Upgrading the Ruger 77/22 Rifle

Many things have changed in the firearms industry since I was a young boy shooting at the local armory with a rifle team. Since then, we’ve had changes in gunstock material, barrels, lock-time, and how triggers are presented to the shooting public. As a kid, I "cut my teeth" on the Remington Model 513T, Remington Model 37, and the Winchester Model 52. These target rifles had triggers that were quite simple to adjust, as long as care, common sense, and an accurate trigger-pull gauge were used.

Coaches taught us safe gunhandling above all else, and then sight-alignment and trigger-squeeze techniques became apart of the learning curve. The rest was up to each team member. It’s not quite that simple these days, as a result of the litigiousness that seems to pervade our society today. You can’t blame manufacturers for setting trigger let-off to some safe and tamper-proof limit to avoid dealing in court with someone who refuses to act responsibly.

The problem is, these triggers don’t satisfy the needs of responsible shooters who know what they’re doing when it comes to trigger-pull weight. Take a look at Brownells #58 catalog and especially at pages 4 through 8. There are many brands of aftermarket adjustable triggers and sears located on these pages designed to satisfy any customer’s wants.

Anytime you choose to install an aftermarket trigger or adjust trigger pull on this or any other gun, make sure you are aware of what you’re doing and use an accurate trigger-pull gauge to set those safe limits. Now let’s see what we can do with the Ruger 77/22 to make it a better allaround shooter than it is when it comes out of the box. Removing the Stock and Bedding the Receiver Remove the magazine and then the bolt and look down the inside of the barrel from the breech end to verify that the chamber is empty.

Both action screws can be safely removed using a #340-6 Mag-Na-Tip bit, allowing the barreled action to be removed from the stock. Secure the barrel in your padded-jaw vise with the left side of the receiver facing up. With this view accessible you will be able to get at all the fire-control components for disassembly. Look over the internal areas of the stock that bed the receiver to the wood for any signs of abnormal depression or unevenness.

Check the barrel channel to see if there are any areas that are dark from barrel contact, and scrape away the wood in those areas. I’ve found that a floated barrel will help a .22 the same as with their bigger-caliber cousins. If the plan calls for bedding the action with epoxy, the two areas that should be considered are the area where the recoil lug resides and the platform where the bottom of the receiver tang rests.

The recoil lug on these rifles is also the clamp that holds the barrel onto the front of the receiver, so make sure the sockets in the hex screws and any surrounding gaps are filled with clay to prevent bedding compound from getting into these areas and causing difficulty with removal later on. Aluminum pillars will help keep the bedding solid and prevent compression of the wood fibers when the receiver/stock screws are tightened down.

Installing an Aftermarket Trigger and Sear The factory trigger on this particular Model 77/22 has an average pull

weight of 5-1/2 pounds as measured with my Lyman electronic triggerpull gauge after 10 pulls. Electronic trigger-pull gauges use a "straingauge" setup, and that’s supposed to be consistently more accurate than a spring-type pull gauge. My plan for this rifle called for replacing the factory trigger with an adjustable aftermarket trigger made by Dayton Traister Co., along with swapping the factory sear for a target sear made by Volquartsen Custom.

The goal was to achieve a smooth, consistent trigger pull of 3-1/4 pounds. To get to the trigger, we need to remove the thumbnail bolt stop from the cast-in-place pivot pin. Be cautious here: Don’t let the bolt-stop plunger and spring get away from you. The trigger pin can be pushed out with a 3/32-inch punch from either side, allowing the factory trigger and trigger-return spring to be removed. The factory sear pin can be pushed out next with the same 3/32inch punch, as these pins do not fit tightly in place.

The sear will need to come out through the slot in the bottom of the bolt raceway in the receiver tang. The replacement sear will then go in through this same slot and the sear pin is installed to hold it in place. Fitting the trigger is not quite as easy as installing the sear, but gives you a chance to remove the side-toside wobble of the factory trigger and smooth up the side bearing surfaces that the new trigger sits against.

Dress the inside faces of the two ears where the trigger resides lightly with 320-grit emery paper. We simply want to remove any burrs surrounding the inside faces of the trigger-pivot pin hole from drilling and to slightly smooth up these surfaces. Try installing the trigger in place, being careful not to lose the little metal pad that fits over the top of the triggeradjusting screw and between the screw end and trigger-return spring.

This little pad appears to be a stamping and there are some nasty burrs around the periphery that should be removed. If the trigger will not slide easily into place, you will need to remove some metal from each side of the bosses around the trigger-pin hole. Because you’ll be trying this trigger several times during the fitting process, it’s best to use a tapered alignment pin rather than the trigger-pivot pin.

Once you have the trigger sides dressed to the point where the trigger slides into place without any side-toside wobble, it’s time to see if the sear and trigger work well together. This may require several cockings of the striker and pulling of the trigger, so a snap cap or spent .22-caliber rimfire case should be used to cushion the blow of the firing pin. If the trigger will not engage the sear, the top of the trigger (see photo) will need to be cautiously dressed down until sear engagement becomes positive.

This process wasn’t necessary during the fitting process on the gun used in this article. After you have the trigger fit to the sear and engagement is positive, work the bolt to make sure that the striker does not follow forward as the bolt is closed. On the top, back end of this trigger, you will notice a pad of extra metal that will be the platform which the safety rotates onto. There will be extra (continued on page 11)

material in place that will need to be removed to achieve positive engagement of the safety. I dressed the back face below and to the rear of this metal pad with a file until the bluing was removed. This back face was then blackened with a black-ink marker so that a mark from the safety cylinder could be observed as it was turned into place. This witness mark will give a clue as to how much material will need to be removed.

The top of this pad needs to be dressed down very cautiously until positive engagement of the safety results. The metal in this area is very hard and, on this particular trigger/sear combination, it appeared that quite a bit of the metal needed to be removed. I set the trigger up in my milling vise and took .015 inch off the top of the pad with a carbide endmill, and then retried the trigger/safety fit. As it turned out, all of the pad was removed to achieve positive engagement of the safety.

The next step was to reinstall the thumbnail bolt stop/release and put the barreled action back into the stock to see if there was any interference of the trigger within the stock. The barreled action should be installed into the stock without the bolt being in the receiver. Conclusions This trigger sear combination takes a bit of time to install, but the results are more than satisfactory. When the customer came in to pick up his rifle he wanted to have the trigger adjusted below the 3 pounds that I had it set to.

This combination handled the adjustment extremely well and remains safe, even when the bolt is rotated into place with some force. The customer was happy with the safe, solid result. If you choose to do this type of work, you owe it to yourself and your customer to use safe methods and an accurate trigger-pull gauge.

When you return the rifle to your customer, place the factory parts in a zip-lock bag, and inform him that if this rifle ever needs to be returned to the Ruger factory, the original parts will need to be reinstalled. Ruger doesn’t especially appreciate seeing aftermarket parts in these guns. I