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Poor Man's AR Trigger Job

4K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  CSBrady 
#1 ·
I shot my 50 Beowulf a couple of days ago. I had only put five rounds through it a few months ago. I wasn't happy with the trigger on either outing.

I measured the pull force on the stock trigger on the Beowulf AR-15 this evening. 5.75 pounds. It was also very creepy and gritty, which I hate.

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I did the poor man's trigger job. First was the rope trick, where I lassoed the hammer and pulled up to increase the sear engagement force while I pulled the trigger a hundred times, being careful to put some padding on the lower so the hammer doesn't smash into it. This polishes the sear engagement parts against each other, accelerating thousands of rounds of break-in. Ten pounds of tension on the rope should yield ten or more pounds of trigger force, and you can feel the trigger getting smoother during the process, even though the pull force is high because the rope is increasing the sear friction in the same way as a very heavy hammer spring.

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That smoothed out the trigger a lot. No longer gritty and creepy, but the pull force only decreased by a few ounces. Then I did the liquid overhaul, applying some Gun Butter synthetic oil to the sear engagement as well as the trigger axis and hammer axis. Use a heavy oil or light synthetic grease that will stay put and won't become much more viscous in cold weather. That smoothed it up a little more and knocked another ounce or two off the pull force. The big improvement in the pull force was obtained by removing the hammer and reinstalling it with one of the spring legs under the trigger axis to slightly reduce the hammer spring force. Don't get too carried away and try to make a three pound trigger this way because you'll get light primer strikes. I'm not shooting Wolf ammo which is known for hard primers. I'm confident this slight reduction in hammer force won't cause reliability issues with my reloaded ammo.

That got the trigger pull down under 4.25 pounds, which isn't quite as good as a Geissele SSA-E trigger, but it's good enough for the girls I go with.

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I can honestly say that half of the improvement was the reduced pull force and the other half was the elimination of the grittiness and creepiness. It feels like a completely different trigger.

If I wanted to Dremel polish the sear engagement and maybe play with the hammer spring a bit, I could probably get into the SSA-E trigger category, but this is good enough for the big thumping AR. If you do polish the sear, just polish it and don't change the profile or remove any measurable amount of metal. You don't want to make an unsafe trigger or a runaway automatic weapon. :eek:

These poor man trigger tricks work with most firearms. They're also reversible so if you inadvertently mess something up with your amateur gun smithing (are there three scarier words in the English language?), you should be able to put it back the way it was.

I also ordered a Limbsaver butt pad. That's the other thing this 50 Beowulf AR desperately needs. That, and a lot of my very inexpensive 50 Beowulf reloads to cause some serious downrange carnage.
 
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