I have been slowly retrofitting an old Westerfield thotgun, and in the process I put to much strain on the trigger pivot pin and broke into 3 pieces. It looks like brass to me. The raw surfaces are very shiny like brass, and have no hint of the pastiness I sometimes see in bronze. It measures at about .090 as near as I can measure a twisted broken pin part about an 1/8 inch long. I can't find any bronze that small, and the nearest brass piece I can find from McMaster is 3/32 (0.09375). It looks like the only answer I am going to have is to polish down a piece of 3/32 brass rod. The trigger is a pretty integral part of this mechanism with a simple hook that holds back the firing pin when you close the bolt, so I am trying to decide which alloy is going to give the best life for this application. The gun is over 60 years old, so whatever the original pin was it did a pretty good job.
Original pin would not have been bronze. It would have been steel. Most likely a rebadged Mossberg. My books list a couple of trigger pins in that size range .095 and .093.
How bout using a piece of brazing rod? And yes..it may have been brass. Its a very low stress part. Id personally use bronze or even Stainless steel and then pass the arm down to my great great grand children.
I looked on the shelf and I had both 0.090 carbon spring wire and stainless spring wire. The stainless said, 0.093 on the tube, but when I measured it I got 0.090-0.091. A short piece of stainless works just perfect. Well longer than the original piece so its easier to work with. I may go out and shoot it tomorrow. This is not the first thing I've had to fix on this gun. It seems like every time I fixed something, something else broke. I've got a complete spare bolt assembly on the way now just in case. LOL.
"Bob La Londe" fired this volley in news:l3vbni$it9$1 @dont-email.me:
But now it's not 'original', with that steel pin in there. Put a brass pin back in, and stop pissing and moaning about haveing to turn down a piece of stock. This is a metalworking group, after all.
BTW... how the heck did you put enough strain on the trigger to completely shear a piece of .090 brass?
LOL. I'll put a brass pin back in there if I ever find an original magazine for it. The original magazine had a retention clip on the magazine. The later magazines used a piece of spring steel mounted on the magazine guide on the gun to lock the magazine in place. Numrich sells a kit with the spring plate and the newer magazine. I bought one. It took quite a bit of doctoring to get it to seat right, lockup tight, and feed properly. It didn't even pretend to be right out of the package. It wouldn't even fit in the hole in the stock.
The trigger doesn't just release the firing pin. It also stops the bolt from falling out. I imagine 60 or 70 years of having that bolt slammed back by frantic bird hunters (myself included) took its toll. As near as I can tell this gun was made before WWII. Its not the oldest I have in my collection, but it's the first gun I ever made a wingshot with, and it's the first gun my dad ever let me take off on my own to go hunting. It was a piece of crap even back then. No magazine, sticky chamber, poor ejection, no choke... and I still loved using it. It was better than the shotguns my buddies didn't have. I've got just about everything fixed except the sticky chamber. I have two things to try there, before I consider trying to remove the barrel to trim and rechamber it. I'm not sure I can remove the barrel without damaging it so I hope my other ideas work. I can see through the stock mounting bolt hole in the frame and the threads are buggered in there like somebody drove a machine screw in there that was too long at one time.
My dad bought the gun from somebody who needed the cash around 1969 or 1970, so there is not telling how much abuse it suffered before we got it. We never had the original magazine. I just used it as a hand fed single shot bolt action. I'm curious to see how it shoots with an actual choke tube mounted on it. LOL. I would never even attempt a shot more than about 20 yards with it before. The shot just spread out to quick shooting out of that open cylinder bore. Atleast with the cheap bird loads I could afford back then.
Interestingly it looks a lot like a lighter version of some of the heavy bolt action rifles.
Glad someone out there can repair old equipment. Cell phones, for example. I took my old one in for repair, and find out that they don't permit their techs "not allowed" to do any repairs. Just pitch in the trash, and sell em a new one.
Funny. I've had both Nokia and Samsung hand phones repaired by the manufacturer's representative. In the Nokia case they had to order the part from wherever, took an extra week. Both repaired free of charge.
Maybe, being third world residents we get ours repaired while residents of the great throwaway culture get to buy new ones :-)
Your description strongly suggests that the brass pin isn't original. Perhaps it was hacked in by someone who lacked the lathe to turn a proper steel pin.
Ever look at the guts of the average cell phone? Those things are largely NOT repairable. Between heavy conformal coatings and SMD machine laid out boards..they were never designed with repair in mind.
They are cranked out by the millions by machines that do the assembly and dip soldered and when they go bad...(except for a very few assembly points like screen cabling)..they are designed to be tossed.
That is substantially true even for their hand-built prototypes. I had to grind narrow, fragile tips on cutters to snip the individual leads of SMT ICs so I could remove them without damaging the circuit board pads. Hot air rework tools won't do everything. jsw
"Jim Wilkins" fired this volley in news:l41044$1v9$1 @dont-email.me:
But they aren't "dip soldered". They're infrared re-flow soldered, using flux-bearing solder paste both to provide the solder and to 'glue' the chips in place until they go under the light. Surface tension of the solder assures each chip self-centers on its pads as the solder melts.
That is a good suggest. I feel silly for not thinking of it. A while back a buddy of mine gave me a vise. In order to take the vise I had to take t he table it was attached to. In order to take the table I had to take the boxes that were under it. In one of the boxes was a huge gallon jar of bra ss screws and bolts. I am sure there is something in there I could have us ed.
I do admit to some trepidation in turning a pin that small. Most brass I h ave turned seems to like a pretty decent DOC, and a piece that small will d eflect a lot. Maybe a file or a live tool with a grinding point would do i t.
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