OK guys, I have been out of touch for better than a year and I am a little lost on something. I have a Colt Trooper that had a broken cylinder latch that I replaced. After assembly and looking at the gun I put some drag on the cylinder and noticed that I can lock it up. Lock it means the hand engages the ratchet pad and starts the cylinder rotating, the bolt will drop at the right point but with just a small amount of pressure on the cylinder I can lock the action completely up. The hammer will not fall and the trigger will not reset. If I release the cylinder I can rotate the cylinder by hand into alignment but if I pull the trigger the cylinder will not time up until I pull it a second time. This happens on all five positions. The cylinder lines up well with the frame, no play or gap in the crane to frame, cylinder pin does not bind when I push on the cylinder at any point. Can someone help me out and tell me what to look for?
BTW, I will be running power to my DVD player and monitor this weekend so I can get my reference material out. This is a fun problem to start things out with.
It sounds like the hand slips off the ratchet and jams itself in the channel. Check the hand spring and the angle of its shelf or shelves. Don’t remember whether this model has one shelf or two shelves on the hand. -TL
Answer
Check your barrel cylinder gap. Ken
Follow-up on Question
Both ideas are good, I know the gap is good, checked it when I was checking the cylinder alignment. The hand appears to be ok, but I need to get it under some light with a magnifier to double check it is engaging all the way. I will report back on my findings.
Answer
Check to see that the hands second shelf isn’t binding against the ratchet pads or slipping off the ratchet pads. Ken
Reply
That was exactly what it was, slipping off. When I first checked that, as TL suggested in his reply, it did not look like the issue, but when I removed the side plate where I could see the hand to pad relationship better I could see it not quite wanting to engage. I adjusted the hand to come out ever so slightly more by removing a very small amount of material. This allowed it to engage the pads better and prevented me from being able to manually hold the cylinder and stop it from advancing.
Thanks for the help.
