Wednesday, January 09, 2008 Rama: Light triggers and a lighter wallet By Karlon N. Rama Stage Five
IN SOME of the forums I monitor, there is a lot of chatter about trigger jobs in factory nineteen-elevens. The principal idea seems to be that one’s shooting is improved by lightening the trigger pull.
Well, it is partly true. With a lighter trigger pull, a shooter encounters less resistance in breaking a shot.
The lesser the resistance in the trigger, the lesser the tension required in the muscles controlling the trigger finger and the shooting hand. And the more relaxed the hand is, the more likely unnecessarily movement is eliminated.
And just to demonstrate the relationship between hand-muscle tension and unnecessary movement, one only needs to assume a shooting position and tense his hands.
He will then observe how it will almost immediately begin to shake, making accurate shots nearly impossible to make.
Conversely, when the arms aren’t unnecessarily tensed, it is relatively still.
It is true that tension is needed in gripping the gun when shooting. However, the amount of tension needed is just enough to keep the gun stable while the process of recoil is unfolding and not to suppress recoil, as many are oft to do.
(When there is insufficient tension in the grip, a situation called “limp-wristing” is observed. This leads the gun to jam. We will discuss this in detail in subsequent columns.)
A lighter trigger pull insures that the amount of tension the gun receives is within limit—enough to keep the gun stable during recoil while insuring that there is no unnecessary movement of the hands.
By and in itself, however, a trigger job does nothing to improve accuracy.
And while guns used in competitions, except for those used in the ISPC Production Division, all have finely-tuned trigger jobs, the reason why they can send bullets into the same hole is because the guys and gals shooting these guns have managed to raise their skills into such a level through practice and familiarity with their equipment, not because their guns have hair triggers.
Thus, going to a gunsmith for a trigger job on an out-of-the-box nineteen-eleven just to get good groups may not be the best course of action for a new shooter.
A quick trip to the firing range, where there are safety officers and instructors, may be the better alternative. The gun owner should first learn to adjust to the gun before making the gun adjust to him.
Many factory guns come with a five-pound trigger pull. In my experience, that isn’t especially hard. One can still hit metal plates at 25 yards with it, given some amount of practice.
Moreover, it’s safe. Triggers that are too light aren’t advisable, especially for guns that were bought for protection and not merely for competition.
I’ve seen too many accidental discharges, guns that fired unintentionally because the shooter placed just too much pressure on his ultra-light trigger, to decide to set the pull on my nineteen-eleven at three-and-a-half to four pounds.
Likewise, trigger jobs don’t come cheap. In some cases, gun smiths won’t work with factory hammers and sears and require the gun owner to buy a new pair for tuning.
And it is only for those who know how to take care of their guns.
A gun with a lightened trigger pull is a sensitive gun. Drop the slide on an empty chamber too many times (this happens when the gun, while in lock-back position, is returned to battery by a push down of the slide stop notch instead of simply easing the slide back into the closed position) and a problem called the hammer-follow begins to develop.
When this happens, a new trigger job is required and a new hammer and sear from the nearest gun store may be required along with it, leading to another problem—the empty wallet syndrome.
