Hammer not resetting when pumping

Remington 870 Repair and Gunsmithing.
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j5689
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Hammer not resetting when pumping

Post by j5689 » Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:21 am

I have an 870 Express that I bought a year ago in November, me and my dad have put less than two hundred shells through it skeet shooting when it stopped firing in the middle of a round of skeet.

I have recently upgraded the carrier dog follower spring(successfully) to the police model and I'm wondering if maybe I bent something as I was putting the trigger assembly back in. It worked fine before that for 3 straight rounds of skeet the first time I shot it and then after my upgrade we went back to the range yesterday again. It made it to station 7 of the first round of skeet and decided it didn't want to fire anymore. I have put snap caps through it numerous times since then and that worked fine, it was only once we switched to live ammo that it decided to do this.

Symptoms:

Trigger never breaks while pulling the trigger. It feels normal but the break never comes. I removed the trigger assembly, and the hammer is clearly still in the "fired" position where it's just sitting there loose, not locked back into the sear. The hammer still engages with the sear when put there by hand with the trigger assembly out so nothing wrong with the trigger mechanism itself as far as I can tell. Something just isn't setting the hammer back into place like it's supposed to

The pump never locks forward while the hammer is loose, I can slide it all day long and it never locks forward, presumably because the hammer is never locked backward. I'm sure this is probably the way the gun is supposed to work, but I don't know enough about how all the parts come together to know how which part(s) is/are responsible for these two things not locking where they're supposed to

If I manually cock the hammer and hold the trigger assembly in place in the gun as hard as I can and pump the gun and dryfire it, everything will function as normal although the trigger assembly will try to fight it's way out of the receiver a bit without the pins keeping it in the receiver. Once I put the two receiver pins back in, that's when the problem comes back and I have to take the trigger assembly back out to manually put the hammer back to the sear

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Synchronizor
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Re: Hammer not resetting when pumping

Post by Synchronizor » Mon Oct 24, 2016 6:12 am

It must be something messing with the sear. This usually won't happen even if a carrier dog follower spring mod is botched, as the carrier in an 870 is mechanically independint of the rest of the assembly. That said, the sear & sear pin are adjacent to the passage for the carrier dog follower & follower spring, and the action bar lock works around the carrier, so maybe you inadvertently messed something up when you "upgraded", like pushing the sear pin out enough for it to interfere with the disconnector and affect the sear. Can you upload some pictures of your trigger plate assembly, say, top, right, & left shots? We might be able to spot something out of place. I would also suggest not putting any live ammo in your gun until you get this figured out. The fact that the sear engages sometimes, but not others, suggests that you may be getting really tenuous engagement. The 870's sear is cleverly designed to not move due to shock or impacts, but without knowing what's going wrong in there, you don't want to risk the gun going off on its own.

By the way, why did you put the heavier spring in your gun? It's an odd modification to perform to a gun used for skeet, as it makes the action stiffer and the gun harder to reload without affecting how the carrier moves. Also, is there anything else you took apart or messed with while you were changing springs?

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