Arnold Jewell: Master of the Light Trigger
Benchrest shooters hail Jewell triggers as the lightest, crispest around. He tells us why his patented designs work so well.
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Arnold Jewell |
Arguably, Arnold Jewell makes the most sought after trigger in the benchrest shooting game, and his designs in polished stainless steel also make their way onto high-end sporter guns such as Coopers. At 59, he is still tinkering with new designs, but he is looking forward to May 16, 1997, when he plans to retire and hand the reins of the business to his 32-year-old son Brian, who does the company’s final quality-control checks. But until then, he plans to finalize a 6-ounce trigger for the Ruger 10/22 rimfire and have it ready to ship in mid-1997. He already has a working prototype on a stainless-steel AMT 10/22 action that has no mush in it and breaks crisply. When he does bring that trigger to market, it will advance the work of the aftermarket custom shops a quantum step—it has been the trigger that kept the 10/22 from developing any further. As you might expect, Clark, Volquartsen, Briley, and other gunsmithing shops have said they will buy all he can make.
Jewell, who chain-smokes Kent filtered cigarettes and who likes to have milk with a barbecue sandwich, has a talent for reducing complex problems into simple solutions. His trigger is made of various hardnesses of stainless steel, and it has only a handful of moving parts. He has been able to isolate each trigger-adjustment function into a discrete area so one doesn’t affect the other, which is a real problem on many other triggers.
A former corporate pilot who flew Falcon, King Air, and DH125 jets, he adapted his breakthrough trigger-design idea from the way aircraft landing gear operates. He worked on the design from 1985 until 1987, when he received a utility patent (number 4671005) on the trigger than now retrofits to custom benchrest, Remington Model 700, and Winchester Model 70 actions.
We visited him in his shop recently to see what he thought was right and wrong in current trigger design, and asked him how a trigger than adjusts to under 1 ounce can still be safe to shoot. Here’s what he had to say.
Performance Shooter: How do you switch from being a pilot one day to making triggers the next?
Jewell: I’ll make a long story short. I’ve been a benchrest shooter since about 1981. I was out at the range one day during a registered match. At that time, I was shooting a Remington 40X with a Burns trigger. The Burns is a standard Remington trigger that was modified by Benny Burns to pull at 2 ounces by adding a third lever to it. In the course of fire, I couldn’t keep my bolt cocked; Allen Hall happened to be shooting to the left of me. He said to push the trigger forward when I worked the bolt, which I did, but it wouldn’t stay cocked. So he loaned me his rifle to finish the group, but of course I blew it because I wasn’t used to his gun. I took it over to Harold Braughton, who has been a friend of mine since I started shooting. He had to take the trigger out of the action, and it took him over an hour just to get the trigger adjusted so the bolt would cock. It felt like crap, but at least it would cock. So I thought there must be a better way.
My background is not in machining, but in airplanes. I’ve been an airplane mechanic and an airplane pilot since 1956, so I’m familiar with gears, levers, and geometry. I went out in the garage and started drawing pictures and hacking iron, and I made a prototype with a file and a hacksaw and put it in my benchrest gun. It worked like a dream.
I shot that same trigger in my gun for three or four years and never took it out of the rifle. An old boy saw it one day and asked me what kind of trigger that was. He tried it, and asked me to build him one. [Laughing] That’s where I made my mistake.
The first five or six triggers, I built by hand. Another shooter said I should get a patent on that, so I contacted a law firm. The patent was issued on the first application with all 17 claims. It was that different. It got to the point where I was spending more time building triggers than my other job running my interconnect telephone company in Midland, Texas, so I sold out and moved down here where there are some trees, hills, and water. I thought I would come down here and build 25 or 30 triggers a week, go fishing a couple a days a week, go shooting a couple a days a week. It didn’t work out that way.
Performance Shooter: So how many triggers do you make a week?
Jewell: We average 300 a month. About 75 or 80 percent of everything I build is built for Remington or the custom benchrest actions, which take a Remington trigger. Almost all of the competition rifle makers design around the Remington action. Fortunately, the competition shooters prefer my trigger.
Performance Shooter: What’s the big difference between your trigger and other models? What gives you the ability to go down to a positive 11/2 ounces.
Jewell: It’s the geometry. In a Remington trigger, the trigger lies directly under the cocking piece, which is pivoted on one end, and resting on the trigger on the other. It takes X number of ounces to pull the trigger out from under the load of the cocking piece. So to move the trigger, you have to use enough force to overcome the full load of the cocking piece. That’s the way almost all triggers are designed except for the three-lever trigger. The three-lever trigger moves the trigger arm in toward the pivot point, so it takes less to pull it out from under the cocking piece. But wear is still a problem, so the three-lever triggers don’t maintain their ability to stay cocked as well as mine. That’s what happened on my Burns trigger.
