Another S&W 78G

A friend made me a good deal (I fixed several of his computers for him as a favor a while back) on a S&W 78G he picked up at a gun show.

The box.

Side

Side

Side. From the Bangor Punta era.

All the documentation was there.

Not the original powerlets, but the original pellets.

Relatively unoxidized.

Pellets…

The pistol has some paint issues on the “slide”.

The grips also have a white coating.

Vintage powerlets with the bottle cap.

Paint problems.

I used a magnet to remove the power adjuster rod. Unlike the previous one I worked on, the sleeve did not slide out. Darn.

So I took some stainless steel tubing I had laying around and countersunk one end.

Fitted a long screw and trimmed the head undersize.

Added some slots.

An internal wrench of sorts. I held the tube with pliers and turned the nut to grip.

Held the end in a vise and gently whacked the slide with a soft face hammer.

And the tube came out.

Pile of pistol parts.

I discovered that the piercing pin was sheared off.

Only way to grip the pin was in a 5C collet as the large end would have fouled against standard chuck jaws.

Made it pointier without reducing any of the remaining length.

And it pierces fine.

I have one useful tip – holding the trigger down with a zip tie makes reassembly much easier.
I did run into some difficulty though, the pistol had no power. I tried a number of different solutions, lighter valve spring, lubing the hammer, triple checking that the transfer port on the barrel was aligned, replacing all o-rings (I had already replaced the dead original o-rings), etc. Then while reviewing my previous article I realized that I had made the seals from 80 durometer polyurethane rubber instead of the 95 durometer I had used the first time I resealed one…so a new valve seal was made and the pistol functions perfectly. Amazing what a change in hardness makes. I can now disassemble and reassemble this pistol blindfolded.

I’m probably going to clean up the slide and repaint and I’m thinking of making a .20 cal barrel for it as well. Given how long I’ve been taking between posts* we’ll see when that gets done…

*kids & work get in the way these days…