Uberti Shofield/Russian questions...

[Andy Griffith]

Has anyone taken the "disconnect" out of these revolvers that prevents them from being actioned while holding back the trigger?

I looked at a nickel Uberti "Russian" in .45 earlier this week...
This was one of the things that bothered me...my original .44 S&W top break doesn't have this feature.

The other problem was that even if actioned briskly, sometimes the extractor star wouldn't fall all the time. Likely just needed a bit of polishing, but I don't know.

 

[Hafoc]

There's more to it than an interlock. I'm going from memory, because I can't find the website of the gunsmith who explained it. But with the Schofield - Russian design, for whatever reason, S&W had the cylinder bolt held in its slot in the cylinder by a mechanism attached to the trigger. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you could pull the hammer back or not; if there was any pressure on the trigger at all, the cylinder bolt would still be locked, the cylinder wouldn't rotate, and the hammer wasn't coming back.

Obviously you can't disconnect that, because the revolver ain't gonna be happy without a cylinder bolt.

On other S&W designs the cylinder bolt was activated by the hammer, which is also more like the way Colt and Ruger do it (and others too, I suppose). As I recall the earlier No. 3 designs worked that way too. There was no particular reason why the Schofield and Russian No. 3s couldn't have been made that way as well. The gunsmith whose site I can't find now (DAGNAPPIT!) specialized in Schofields, and one of the services he offered was to modify them in just that way.

Oddly enough, I've never had a problem with the "interlock" effect. Maybe because I learned on DA revolvers and autopistols which also require you to let go of the trigger between shots. 'Course I don't shoot in competition and I am SLOW, so what I do doesn't signify much to anyone else. Nor should it.