I got the idea for my design one day when we were weighing a plane at Windecker Aircraft. One of the mechanics was underneath getting the wheels chocked on the scales, and his shoulder bumped the drag link. This link is attached to the strut. It has mechanism whereby when the gear goes down, it goes slightly over center, so that if something jostles the gear, it won’t pop up and let the gear collapse. I looked at that and saw that mechanism was carrying a lot of weight. When you turned corners and so forth, it put a load on that drag link. But it took very little to knock it off center and collapse the gear. That’s what makes this trigger work. It’s just like a drag link.
If you draw a line from where the upper lever in the trigger engages the firing pin block to the center pivot point of the lower lever, you’ll see the top of the lower lever is a freckle forward of being straight in line. If it were straight in line or farther back, you would pull the trigger and nothing would happen. This would be a solid link. I designed the tip of the lower lever so that it would only go so far back and then it stops. That leaves the tip of the lower lever forward of a solid link.
That means that the load on the sear is virtually nothing. That means that 99 percent of the pull in my trigger is due to the spring in the trigger shoe, and not the geometry. There’s a little coil spring that goes against the spacer. Then you put a screw in to compress that spring. The stronger the spring, the more resistance there is to pulling the trigger.
Performance Shooter: The only weight to make the sear release is whatever force it takes to compress the spring in the shoe.
Jewell: Exactly. The geometry allows the sear to fall with no weight if there’s not a spring present. This has a spring in it, and it’s set at 11/2 ounces. [He drops a cigarette on the trigger and the firing pin clicks forward.] Without that spring, it would take even less to make it fire. Tony Boyer makes me set his at three-quarters of an ounce.
Performance Shooter: That means the trigger shoe spring is crucial.
Jewell: We grind the spring flat on both ends so that even if it rotates, it won’t change the weight. It’s simple. I don’t know why somebody didn’t do it 200 years ago. Everybody who has ever seen how this trigger works says, “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
Performance Shooter: They hadn’t seen enough airplanes.
Jewell: I guess so.
Performance Shooter: Once someone sees this, it would be simple to copy. What did you patent?
Jewell: I got a utility patent on the geometry.
Performance Shooter: So if the levers on a knock-off come too close to the arrangement you have here, they infringe on your patent?
Jewell: Exactly. I’ve already won one case like that.
Performance Shooter: Are all the components stainless?
Jewell: Yes. The internal levers are 440C stainless, and the sideplates are 304 stainless. Even the spring is stainless.
Performance Shooter: What maintenance does the trigger require?
Jewell: I recommend they use it clean and dry. No lubrication whatsoever. The metal surfaces are hard as hell; they’re heat-treated to a 58 or 59 Rockwell C hardness. We don’t have to worry about galling because the loads are so light at the sear.
Performance Shooter: Still, no mechanism is perfect. What’s the biggest problem customers have with the trigger?
Jewell: Allowing it to get dirty. They’ll let that Shooter’s Choice cleaning solvent get down in there, and I’ve seen that stuff actually solidify. I’ve seen these parts welded to the sideplates. People will let solvent trickle down into the action when they’re barrel cleaning. It will eventually build up and make the trigger quit working. But because my triggers require so little effort to make the levers move, they are probably more susceptible to getting gunked up.
Performance Shooter: And the solution?
Jewell: A can of lighter fluid. About 99 times out of a 100 they can squirt lighter fluid down from the top of the assembly and work the trigger, and the fluid will flush whatever is in there out and the trigger will work again.
Performance Shooter: So you take the trigger out of the action….
Jewell: You don’t even have to do that. You take the bolt out and flood the trigger from the top. The lighter fluid evaporates, and doesn’t leave a residue. And it doesn’t hurt paint, finish, epoxy, bedding, bluing, or anything else.
Performance Shooter: What about making modifications to the trigger. Can the customer reset the trigger if he wants more or less weight?
Jewell: Absolutely. We have three springs: An A spring, a B spring, and a C spring. The C spring allows a trigger-pull weight of 1.5 to 3 ounces. The B spring goes from 2 ounces to about a pound. The A spring will go from 8 ounces on up to about 5 pounds.
We set them to whatever the customer wants, but to change it, the customer just has to turn that gun upside down, and every one of the adjustments are looking right at you. You don’t have to take the trigger guard off, even. You stick a little allen wrench in there, and you can reach all the adjustments.
