While I love shotguns, I do not use them very well, pistols leave me cold yet I use them well enough to score 95per cent in Olympic air pistol shooting. Trigger sensitivity is the foundation of pistol shooting and much cultivated by pistoleers.
We tested a fellow pistoleer who claimed he cound detect minute trigger difference. Blindfolding him we asked him to judge the difference in a Perazzi with V and Coil spring locks in place. He could not. Neither could any of the rest of us including the owner of the shotgun.
Small Bore points out that the best shotgun makers used V springs. They also favored sidelock actions and finished the metal surfaces properly and these maybe the reasons for the absence of creep, rather than the type of spring used. Sidelock geometry promotes crisp triggers.
The boxlock geometry is more challenging from the trigger feel angle, since in the boxlock the main spring is compressed a bit when the trigger is depressed. However, one of the best boxlock triggers I came across was on a Winchester 21 which has coil springs, it had none of the usual "sponginess" of V sprung boxlocks.
Perhaps having had the experience of repeated V spring breakages makes me more coilspring-friendly, introduing a bias in my judgement.
I am starting to believe in the Uri Geller phenomenon. Since my last post on V/leaf springs I broke another one. Not a shotgun one, it is the flat spring on a British army jack knife. It just gave up and fell out of the knife handle in two pieces with no undue strain having been placed on the knife. It is getting so I feel some unease whenever I handle one of my V sprung doubles, a cute little 410 Cogswell hammer gun and an Italian SXS boxlock ejector.
Is there a V spring phobia support group out there?
