MemphisMechanic

I want to set off CCI magnum primers. Not punch Optimized holes in the backs of them.

Probably get around to that next week.

Not questionable at best, ARy. Not at all. Far from transferable from gun to gun as far as weight is concerned - for exactly the reasons you stated. Some of this information should carry over, however. Primarily, how little trigger pull weight is affected by the ammer spring's weight in single-action. That said... You should be happy. There's no doubt that PD springs were my favorites, and delivered the sexiest trigger pulls. What I wish I'd had time to do... was put each one to the pencil test without changing anything except hammer springs. When is Bevin going to start milling hammer spring holes? Might as well send him the whole frame along with your barrel, right?

Parts changes made in search of a 100% gun: 1. Switched from an 8-lb longslide recoil spring to a 10 pounder. In line with others saying fun things like "I have two 8 pound wolff springs and they aren't even the same length"... The 10 pound feels half again as strong as the 8. Good. I was having feeding issues with SWC rounds at the indoor range in slow fire. Twice the gun fired then hung, and after about a half second it snapped forward into battery. That's interesting, and not in a good way. I'd switched back to the factory spring with three coils cut to get by. We will see if the 10 pound spring is the ticket. (Factory recoil spring weight is14 lbs by the way. I saw that somewhere.) 2. The new heavy Patriot Defense firing pin is in the gun. I'm hoping that's all that's needed to get it to run 100%. 3. I discovered the photos of my trigger pull weights were unintentionally fudged. I'm at 6 pounds 3.25 ounces in DA and 3 pounds 3 ounces in SA. I did a test of four different hammer springs tonight. The results of that are here: 4. When I get time to play with it, I'm going to continue to look into driving primers as deep as possible on my Dillon 650. That's the actual cause of all of my issues. If I were loading on a 1050 I'd have been shooting a 100% reliable gun as soon as all the PD parts were dropped into it, weeks ago. At least this spring test means that I know that if I can't remedy the issue at the press, I can try the Wolff-14 pound spring to hit primers a little harder while only adding a few ounces to the first shot on every stage. I can definitely live with that as a plan B. 5. I should mention that the firing pin block is still absent from my gun. It's going to stay out until it has fired 1,000 trouble-free rounds. I am keeping that variable completely out of the equation until the gun is known to be completely reliable.

HAMMER ... SPRING ... DEATH ... MATCH "Four springs enter... one spring leaves." "MasterBlaster run barter town" Ahem. I'm not usually on my laptop, and felt like playing with the formatting options you get when you aren't on an iThingy. On to the technical stuff: I polished up and tested four springs back to back in the same Stock 3 (with a digital Lyman trigger scale) without changing anything else in the gun. The results might surprise you! First, I had to clean them all up so that it was a fair fight. Particularly since Tanfoglios catch fire and explode if you try to run unpolished parts - at least if you listen to some of the guys in this forum. 1. Chucked them in my drill one by one and cleaned up the outside: 2. Polish half, then turn it around and shine the other half of the outside: 3. For the inside, I roll 2,500-grit up, coat it in polish, and spin the spring in a drill again: 4. Polished 14lb Wolff next to the untouched EG Medium: 5. Here are our contestants: (I left enough paint on the PD springs to identify them by color, but the inner and outer surfaces are bare metal) Each spring was tested in DA and SA with three pulls each, after being racked & dryfired 10 times so that everything was set. I'm writing it as pounds/ounces because that seems to be easiest to read quickly. 1. EG Medium Spring: (15-16ish per @johnbu's guess) Double: 7/13 ... 7/14 ... 7/5 Single: 3/5 ... 3/6 ... 3/3 This spring stacked hard at the final 25% of the DA trigger pull. Being the longest, it was under the most preload and was the hardest to compress to get the hammer pin inserted. 2. Wolff 14 pound: Double: 6/10 ... 6/12 ... 6/10 Single: 3/3 ... 3/2 ... 3/2 Less stacking than the EGD spring, nearly as good as the Patriot ones. 3. Patriot Defense 14 pound: Double: 6/4 ... 6/2 ... 6/4 Single: 3/4 ... 3/2 ... 3/3 Ahh. Gun stopped stacking toward the rear of the trigger pull, Honestly it's hard to tell the difference between this spring and the Wolff 14. I'm not delicate enough to feel a half-pound difference in trigger weight. The difference between it and the EGD Medium spring was night and day, however. 4. Patriot Defense 13 pound: Double: 6/1 ...6/5 ... 6/3 Single: 3/1 ... 3/2 ... 3/2 Felt pretty much identical to the PD 14 pound spring. Moral of the story, while Tanfoglio guns vary widely (some guys are well over a pound lighter in DA with the exact same parts and a PD 14 pounder) I feel good about running the PD 14 in my gun. If I ever find that I need to hit primers harder, I won't feel like I screwed myself if I decide to run the thicker & stiffer Wolff 14 pound spring. Previously I had also hoped to get away with the 13 once the heavy firing pin came out, so that I could enjoy a 5.0ish pound DA on stronghand / weakhand classifiers. Now I know that it isn't worth pursuing - in my gun there's barely a difference. I do wish that I had a PD 10 and 12 to install in this gun just to see what would happen to the DA weights... but I'm not going to buy them since my gun is on a strict "CCI primers only" diet. The most interesting thing I learned was how little hammer spring weight matters in single action. Adding roughly 3-4 pounds to the hammer spring added - at most - a quarter of a pound to the SA pull.

