You Will Not Believe These Things About Beretta Pistols

Pretty much a simple little survey of sorts. We currently have the M9 (Beretta 92FS 9mm Pistols) as the standard issue side arm for some military MOS's.

This article is strictly geared towards qualified, professional gunsmiths who are both accredited and insured and have sufficient experience to perform work on semi-automatic pistols. Also caveat: this article is more geared towards accurizing for "bullseye" or NRA conventional pistol than for IPSC, IDPA, USPSA, etc.

Accurizing the Beretta M9 (or 92FS, which will be the model number given to the version which is available to the civilian population in general) is one area that competitive shooters happen to be doing for a while essentially, but how to do it's a relatively unknown art.

Luckily, it's not that much not the same as what you should need to do to make just about any gun accurate. You can find some options that will also make the gun last a great deal longer if you are a competitive shooter and need the frame (made of aluminum) to last for 10,000 rounds or more.

The most difficult involved in the whole process will be the trigger job itself, that enables the shooter to fire the gun accurately without disturbing the sight alignment. Most military-grade guns "out of the box" have a relatively heavy "single action" trigger pull of between 5 and 8 pounds for safety reasons (i.e. to prevent accidentally discharging the gun). For many marksmanship competitions, trigger pull has to be at least 2.5 to 3 pounds. For "Service Pistol" competitions, the rule is 4 pounds minimum. In the event that you are not only a professional gunsmith: take the gun to a gunsmith, let him/her handle that a component of the work. You will be happier with the result for quite a few reasons, not the very least of which is the idea that doing a trigger job on a Beretta is a serious pain. It requires several iterations of taking the sear out of the frame and re-installing it to test pull weight, and getting the sear in and out of the gun is difficult even if you've done it a hundred times. So do yourself a big favor and just tell your gunsmith what your minimum trigger pull needs to be.

In case you are a professional, qualified and insured: the trigger pull weight on a Beretta results from a combination of the condition of the sear surface and hammer hook surface, plus spring condition.

Sear and hammer surfaces. The sear has a return spring which must be carefully removed and re-installed correctly whenever work is performed on the sear. Take pictures prior to removal to make certain you may replace it the way it is supposed to be. The sear surface must be polished (buffing wheel or rotary tool) and also a relief angle cut (similar to what you should do when doing sear work on a 1911) but do not modify the sear angle itself, or the gun could be unsafe. The hammer hooks need to be polished with a stone. Apply pressure-sensitive marking material (Dykem or other layout fluid), re-assemble everything and test everything. Disassemble and observe the bearing surfaces of the sear and hammer hooks to make certain there is consistent sear contact across the entire width of both the hammer hooks.