I have an incredibly accurate Marlin model 60 semiauto .22 rifle.

It has a horrible trigger pull. Does anyone here know how to fix it.....?

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quote:

Originally posted by vapodog:
I have an incredibly accurate Marlin model 60 semiauto .22 rifle.

It has a horrible trigger pull. Does anyone here know how to fix it.....?

No, but I've got one that's a tack-driver, too!

quote:

Originally posted by vapodog:
I have an incredibly accurate Marlin model 60 semiauto .22 rifle.

It has a horrible trigger pull. Does anyone here know how to fix it.....?

I paid a gunsmith in Fairfield Connecticut to do mine, and it's nice. Unfortunately I don't remember his name as it's been 20-odd years since, but there aren't that many in Fairfield who do Marlin 60s. I also changed the stock screw, bedded it best I could, and at the time shot only top-shelf target-grade ammunition with a wipe of moly. The scope was a Japanese Tasco 3-9X mounted right, in steel Burris rings.

I was at the Blue Trail range once with that Marlin 60, shooting next to a guy with a nice Anschutz. He was getting 3-inch groups at 50 yards, I was shooting three-quarter inch groups and he was at his wits' end, looking at a $100 Walmart gun outdoing his Anschutz. I gave him a handful of Lapua rounds, and things brightened up considerably for him. He'd been shooting $2 Walmart ammunition, and it wasn't getting the job done. I'd like to have been at the rifle shop when he found out that the Lapua was $12 a box...

One of my first jobs after Trinidad State was a job at Stan's Gun Room in Santa Anna California. It was a factory warranty station for Mossberg, Remington, Marlin and a few other manufactures. The Marlin model 60 was the rifle that I most often got in paper bags. If you pull the barreled action from the stock, You'll
see (from the bottom) a series of C clips and pins. These are very small clips, and if you drop one it will roll away and you will never find it. And once you take it all apart, you need slave pins to put it together again. The biggest issue I encountered with this firearm was the ejector was a spring bent over the carrier. Marlin made two model 60's, one with the spring ejector and the other was a solid block on the carrier that was a ejector. When the used cartridge hit this block it left the rifle. I would change carriers from the spring ejector to the solid block type. Now for the trigger job, you need to completely take it apart and using a fine stone and work all the mating surfaces. But you need to have the tools and know to how to do this job.

The simple sear to hammer engagement surfaces can usually use a bit of touch up.
Some will be found with terrible nicks and disfigurements in the sear edge especially. Just a factor of the mass manufacturing process.

Also check the trigger itself pinned into the trigger guard. That simple pivot assembly can sometimes be balky and/or the cross bolt safety button can be interfering with the trigger pull itself.
Not often a problem but the whole guard w/trigger assembly can sit too low in the stock if the inlet is cut too deep. That can cause a heavier than normal trigger pull as the leverage of the trigger against the sear isn't good.

Taking the lower apart can be tricky as M Stratton says. Put a bent paper clip in the small hole in the hammer strut first off and let the hammer forward before you do anything.
Otherwise pulling a side plate off will let that hammer and spring take off for the dark side of the shop.

While it's all apart, check the slide buffer over. The white (it was white back then!) nylon plastic part fitted into the rear of the lower assembly to buffer the bolt at it's rearward movement.
They crack with age and use,,and not much age and use sometimes.
Sometimes you don't have to check too hard as they come out in pieces as you disassemble the lower unit.

The biggest problem w/the 60 we had when I worked there at Marlin in the repair dept in the early 70's was the early style feed throat made of sintered metal w/it's cast in place ejector stud.
This sintered metal 2 piece part worked OK as a feed throat to guide the cartridges from the tube back, up and into the chamber.
But that small cast into place ejector tab just didn't make it and we replaced them by the 1000sands. Many 60's didn't make it through the range and the little ejector tab was worn off. That's was only a proof round, 5 function and 5 to target it in.

The sintered metal feed throats were an outside vendor product. We got them by the cardboard bbl full. Rifles were returned for warantee work by the pallet from places like TArget, JC Penney, ect. Most every one was a FTE.
Those warantee repairs were stacked aside to be repaired/rebuilt/refinished whenever we had time.
The stores were simply sent a new rifle from the shipping dept. The customer had already gotten his/her new rifle when they came in and complained about the one sitting in the pile behind my bench.

Some of the warentee rifles being recv;d were early enough to be pre-68 and had no ser# on them.
Imagine that,,still accepting those 4 and 5 yr/old rifles back for a full refund/exchange.

Anyway they were at first ser#'d by hand stamp when rebuilt. A list of special #'s provided to use to be applied. Remember this is now after GCA68,,so the 22 rifles now need a ser# to be (re)sold. Then MArlin decided that took too long and any of those pre-68's were stripped for parts and the rcv';r crushed. Then that took too long and the entire rifle was just destroyed. Same with Model 81 bolt action rifles,

Anyway,,
It was a real issue to solve that ejector problem back then using the cheap to make & buy sintered metal part.

A little background...
An elderly gent (Larry Sisson) in the Repair Dept came up with the idea to use the opposite end of the hammer torsion spring as the ejector. Wrapping it up and around, laying it into a groove filed into one of the 'bad' feed throats where the old cast in place tab had worn off.
The Range fired it 10's of 1000's of rounds w/o a FTE. Larry had already submitted his idea to the company, a common thing in factorys where employee ideas if used where compensated for.

Well MArlin jumped on the idea,,changed the M60 ejector system over, Then told 73y/o Larry that they, Marlin, had already come up with the idea and therefore owed him nothing.


Sorry for the long rambleing post.

I'm glad that 2152hq was able to give you a little history on the Model 60. The year a spent working at Stan's around 1972.