Zhillsauditor
New member
Don't people just remove it on their defensive carry guns? It's not hard to do once you've detail stripped it.
Smith and Wesson Revolver locking mechanism, whats the big deal?
- Thread starter mini14gb
- Start date
No, I've simply pulled the sideplate and hammer of an ILS-equipped revolver and seen how it works (it's really a very simple mechanism). I would think that it is common sense to come to the conclusion that, when something designed to be routinely locked and unlocked cannot be unlocked or, more obviously, when parts start flying off that something is out of spec.
Fastbolt, on the other hand, is a S&W-certified armorer and the only things that he's mentioned thus far to cause "auto lock" is damaged, defective, or improperly installed parts, the same things that I'm saying is the cause of "auto lock". Fastbolt has also said that neither he nor any other S&W-certified armorer that he's ever talked to has seen a verifiable case of "auto lock" which reinforces my belief that it's an extremely rare occurrence.
Now, I'll pose the same question to you: Are you a certified S&W armorer, engineer, or a licensed gunsmith? If you are, perhaps you could explain to all of us exactly how the lock could engage itself with undamaged, in-spec, properly installed parts.
orionengnr
New member
And in at least this case, you'd be wrong.
I have no problem with MIM. But, having owned over half a dozen ILS S&W revolvers (and, more importantly, after knowing someone who had his 360 auto-lock while dry-firing) I sold them all.
More recently I bought an M25 that the previous owner had "gutted". Works fine, and I trust it enough to carry it during the winter time.
Maybe yes, maybe no. I would add the possibilities of "worn" (to include normal wear) and "poorly designed". Regardless, those are three very good reasons (for me) not to have an ILS in an SD handgun.
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Obviously there are exceptions to any generalization (which is why I avoid them). Just like you have no problem with MIM but dislike the lock, I like S&W and don't mind the lock but also have no problem with Taurus (many of the S&W bashers like to generalize "apologists" as we're called as Taurus bashers).
I would classify a part that is "worn" to the point of making the firearm malfunction as "damaged" and thus in need of repair or replacement. As far as "poorly designed" goes, I've still yet to see anything that makes me believe that the lock is particularly susceptible to damage or easy/rapid wear nor anything to make me believe that an ILS revolver can lock itself spontaneously without pre-existing QC issues, so I'll have to disagree that it's "poorly designed".
Colorado Redneck
New member
Something similar happened to Winchester about 1964
And people still get all riled up over that change in design. Some that weren't even a glimmer in Daddy's eye in 1964. Certain things just make some people really passionate.
And people still get all riled up over that change in design. Some that weren't even a glimmer in Daddy's eye in 1964. Certain things just make some people really passionate.
orionengnr
New member
Well, I have read a bunch of threads and know (second hand) of one occurrence. Almost everything I have read has occurred within 500 rounds of new; most far less than that. This would include my acquaintance's experience which was well under 500 rounds.
In response, I would say:
--There are a number of documented ILS self-locking issues.
--These specific issues do not and cannot exist in non-ILS S&W reviolvers.
--This is known as "prima facie" evidence.
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Most of the occurrences that I've heard or read about have been when the revolver was new, or nearly new, as well. Likewise, I don't believe that I've ever heard or read of a revolver that repeated the problem after a trip back to S&W. This reinforces my belief that the problems are due to defective or improperly installed parts. If the design in and of itself was faulty or if the parts were particularly susceptible to wear, then we should see occurrences in revolvers with large round counts as well as those with low round counts as well as the issue repeating itself after multiple trips back to the factory.
- The number of documented issues is extremely small in comparison to the total number of ILS revolvers that have been produced. Some QC issues are inevitable in any man-made product and the number of documented self-locking issues is small enough to be statistically insignificant.
- These specific issues, as well as many others that could affect both pre- and post-lock S&W revolvers do not and cannot exist on other types of handguns either, but then again no handgun regardless of its design can be guaranteed to be 100% reliable. The fact remains that I've seen no evidence to convince me that an ILS revolver which has been thoroughly tested for reliability, as should any handgun which may be called upon for self-defense, poses a significantly higher chance of malfunction than one without that feature.
