How I made my Benelli Nova trigger suck less(LONG)

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5 years ago I purchased a Benelli Nova from Ellwood Epps in Orillia. Went out duck hunting with it a few times, then one day it started to have extraction problems (with factory steel loads). I took it back to them, they looked at it, couldn't find any problems with it, I took it back out, same thing happened again, so they replaced it with a brand new one. Bottom line, Epps is a good place to do business.

The one thing that I didn't like with either of these guns was the trigger. The first time I went to shoot it (both of them) I shouldered the gun, squeezed the trigger and I thought that I had left the safety on. I appreciate the fact that Benelli doesn't like lawyers and wants to keep them out on the golf course and not in the courtroom suing their ass off. But I think an 7.5-8 lbs pound trigger is a little excessive.

Since I plan on deer hunting this fall I figured that I should get the trigger weigh down to a reasonable number so that I can shoot it half assed decent. I'm also a Ruger 10/22 owner so I spend a bunch of time on RFC, and have paid attention to the trigger work they do on the 10/22, which was my inspiration.

I should point out right now, that this is NOT a “how to do a trigger job on your Nova” thread. This is merely me documenting how I tuned down my own. If a person should be so silly as to try and replicate this on their own gun, then they should be responsible for their own actions (and should have some decent mechanical abilities).

Here are the tools that I used to work on my trigger.



Not shown are the actual dremel, and the vise that I used to hold the various pieces. I would have rather used a small sharpening stone (the stones on a lansky, without the plastic on them would likely be a good bet) than the dremel, but I didn't have any around, so I used what I had available.


1. Here is the trigger group pulled out of the gun. Notice that the hammer isn't cocked, this makes disassembly easier. (also the metal pieces that run down the sides are not on it either, I just pulled them off so I didn't have to fool around with them, some of the pictures were not taken in order, I took them when it was convinient for me).


2. I have pulled the pin out of the back end (above the trigger) and used it to drive the front one through the hammer. The idea here is that you want to keep everything in line so that re-assemble is easier. Doing a project like this required a lot of assembly and disassembly to test the modification as I went. If something falls out of place it isn't the end of the world, you just have to line stuff back up.


3. Here you can see I have both of the pins in the front holes, but I backed them off so that I could remove the hammer.


4. Here is the tool that I used to start pushing out the pin that holds in the sear.


5. Starting the pin.

 

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6. The tool that I was using to push out the pin that holds the sear was too large, so it wouldn't push it out the whole way. So I had to hold the part of the pin that was sticking out with a cloth, and compress the sear to relieve the pressure so that I could pull it out the rest of the way(good luck on this one if you have sausage fingers!). Sorry about the fuzzy pic.


7. Here is a picture of the hammer, the sear, the sear spring, and the sear pin.


8. The Hammer.


9. The sear.


10. This is to give a rough idea of how the firing mechanism works (that isn't rust, it's polishing compound). This is how things line up when the firing pin is cocked. Here you can sort of understand what we are trying to do. If it wasn't for my crappy photography skills you could see that the angles that the hammer and sear lock into each other are very steep. The idea here is to reduce them SLIGHTLY. If they are slightly reduced you will reduce the effort required to pull the trigger. If too much is taken off then your trigger will become unsafe and you are a liability to the world. This is a shotgun, not a 1000 yard precision rifle, you don't need a 2 ounce trigger, 4 lbs would be as far as I would take the trigger down on a field shotgun.


11. When the trigger is pulled the sear moves forward and the two become unlocked.

 

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12. This allows the hammer to be driven forward by an incredibly strong spring into the firing pin.


13. Here is the dremel bit that I chose to use on the hammer and how I plan on lining it up. Like I said before, I would have rather used a stone modify the hammer and sear, but I didn't have one that was appropriate.



14. The polishing tool.


15. Here is the dremel bit that I chose to use on the sear and how I plan on lining it up. Like I said before, I would have rather used a stone modify the hammer and sear, but I didn't have one that was appropriate.


16. The polishing tool.


17.Here is the stone that I used to dress the dremel bit. I wanted it to be narrow at the flat spot on the side, so that I could get in as far as possible and not remove material from any undesired locations.

 

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18. The hammer clamped down.


19. How not to clamp things down (I took 2 goes at it like this before I changed how I was clamping).


20. You can see how we are going to reduce the angle of the hammer. THE ANGLE HERE IS NOT CORRECT. This picture was merely taken for demonstration purposes.


21. Here is an example of more acceptable(not fantastic, but better) clamping. If I was at the farm I would have come up with something better than this, but since I am at university this will have to do. Here is the sear getting ready for modification.


22. Here is the sear partway through the process. As you can see the bottom needs a little more taken off. Notice that the front edge is sharp, not rounded. I wanted to change the angle, not round the edge.


After that it was just grind a little, polish what I had ground, put the piece back in the trigger group, fire it a bunch of times, then test the weight that it was pulling at (I used a digital fish scale, slowly increasing the pressure till it fired, not the best possible way I'm sure, but it is the best that I had available.

The key is to take little steps, changing the angle little by little, you can always take more off, but good luck putting more back on.

results

My trigger went from 7 lbs 10 ounces +/- 4 ounces to 4 lbs 14 ounces +/- 4 ounces. I feel that is a significant difference and most importantly I am pretty happy with the results. Yes the trigger still has a lot of pre-travel (take-up), still has a bunch of creep and it is a little rough, but it is a start.

I might look into working on the take-up (I have a few more ideas from the 10/22 crowd), and I want to find a set of stones that are fairly small so that I can smooth out what I have done, but I don't think I am going to tackle the creep on this one, I can see that there could be some safety issues that could pop up real fast if I was to try and tackle that demon.

Just remember I didn't say 'How I turned my Nova trigger into a wet dream', I said suck less (cause it still does suck).