Yesterday was a day filled with snubby goodness. 🙂
While sitting at my desk working, if my fingers weren’t typing they were dry firing the new snub to work the trigger in. I will say it’s smoothed out some since I brought her home.
After work I gave the gun a basic cleaning to clean off any preservative from the factory and ensure she was lubricated. I wanted to put some oil in the action. Trouble is, being a “Centennial” frame the action is fully enclosed, so what to do? After much Googling around on the matter, the conclusion I came to is that generally it is not necessary. If however you want to, just take off the grips. When you do that, it will expose the mainspring/hammerspring (see this nice parts diagram) and of course the “hole” in the frame that the spring passes through up into the hammer/action area. One can place a drop of oil down there, work the action, and that should be all you need (in terms of lubricating the trigger/hammer/action). Of course, if you feel a need for deeper cleaning or lubricating there is the side plate that can be removed BUT unless you know what you’re doing you shouldn’t remove it. The warnings I’ve read is that unless you know what you’re doing you risk all sorts of pain and suffering. Either take it to a gunsmith and let them do it, or just be willing to sacrifice the gun and learn. I’m not yet willing to go there, so I just put some oil down the mainspring “hole”.
Actually for this initial run, I have some Break-Free CLP in an aerosol can, so I put the little spray tube on the end, stuck it in the mainspring hole, and gave a couple short blasts of CLP into that entire area. My reasoning was to ensure everything was lubed, plus if I could soak/wear/blow out anything in there (e.g. any powder carbon from the factory test fires, any small metal bits from the trigger/action break-in that I’d been doing), that’d be good. Of course, that meant a lot of lube so I was constantly wiping the gun down… spray, work action, wipe wipe wipe, work action, wipe, work action, wipe. Did that for a while, and given the CLP I was wiping up wasn’t “clear” on the rag (it’d be black) I figure I was getting something out of there OK. In the future I will likely lube it with just a drop of good oil, but I felt I wanted to do something a little different for this initial time.
Note the above isn’t necessarily some recommended practice. It’s just what I personally did to my personal firearm. Based on what I read online coupled with some logical extrapolation, it seemed to be an OK thing to do. I cannot atest if it actually is or not, so if you opt to try the same well.. your mileage may vary.
Furthermore, I do think I’ll take her to a gunsmith in the near future to have her checked out and cleaned up.
Otherwise, cleaning the revolver is like any other.
So, she’s cleaned, I have continued to work the trigger to try to break things in a bit more.
And man… both index fingers are getting sore, a little tender. 🙂
Stuff From Hsoi 