Magazine Safety

The Hi Power has a magazine safety.

It is easily removed.

I removed it.

While I had the trigger out, I cleaned all the parts and the dark recesses where they reside.

I took out the transfer bar too, and that had genuine SAND in its groove.  Literal grit in a gritty trigger.

Some 'splainin'.  Lots of pics below the break.

This is the magazine disconnect.

This is the trigger lever.

Trigger lever position with no magazine.

What the trigger lever does when you pull the trigger with no magazine.  The magazine safety plunger is pulling against the bottom of the trigger lever.  This causes it to miss the nose of the sear lever.

When you insert a magazine, notice how the trigger lever is allowed to pivot to the rear.  This is also where the trigger lever would sit if there was no magazine safety with the magazine removed.

Now when you pull the trigger it moves straight up!

The sear lever.  It's up in the slide.  Here the slide is upside down and the muzzle to the right.

The trigger lever pushes up on the sear lever and that causes...

... the tail of the sear lever to pivot down to rotate the sear and release the hammer.

Where the tail of the sear lever pushes.

Simple.

When the gun fires, the nose of the sear lever moves to the rear with the slide.  When it comes back, it pushes forward against the still raised trigger lever and pivots it to the same position as when there is no magazine and the trigger is pulled.

To reset the trigger, you release it and the trigger lever snaps back to its lowered and vertical position.

Removing the magazine safety is supposed to make the trigger smoother and lighter.  I thought so, until I considered all of the grit I'd cleaned out of the mechanism.  So I put the magazine safety back in.

My trigger pull is exactly the same as with the safety removed.  All of the creep and grit was from it being dirty.

Since there's really no discernible reset, being able to rack the slide while holding the trigger for dry fire practice doesn't help.  Taking the follower out of a magazine allows you to do this practice if you want to as well.

About the only thing I really lose here by retaining the safety is magazines have to be manually extracted instead of dropping free.  I'm kind of used to plucking already from the Glock 21 which will hang a mag every once and a while for no good reason.