[LDBennett]

I recently bought a Charles Daly High Power clone. It uses an American made frame and slide with FEG internals (it says here somewhere). The gun is actually pretty nice. But the trigger was typical Browning High Power bad: lots of gritty creep. I studied the design and determine that the magazine safety had to be part of the 7 lb trigger pull as it took about 3 lbs of creep to get to a fairly nice crisp letoff. The magazine safety is a foot that touches the inserted magazine. If the mag is not there it disallows the trigger to move the sear through some linkage in the slide. It is a unique design in that the slide must be in battery and the magazine inserted in order for the trigger pull to be traslated from a verical link on the trigger through a lever arm in the slide and back down to the sear in the frame. Anyway, during the trigger pull the trigger foot must slide vertically on the magazine surface. That is the grittyness. Polishing both the foot and the magazine surface makes the creep a lot smoother but the creep is of course still there by design.

I order a new "target trigger" from Brownells. It has a wider surface for your finger, is hard chromed and has no provision for the magazine safety (using it disables the magazine safety feature, which is fine with me as few of my other guns have that feature).

I removed the old trigger and determind that the magazine safety feature could be disabled by removing one visable pin on the trigger itself with the gun fully assembled and allowing the foot and its spring to fall out of the magazine well. But I had the new trigger so I put it in. Boy what a difference. It turns out that Charles Daly had done an excellent fitting job of the sear to the hammer and all the creep was in the magazine safety. The pull is about 4 lbs then the break is creepless and crisp. No extra work is even necessary! In fact the pull is denfense gun perfect (it is not what I call a target trigger because the pull is 4 lbs not 2.5 lbs but it sure is nice and crisp). It is two stage (virtually no resitance in the first stage): light pull up to the real 4 lb tigger pull and a crisp letoff that comes as a surprise.

Perhaps others here might want to investigate removal of the magazine safety on these High Powers and their clones. The Brownells trigger is pricey and I'd bet totally unnecessary, but remember that this modification REMOVES the magazine safety and gun handling should be modified to accomodate that.

LDBennett