Triggers

     The point of contact between you and the pistol's ignition system is the trigger. We are fortunate to have a lot of good triggers on the market today and can take advantage of this to tailor your pistol to make the best interface possible with your hand size and grip. There are also a number of different styles to pick from to please your eye.
     You should learn to pick a proper trigger length for the size of your hand. It will help you regardless of what type of pistol you shoot. To see if a trigger length fits you correctly, stand in front of a mirror with an unloaded pistol in your firing hand. Assume the correct firing grip and place your trigger finger's first pad across the face of the trigger. Hold the pistol pointed toward the ceiling with your trigger finger about eye level. Look into the mirror and see if your trigger finger is laying flat across the face of the trigger (parallel with the floor) or if it's lying at an angle pointed slightly up or down. Ideally, you want to be able to pull straight back on the trigger without inducing any force toward the side. When the shot breaks, the trigger will continue to move rearwards until it stops. If you are pushing sideways on the trigger, you can easily force the shot off to the side when the trigger movement jerks to a stop. Pick a trigger length that allows your trigger finger to lay flat on the trigger with no tilt. If you have to err in choosing, lean toward too short, rather than too long. Unless you have really large hands, I'd suggest that you try a short.
     On a self-defense pistol, I recommend a solid aluminum trigger, correctly sized to fit your hand. These triggers are available in 4 or more lengths - short, medium, long and extra long. The short trigger is a little longer than the original M-1911 A1 triggers that most of us have used at one time or another. Most triggers on the market are equipped with an over-travel screw. The purpose of this screw is to limit the distance the trigger can travel after breaking the engagement of the sear to the hammer. A trigger pull that has a lot of over-travel can cause your shots to go low & left for a right-handed shooter. For a self defense pistol, it's important that the over travel screw be adjusted with a little bit more travel than the minimum setting and that the screw be adequately locked in place, so it can't accidentally turn. A miss-adjusted screw or one that was left unlocked could render the pistol inoperative if the screw were turned in too far. Some shooters prefer that the over travel screw be left out entirely so that this can't happen. I will do that, if requested to, but feel that it's enough to set the screw in red loctite and then crimp the bottom rear corner of the trigger. Set correctly, there is no need to adjust the screw.

   Ignition Components

     Like the trigger, there are a lot of quality hammers, sears and disconnectors available today. Before we get into the sexier aftermarket parts, let's look at what the parts supplied by the factories and see what we can do with those parts.
     Thirty years ago, there were virtually no aftermarket hammers, sears and disconnectors. The upside was that those parts were largely good quality forgings made by a company called Colt. A lot of the parts that are taken out of today's 1911's are not of the same quality as those parts available back then. What does it all mean? Soft parts won't hold the dimensions; surfaces and polishing that are done to them in a trigger job for a long time. Overly hard parts may break, rendering the gun either unsafe or useless. How long before my gun quits? It varies from one instance to the next. What occurs with soft parts is that the quality of the trigger pull goes away with time and use. In most cases, I can re-use the factory hammer and disconnector. I nearly always replace the sear because they see the most impact and wear in the firing cycle. At a minimum, you can get a good basic trigger job by replacing the trigger, sear and possibly the sear spring. If you are having a beavertail grip safety installed, 99 times out of 100, you'll want to use a Commander hammer with it. If you're doing a beavertail and your gun came with a spur hammer, it's a good time to consider installing a high quality parts set of hammer, sear & disconnector.
     There are several manufacturers of good quality ignition sets on the market. I have used nearly all of them at one time or another. I've been very pleased with the consistency of the parts sets sold by Yost-Bonitz. They are fully machined, heavy-duty, top quality tool steel parts that come with a very nice surface finish. They are supplied in the white and will blue nicely. The hammer comes with nicely beveled corners and is narrowed to prevent scuffing against the slide. On an all-stainless gun, more often than not you will want a stainless hammer. To meet that specification, I use either the EGW or the Nowlin stainless steel slotted Commander hammer and parts set. Both hammers are narrowed to prevent scuffing against the slide.
     Springs are just as important a part of the trigger job as any other component. I use springs from The W.C. Wolff Co. for every trigger job and any time a firearms spring is due for replacement. For street guns, I prefer to use full power 23 lbs. Wolff hammer springs to assure reliable ignition and to aid in controlling the slide's velocity. For competition-only trigger jobs, I will use 19 lbs. springs from Wolff to aid in reducing the trigger pull to "match use only" weights. Wolff's standard sear spring is my pick after trying everything on the market. They are consistent in quality, strength and durability and hold their tension settings forever.