-If we want to take the Reductio ad Absurdum route, perhaps we should trade in all of our revolvers for single-shot derringers since those have even fewer parts to potentially cause problems. Any mechanical device will have a certain number of potential problems and we must balance those against the potential benefits of the increased complexity of a given device. In the case of the S&W ILS, I will gladly accept the statistically insignificant chance of malfunction in exchange for factory support, greater availability (certain models are either extremely rare or flat-out non-existent in pre-lock form), and immunity from the scalper's prices often asked for pre-lock guns by those attempting to take advantage of the ILS bogeyman.
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I talked to the guys at the gun shops, they heard of a few stories of people having them lock on them while shooting, and if it was in a SD your life depends on it. 
You can disable it or buy one without it (hard to get)
I had to pay $75 more for mine without the lock, totally worth it.
You can disable it or buy one without it (hard to get)
I had to pay $75 more for mine without the lock, totally worth it.
Let's do the math.
I do not know when the lock was introduced, but 18DAI said 2001. So let's use January 1, 2001. Bane's post was on August 27, 2007 (approximately day 245 of the year). Assuming exactly 365 days per year, that's 2190+245=2435 days. If one count equals either locking or unlocking the ILS, then let's say Bane unlocks it in the morning and locks it when he goes to bed. That's a count of 4872 (plus two because he tested the lock when he opened the box).
According to the posts presented in this thread, one possible source of the unintentional engagement of the lock is worn parts. Is a mean count before failure of 5,000 acceptable for a part in a weapon? When I worked QC for a corporation that produced electronic equipment, everything was tested tens of thousands of times. Front panels were opened and closed a thousand times at each stop (poor interns!) when the engineers tested reception. Their goal was a 10 to 15 year service life under heavy use.
Does each shot count toward the mean count before failure? This is unknown and I doubt S&W will tell us. If shooting does cause lock wear, then use increases the odds of failure as the count approaches the mean count of failure. Not bueno!
If the source of the unintentional lock failure is parts wear, then it's a badly designed part if it causes a failure in under 5,000 uses. I will go further and say that it's poorly designed if it fails in under 10,000 or even 20,000 uses. It should, in fact, never fail because the failure could occur during a life or death situation. What this means is that the design should account for failure and not affect the operation of the gun.
Furthermore, I have been listening to Michael Bane's podcast for at least five years. I know his attitudes toward gun control. I know that his opinion of mandatory storage laws and that it is extremely negative. I am fully confident that Micheal Bane does NOT use the lock on his guns. I suspect that he used it twice to test its function when he opened the box. My guess, then, is that the use count is less than 10 on that particular gun. A use count of 100 seems implausible to me.
If wear is not the cause of the issue, then perhaps the lock was removed and reinstalled incorrectly. This seems more plausible. The article does not say whether or not he did anything to the lock prior to the failure.
I do not see how anyone could argue that a mean count before failure of 5,000 could possibly indicate a good design in a tool that will be used in life or death situations.
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Your math really doesn't show anything at all. Your acting as though the one reported failure on a blog is proof that every single ILS equipped S&W revolver is going to have a lock failure. You made that same assumption earlier about lightweight magnums, and I still have yet to see any evidence from you that shows it's a common occurance.
If you count this bloggers failure and Ayoob's failure then that's 2 documented cases of a potential failure of the lock tieing the gun up. The ATF reports that S&W made somewhere around 295,000 revolvers in 2010 alone. Say we give S&W an average production of 200,000 revolvers per year for the last 11 years they have been equipped with the ILS. That's 2.2 million ILS equipped guns. Those two failures out of 2.2 million guns is a 0.00000091% chance of failure.
See, I can throw around a bunch of numbers to make something seem important too.
