Reply With QuoteGood stuff. There will be many who will use this to modify their triggers on their old staggerfed actions.
My new old stock model 16 arrived a few days ago and one of the first things I wanted to change on it was the trigger. I know those original three-screw triggers can be adjusted and made to work well, but all my other guns have Accutriggers on them and I actually like the Accutrigger. So with a little encouragement from J. Baker, I managed to figure out what needed to be done to install a present-day Accutrigger into this old gun. Good news is that it didn't take that long and I only needed a few common tools.
Here's what I did.
1) Drill out the plastic plug on the safety screw and adjust it back away from the safety (counter clockwise) until it clears the original safety, which is thicker/taller than the present day Accutrigger safety. This wasn't all that hard to do. Just find the right sized drill bit and allen wrench, and pick out the plastic residue after you've drilled through it. The screw is red loctited in, but with a firm turn of the allen key, it moved pretty smoothly.
2) Widen the gap for the trigger in the steel trigger guard. The Accutrigger has a wider body (to allow for the blade) than the original model 16 trigger. A few passes with a carbide milling bit in my Dremel followed by a file worked pretty well for this.
3) Mill a notch in the stock under the rear tang for the longer Accutrigger. The Accutrigger is both longer and "taller" in this area than the original trigger. A cutting bit in my Dremel worked well for this and it only took a minute or two in the synthetic stock. You have to make that notch 0.8" deep to allow for the end of the trigger and the trigger pull weight spring.
4) Trim off the end of the rear trigger guard screw. When you mill out the notch under the rear tang for the extra length and depth of the Accutrigger, the rear trigger guard screw may protrude through into that notch and interfere with the trigger. I used a cutting wheel in my Dremel to trim about 1/8" of that screw. There is still plenty of length and plenty of meat in the synthetic stock to capture that screw and hold things tight.
That's it. Start to finish it took me about 45 minutes, but only because I haven't done it before and I wanted to be careful.
The last thing I did was to trim two coils off the pull weight spring at the back of the Accutrigger because it bottomed out at 3#. After testing it many times, I decided I wanted some wiggle room on that adjustment, so I trimmed off two coils, bent the end 90 degrees and reinstalled it. Now I can back the trigger down to about 2 1/4# I set it at 2 1/2# to match the trigger in my Savage .308.
Hope this helps someone!
Good stuff. There will be many who will use this to modify their triggers on their old staggerfed actions.
I am sorry, I may have mispoke.
Hope so. I've learned so much from this forum in the past 10 years that it's nice to be able to give back for once.Originally Posted by Robinhood
Nicely done!!
Don't forget to add some shims if there is the same side play as mine all had.
This deserves a place in the sticky's.
Oh great! This is my reward for being helpful? He's gone and put together a nice write-up with detailed photos that I'm going to have to promote to an article on the homepage.
An admin's work is never done...
Joking aside, I would LOVE to see more posts like this that are clear and concise that we can promote up to the homepage. Whether it's a how-to such as this, a product review, a build article, a cartridge specific piece or whatever I'm always looking for good stuff to promote to the homepage. The biggest thing is that is has to be fairly well organized/written and have at least a couple good photos.
"Life' is tough. It's even tougher if you're stupid." ~ John Wayne
“Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” —Mark Twain
Nice work and great pictures!
Thanks J!
Thanks all. Happy to help!
This is awesome.
I had asked about extractors and aftermarket triggers for an older 110 243win. Seems like I may go this way with an Accutrigger install
After reading your comment I went back to see how much play there was in mine and yes, there is a little bit. It could probably benefit from some thin nylon washers as shims, but I'm going to leave it as-is since I didn't notice it when I was testing it and adjusting pull weight.
Hope it works well for you. I did leave out one minor step in my list however. I forgot to mention drilling a tiny hole in the underside of the rear tang to capture the tip of the trigger pull adjustment spring. I didn't drill into the metal but rather the edge of the red plastic "fire" indicator, where it meets the metal. It was very easy to drill, quick and close enough the the correct location that it saved me from having to drill into the receiver at all.
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