   The finished trigger pull

     Trigger pulls have been described as "like a glass rod breaking" or "like an icicle breaking". What these folks are saying here is that a good, crisp trigger pull has the attributes of having no perceptible movement after take up and then breaking engagement with a reasonable amount of force required, allowing the shooter to hold the pistol steady, always in alignment with the target. After the engagement is broken, the trigger is only allowed to move the minimum amount necessary to let the hammer swing past the sear, before the trigger's rearward movement is stopped by the over-travel screw.

     Let's break the trigger pull into three parts: Take-up, Breaking of Engagement and Over Travel and talk about each.

     Take-up is the first part of the pull that you feel. What is happening is that you are taking up the slack between the trigger, disconnector and sear, prior to the trigger pulling the sear from engagement with the hammer. The measurable weight of this portion of the trigger pull is usually less than a pound. The design of the components requires that there be some .040" of travel in the trigger to allow for full engagement of the sear nose into the half-cock notch. There is often a good bit more pre-travel, which can be reduced to the minimum on competition-only trigger jobs. I'd prefer not to remove too much take-up travel on a carry trigger.
     The next part of the trigger pull that you feel is the main effort of force required to make the sear's nose pull free from the hammer hooks. I set up my trigger jobs to have about .010" to .015" of engagement between the sear and the hammer hooks. You have to pull the trigger through this small amount of engagement to break the sear loose from the hammer hooks. The engagement surface angles and surface finish make this travel unnoticeable, feeling more like you are pulling against something that is unmoving until you put enough force against it to snap it in two (this is where the "glass rod" comes in). If you have poor surface finish or bad contact points or bad angles, you feel this movement in starts and stops, called creep.
     The last part of the trigger's movement happens after the sear comes free from its engagement with the hammer hooks. When these two parts disengage, the trigger is suddenly turned loose to fly to the rear against approximately the same spring tension as was there in take-up. In a stock gun, the trigger's rearward movement is normally stopped by either the front of the magazine catch or the front of the arm on the grip safety. The trigger can usually travel quite a bit, before it stops, causing a sudden jerk in the gun. This jerk translates to the bullet striking the target wide of the aiming point. The extent of this inaccuracy varies from one shooter to the next. The fix is to fit a trigger equipped with an adjustable over-travel stop, either a screw or a fitting pad. This adjusted to minimize the over-travel of the trigger because the sooner you arrest the trigger's free movement after breaking the sear engagement from the hammer, the less jerk is transmitted into the frame of the gun, pulling it off target. There is a risk of the over travel stop working against you, if the gun gets really dirty, through neglect, a spill in the mud, or some other ingression of debris. The over-travel screw or stop should not be set too tight (or left out altogether, if you prefer) on a self-defense gun to reduce the risk of dirt, lint, or debris getting between the stop and the mag catch, keeping the gun from firing. One other thing to know is that once the gunsmith sets the over-travel screw; it does not need periodic adjustment by the end user.

   Thumb safeties and how they relate to the hammer and sear

     Thumb safeties come from the manufacturer with an oversize fitting point on the stud that blocks the sear's movement and keeps the sear from moving out of engagement with the hammer hooks. When a new safety is installed, it won't fit into the gun, requiring this fitting pad to be filed down until the blocking stud fits so that the sear can't be moved at all, yet the safety can be installed in the gun. So, in effect, the thumb safety is fit to a particular set of parts, the frame, pins, hammer, disconnector and sear. When some of the parts in this set are replaced or a trigger job is done, the relationship between the fitting point on the blocking stud and the sear may change. Sometimes a little more will need to be filed away from the existing fitting pad, sometimes it'll be just right and work as-is and sometimes it has to be welded up and re-fit to remove any clearance between the stud and the sear. The reason that I weld and re-fit is that the only other option is to replace the safety with a new part.