Your math is only close to correct if we assume that Bane bought the gun in 2001. Since the 8/27/2007 post is the first mention of his gun anywhere on his blog, I find the notion that he'd owned it for 6+ years prior to the lockup highly unlikely and think that it's far more likely that he bought the gun only a short time before the lockup (this is consistent with other reports of the issue as it almost always happens to fairly new guns with relatively low round counts).
All of this only holds weight if we assume that the failure Bane experienced was caused by worn parts, something that isn't known and not particularly likely. As you yourself admit, it is very unlikely that Bane had used the lock much, if at all. Given that the device was likely engaged little, if at all, and that Bane also more than likely had a very low round count on the gun (probably no more than a few hundred rounds), the lock would've had to have "worn out" extremely quickly in order to cause this problem. Such fast wear is something that most manufacturers would label "defective", and, if the design itself is the cause of such rapid wear, we should see the same problem with a larger number of guns since all ILS revolvers use the same design.
Likewise, if the lock "wearing out" is the source of the issues, every turn of the key or pull of the trigger should bring an ILS revolver closer to an "auto lock". If this is the case, then we should also see just as many, if not more, problems with ILS revolvers that have high round counts because the increased use of these revolvers should mean that the ILS has worn even more and thus likely make them even more susceptible to "auto lock" than revolvers with lower round counts. What we see, however, is exactly the opposite: "auto lock" almost always occurs in revolvers with low round counts and revolvers that don't experience the problem early on rarely, if ever, experience it later.
As I've said numerous time in this thread and others like it, the rare "auto lock" is a QC issue rather than a design issue. The most logical explanation for the incidents occuring in the manner that they do is that the guns which experience the issue have parts that are defective or installed improperly and neither you nor anyone else who has posted here has presented compelling evidence to the contrary. No design or company is immune to the occasional QC issue because nothing man-made is perfect. If you are willing to let a handful of isolated incidents, so few that they're statistically insignificant, prevent you from buying any gun from an entire product line, then I think you're in for some disappointment as pre-lock S&W's and guns from other makers can, and occasionally will, have QC issues as well.
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Onward Allusion
New member
Just one more part to fail. The fix is a drop of Loctite.
Strafer Gott
New member
Engineering Law
If it ain't broke, it don't have enough features! I can't remember who, but somebody on here has a quick fix. Hope they pipe up. In the meantime, is this feature keeping the price down?
If it ain't broke, it don't have enough features! I can't remember who, but somebody on here has a quick fix. Hope they pipe up. In the meantime, is this feature keeping the price down?
This thread still going?? 
Well, this topic does often generate no small amount of disagreement.
Not surprising.
I'm still trying to wear out my first M&P 340, or get the ILS to spontaneously engage. None of the other cops I know carrying the new style S&W's with the ILS has been able to get one to spontaneously engage, either. Ditto for a number of private party owners/shooters I've met.
The only part of the ILS that I check for wear when doing an armorer inspection on the single ILS-equipped revolver I own is the spring tension of the torque lock spring (I don't use the ILS for storage purpose, as I have other methods of preventing unauthorized access to my firearms, so the rest of the assembly isn't being subjected to normal wear & tear). If the itty bitty spring ever exhibits any significant decrease in tension (putting it out-of-spec), I'll replace it.
Any time folks start talking about the good (better) old days of S&W revolvers, I take a moment and shudder thinking about the various personally-owned and issued S&W revolvers (of the old style) that I've seen exhibit problems. Some of them have been mine. (Personally-owned Ruger revolvers, too, for that matter, both SA & DA.)
Some older S&W models being carried by some of our shooters have had some rather nasty file and tooling marked parts inside them, and the tolerances weren't exactly wonderful. I've received occasional calls as a revolver armorer to respond and repair old style S&W revolvers. (Old style meaning pre-MIM & pre-ILS)
I was remarking about this a few months ago to a former (retired) revolver armorer I know. I had just He just chuckled and told me that I should have been around to try and maintain/repair all the S&W revolvers he saw from the 70's & 80's.
