Pistol repair work and upgrades
Repair work and upgrades. So, after pulling my old .22 pistol out and plinking a bit, it started having failures to fire. It is one of the few I have that is somewhat collectible. They only made these for a few years. Browning BuckMark Silhouette with a 10" barrel. I did some reading up on it. Apparently some of these were prone to light primer strikes, and especially if they had been dry fired a lot. I bought this one used like 30 years ago. I haven't really dry fired, but also haven't had it apart to clean in that time, just brushed the bore and kept oiled. It finally started failing like 4/10 rounds, and even when re-trying some 4-5 times.
I couldn't get the screws out initially to clean, but found some "Kroil" that worked like magic. A little of that on the screws, a few taps, let it sit 10 min and they came right out.
A good cleaning and then I also used another trick, to very slightly file the hole in the firing pin a little longer (see pic). This did the trick, 4 magazines so far with no failures. Next, that motivated me to order a new sear spring "gearbox" and flat trigger from TandemKross that should reduce the trigger pull from 4lbs. to 2 lbs. and also a new magazine spring and extra mags. Stay tuned for the upgrades coming soon, maybe even a Vortex Venom red dot.
Nice tool sets..Beauty of a pistol... Do you use your free hand to hold under the barrel ?
It's one of my favorites, on par accuracy wise with many rifles! I actually use a normal two handed grip / modified weaver stance most of the time just due to habit. The forearm does come in really handy when shooting from sitting position and bracing against leg, or when using a rest though. I be uploading more pics and targets after I get new sear spring, trigger and red dot mounted.