Boom. 77% more awesome, installed last night...12% heavier as promised and clearly longer to the naked eye. Factory pin, top. PD firing pin, bottom:

I'm gonna build one poly Tanfo. But it'll be my own. And I'll only polish it and do a bit of cleaning up, a 7-8# DA would be the GOAL in that one. So I'm not gonna keep going back in and tinkering. Polish, reliability tune (polish breechface and feedramp etc), and done.

#thatswhatshesaid.

Then I feel better about my trigger gauge reading with the 14 now. Run a couple hundred rounds through the gun, and go back in and polish everything that shows wear. It's possible that you'll lose another half pound of the DA weight... but tough to say. Every one of these Italian guns is different.

It still is... just like it was three years ago. Good job with the Necro-post, Jeff!

If you sold those, I might just have bought one. I've officially gone Tanfo Crazy...

That photo is helpful. I see four key places where you managed to make the pin weigh more. Hopefully it puts my gun over the edge from 95% to 100% reliability without making any other modifications.

14 pound hammer spring, correct?

That's some sexy stuff right there, I wonder if mine is waiting at home. I have even more hope for the pin's extra depth to help light stubborn primers than I do the extra weight!

I hold the spring in place with needle nose pliers and guide an Allen wrench through frame, trigger, and spring. Then push it out the opposite direction with the factory roll pin, or in my case, the Canik pin that Jesus himself spake unto me and told me I should be using.

http://forums.brianenos.com/index.php?/topic/241535-stock-2-stock-3-one-piece-sear-installation-guide/

@GARD72977... So that you can more easily knock a couple mags out during a stage and find yourself one short at the end, again? I have to admit that was good for a laugh. @Gcarr and I were watching and waiting. "He's not going to like this..."

I would have to go look - but I just checked. It was bought in 2008 and they don't make it anymore.

Excellent utility, an IPSC guy put a ridiculous number of stages online: speedslide.com

Oh don't worry. I no longer make the mistake of shooting IDPA. And I say that with regret, not with a smile. I shot IDPA for the better part of a decade, quite often. They drove me off with inconsistent SO's at State matches... and random rule changes passed down by a governing body which the members didn't elect, and don't respect. So I get to poke all the fun at it I like now. Not because I'm a "USPSA guy coming to troll" but because I tried to enjoy their sport, despite the vests, until they no longer made that possible. It took a lot of hard work, but they managed it. I brought up "that isn't any kind of realistic defensive shooting" because Joyce did it first as her weak justification for trying to slow down the bullet squirters in order to give the 50+ year old shooters with bad knees a chance: "As concealed carry holders, which many of our members are, we are responsible for every round that leaves our gun, and IDPA needs to reflect that in our practices." I was merely pointing out the hilarity of their weak-sauce explanation, saying that we need to make the sport more like what you'd do in a gun fight... even though everyone who has ever watched a single defensive shooting on YouTube knows that it's not what anyone does in a gun fight. "Keep your rounds on the bad guy and fire them before he hits you, and until he's out of the fight" seems to universally be the winning strategy. 1. Make the entire -1 and -0 into the new zero down. 2. Give a half second penalty for -3. 3. Incur five seconds per miss. 4. Thirty seconds per noshoot. (Match ending disaster.) ...and you have my idea of "reflecting concealed carry practices" which Joyce refers to. Would I want to shoot it? Probably not. I liked the balance of speed and accuracy the "half second" rules required. But it was already slower than any real life shooting done by soldiers or civilians. And that was fine! Because it is a sport. I'm just tired of them constantly making things worse and worse, claiming to make it more realistic each time, on their holy crusade to "try and stop the gamers."

Careful. Dillon has a trademark on blue paint.

Quoted for truth! I shoot production. I b*tch and moan about this all the time.

Put a hundred thousand rounds through it and we'll let you know afterward that things are just fine.

I want to watch you pull one apart blindfolded. You have to keep the blindfold on while trying to find the mag catch spring's plunger, though.

You make it sounds like it takes more than one fairly leisurely evening to get the parts in the gun.