummy rounds. Do something that makes your inert ammo visually distinctive.

It depends a lot on what springs you're running, too. I think Johnbu is right about that. If you're running a 14 with Federals, it would go a year and still probably be stronger than a 10 was in the first place. Of course... if you're running it with CCIs you won't have nearly as much margin for wear. An annual re-springing with a hammer spring in the middle of the season sounds like a solid plan. If it was a CZ, I'd do the trigger spring halfway too, but I don't believe Tanfoglio guns break trigger springs like the CZ does. (I know we don't have to carry spare slide stops like they do.)

Let us know what you think you hadn't polished sufficiently. Have you stripped them down side by side and compared the finishes, etc?

@johnbu's "GrandMaster Training Springs" now available on etsy...

Those launch numbers are really similar to what I was seeing with an EGD Medium spring which is 16.5# and seriously stout. That is another possibility for your "stock" spring - if it isn't the actual factory Tanfoglio spring which I believe @johnbu said launches them closer to 3 feet!

Definitely work on gripping the gun harder (weak hand especially - literally as hard as you can without shaking) with dryfire reps all you can. I shot matches for seven years before Ben Stoeger demonstrated his girl pressure with his hand on top of mine. It was at least triple the pressure I used, and the improvement was immediate. It's been a pain to fix. Don't ingrain lazy shooting. Learn to crush the gun right away.

Also, if you're in the US and allowed to polish things, you can go in and really clean the action up. Pins, channels, sides of hammer, pin holes? Everything in my gun looks like it's freshly dipped in wet chrome. Reducing friction internally will get more force out of the same hammer spring. I even lightly polish the inner & outer surfaces of the spring itself. This generally lets you drop a pound or two of hammer spring weight vs the factory gun, with equivalent reliability. But in IPSC, internal polishing isn't allowed.

If it needs hit more than once, the primer might be seated flush... but it isn't FULLY seated. Strike #1 drives it down into the case and leaves a light dent, strike #2 or 3 sets it off. Coming from Glock and M&Ps, I'd always believed primers being flush was what a seated primer looked like. That's the benchmark. Because a gun with a 3# trigger could ignite them all day. "High primers bad, flush primers good" Thats not the case with a hammer-fired gun. They need to be a fingernail's width below flush if you want to run a really light hammer spring in a double-action gun. Your gun doesn't bring the hammer back all the way in double action, so that first shot from the holster is very weak compared to firing with the hammer cocked, or a Glock. In order to run reliably you have two options: 1. Go for light trigger weight: This means "designer ammo." Change primer brand, or ammo brand, and it usually means loading your own ammo where you can control primer seating depth if you really want to chase a light trigger. You have to feed the gun ammo that's easy to fire, since you aren't hitting the primers nearly as hard as a stock firearm does. 2. Go for reliability, and practice until you shoot a 7 or 8 pound DA trigger well. Run enough spring to detonate any primer in any ammo, and you'll have Glock like reliability in the CZ or Tanfoglio platforms... now just go practice a lot. You can't have both. That's the hard truth.

The blue bullet 135 I've heard from a CZ guy that: "Before I switched to the blue bullet 135tc I used another companies 135 and was running 1.110 OAL and with the blue bullet 135tc I am running 1.145 OAL at 135pf." 135 BBIs? I've shot thousands of those. I couldn't go past 1.080-90 ish in my Tanfoglio without reaming it. The blue is a tapered cone and the BBI is a round nose. Very different ogive profiles.

Just take the sights off.

It's probably easier to just install a firing pin with a longer tip. Like the one Patriot Defense makes.

Definitely screw it into the studs of the wall. A huge improvement.

There's another divide present too: Are you after the lightest possible trigger pull with designer ammo, or are you after a gun that eats anything you feed i?

Is there anything you can do to more deeply and consistently seat primers in your ammunition? Use the depth measuring ability on a dial caliper to check your loaded ammo. .005"-.008" is truly, completely, fully seated in most pieces of brass. You shouldn't need nearly as much hammer spring as you are currently using, not to ignite federal primers 100% of the time. If you want to chase light trigger pulls, you have to really drive your primers down in there all the way: The gold Winchester primers in the foreground are fully seated. They run 100% with 3.5# less hammer spring in my Tanfoglio than the CCIs in the background, which are so hard that a Dillon 650 won't seat them any more deeply than this. They're barely down past flush.

As an FYI, apparently the 135gr blue bullet (tapered cone) will allow you to load out around 1.125 -1.130 in a CZ or Tanfo which hasn't been reamed. That's an option for someone who wants to load longer without having the barrel cut.

What he said. Swap 'em out.

@ryridesmotox is spot on. Do what he said. Also my gun showed 1/3lbs of change in single action pull weight going from a 13 pound to a 16.5lb EGD Medium spring.

At least some of us have been stubbornly happy with a heavy trigger the whole time. I have no long term plan to shoot Winchester primed ammo, I was just curious to see if the popular combination of PD 13 & Win SP would run in my gun. It did. I'm done now. I'll be going back to my "soviet tank armor" primers, as @johnbu describes them.

Always go full speed and commit to completing the course until told to do otherwise. Even if there's just cause to award a reshoot, you can't be certain that you'll get it. Take the opportunity that you do have to get the best possible score down on paper. As the guy behind the timer, I'll say that I'm pretty quick to start someone over for jumping the beep - giving them a STOP command - before we have to tape paper and reset any steel.

I'm just going to say this: I know how heavy Stoeger's trigger is. I've seen how fast 2 As at 25 happens for him. I don't think it's a detriment. If you practice. A lot.

Well, the good new is... I shot a match this weekend with the PD 13 installed and some deeply-seated Winchester primers. The gun ran like a champ. However, in dryfire I was noticing that the lighter trigger didn't handle any different in drills than the heavier pull with the EGD Medium. Yesterday's match confirmed that. I am completely certain that I'd have shot the same exact score. I'll likely go back to the heavy spring permanently after doing some testing.

Covering them with duct tape has been said to be legal. I don't shoot that sport anymore, so I couldn't confirm.

Left:15.5 Patriot Defnese spring Right: EGD Medium Both are fresh out of the wrapper. They're exactly the same length, but the EGD Med is fewer turns of a thicker wire. It's obviously stiffer when squeezed by hand.