I miss hand polished blued steel and wood.
However, a lot of the newer production guns folks occasionally hold their nose over right now are probably going to be thought of as the "good old days" by future generations.
Tolerances are tighter, metallurgy is better, but the cosmetics are ... not the same.
Less hand-fitting is needed (which helps keep costs down).
QC can apparently be as iffy as it ever was, though.
Human nature, maybe?
Well, this topic does often generate no small amount of disagreement.
Not surprising.I'm still trying to wear out my first M&P 340, or get the ILS to spontaneously engage. None of the other cops I know carrying the new style S&W's with the ILS has been able to get one to spontaneously engage, either. Ditto for a number of private party owners/shooters I've met.
The only part of the ILS that I check for wear when doing an armorer inspection on the single ILS-equipped revolver I own is the spring tension of the torque lock spring (I don't use the ILS for storage purpose, as I have other methods of preventing unauthorized access to my firearms, so the rest of the assembly isn't being subjected to normal wear & tear). If the itty bitty spring ever exhibits any significant decrease in tension (putting it out-of-spec), I'll replace it.
Any time folks start talking about the good (better) old days of S&W revolvers, I take a moment and shudder thinking about the various personally-owned and issued S&W revolvers (of the old style) that I've seen exhibit problems. Some of them have been mine. (Personally-owned Ruger revolvers, too, for that matter, both SA & DA.)
Some older S&W models being carried by some of our shooters have had some rather nasty file and tooling marked parts inside them, and the tolerances weren't exactly wonderful. I've received occasional calls as a revolver armorer to respond and repair old style S&W revolvers. (Old style meaning pre-MIM & pre-ILS)
I was remarking about this a few months ago to a former (retired) revolver armorer I know. I had just He just chuckled and told me that I should have been around to try and maintain/repair all the S&W revolvers he saw from the 70's & 80's.
I miss hand polished blued steel and wood.
However, a lot of the newer production guns folks occasionally hold their nose over right now are probably going to be thought of as the "good old days" by future generations.
Tolerances are tighter, metallurgy is better, but the cosmetics are ... not the same.
Less hand-fitting is needed (which helps keep costs down). QC can apparently be as iffy as it ever was, though.
Human nature, maybe?There are quite a few assumptions here.
1) The math isn't a statistical analysis of a random sampling of lightweight revolvers equipped with the ILS. It's just a look into what "wear" means in the context of the article.
2) Five minutes of research on the web will show hundreds or more anecdotal posts regarding ILS lock failures. Check the S&W Forum for their huge lock thread. The failure rate is likely closer to 0.0000091%.
3) RE: Lightweight magnums: Bane has stated that repeatedly, not I. He says he can get the gun to do it on demand. I have no reason to doubt his credibility on the issue; he has far more to lose than I for saying it.
4) I did state that it is unknown if round count affects the lock. I liked Webleymkv's response/explanation.
5) I like Onward Allusion's response
6) I still have the ILS on my 327. The gun still works, though it does sit in the safe since I don't have a good belt holster for it.
The ILS opens the California market to S&W revolvers due to various silly laws there. It gives the parent corporation a client. It may or may not apply to the Clinton agreement (I thought that was gone).
There are three courses of action: 1) remove the lock and use the hole to oil the internals, 2) replace the ILS with THE PLUG (see S&W forum), or 3) ignore it. I'm not sure loctite would prevent a failure.
Well there's your problem. Anecdotal evidence from random and annoynomous people on the Internet is not a valid source of information. I said it earlier and I'll say it again, nearly every time someone comes to a place like this and reports that their newer S&W revolver tied itself up, you have all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork blaming the ILS. There's plenty of things that can tie the gun up, but the ILS is the popular thing to blame.
Even if you could comb the Internet and find 1000 cases of documented lock failure where it was the one and only cause of the gun being tied up, that's still a .00045% chance of failure. As Webley said, the chance of failure is so small it's statistically irrelevant.