Performance Shooter: Do you worry about a customer shooting a trigger that’s too light for him? Many shooters have never felt what a good trigger is like.
Jewell: Not in our case. Because the kid who goes to Wal-Mart and pays $400 for a rifle is not going to pay $200 for a trigger. It’s going to take an experienced shooter to recognize the difference.
Performance Shooter: What about pistol triggers?
Jewell: The only pistols these triggers will work in are the XP-100 rear grip models.
Performance Shooter: We see you have a Sako Finnfire rimfire action sitting there with one of your triggers installed on it. Are you flirting with .22s now?
Jewell: We’ll be able to fit this trigger on any Sako, centerfire or rimfire, above serial number 800,000. But yes, I haven’t been in the .22 game until recently. In fact, I didn’t know how to spell rimfire until just a couple of weeks ago. I just wasn’t in the game.
Performance Shooter: It looks very easy to install. Does it require any gunsmithing?
Jewell: No. You take off the old trigger, snap this one in place, and tighten one screw. It’s ready to shoot. It comes from the factory adjusted for sear engagement and weight. There’s probably a dozen other guns the trigger would work on, because it’s only a change in the bracket that holds the trigger on, not the trigger itself. I just haven’t had the time to look at it. [Holding up an AMT rimfire action.] And I will get this little darling into production next year.
Performance Shooter: What gave you the idea for that?
Jewell: I saw a comparison of aftermarket 10/22s in Performance Shooter, and I noticed that those guys were trying to shoot competition with pound-and-a-half triggers. That’s too much for competition shooting.
Performance Shooter: What has allowed you to expand so much? Two years ago, you only made the one Remington trigger.
Jewell: I’ve had the time to do the other projects. Until five years ago, the only one here was me. I was up to here with orders; I didn’t have time to anything but production. And then I got my son and my brother, and that freed me up to design new triggers. Pretty soon, Pat Black is going to be the production manager for the rotary magazine type triggers, Brian will do the Remingtons. Don [Jewell] does the detail parts and gets the production parts ready for them, and he assembles the Cooper triggers. I goof off. It boils down to, if you give them more than they paid for, they will beat a path to your door.
My thoughts when I started this company were that I would not knowingly have a dissatisfied customer. I’ve sold about 20,000 triggers, and I have had one customer who wanted his money back. He didn’t like the color of the trigger. I found out later he had ordered triggers from Canjar and Timney, and had returned theirs too. I can live with that.
Performance Shooter: But weren’t there bumps in the road?
Jewell: I built some triggers in the early stages that were made out of A2 tool steel with 4130 sideplates. They worked great. But the old boys down in Louisiana were calling me and saying, “Hey, this sonafabitch is rusting.” I told them to send it to me, and let me take take a look at it. I just threw the goddamn tool-steel triggers in a box and sent those guys new stainless triggers. That experience pushed me toward stainless steel completely.
Performance Shooter: You won’t be making porcelain triggers?
Jewell: [Laughing] I don’t think I’ll make a porcelain trigger. This is good enough. This trigger weighs 2 ounces, it doesn’t rust, and it’s easy to maintain.
Performance Shooter: Do you foresee any problems with the 10/22 trigger?
Jewell: It’s gonna be a killer. I’m still undecided about how I’m going to handle this. I’m giving serious thought about just buying some trigger guards from Ruger for $14. They are investment cast assemblies, and what I’ll do is put the whole think together, so that when the old boy gets it, all he has to do is stick it in there, put in two pins, put the gun back together, and go shoot it. I’ll do that on an exchange basis, where the customer will send me his core, and I’ll send him a new core with a trigger.
Performance Shooter: That will take the 10/22 to a new level. Somebody like Clark can take the action, put on a new barrel, a good stock, and a good trigger, and have an inch-and-a-half rimfire at 100 yards for $600.
Jewell: Right. And my safety will be much better than Mr. Ruger’s. The first thing I did when I got a 10/22 action was cock the action, put the safety on, and then pulled the trigger. When I engaged the safety, then disengaged the safety, the gun fired. That is not bueno.
The way that thing works, the trigger has a long extension on it, and a little crosspiece they’ve got has a flat in it. What’s supposed to happen when you punch the cross slide, it’s supposed to ride up on top of a cam so you can’t pull the trigger. The problem is, you’ve only got a few thousandths to play with, and if the hole the extension goes in is a little oversized, the flat can drop a little lower. When you punch the safety on, instead of this arm riding over the flat like it’s supposed to, you’ve got a gap there. Enough gap to allow you to pull the trigger out from underneath the sear on the hammer and it goes bang. You can’t correct the problem on that design. So I got completely away from that.
What happens on mine, when the action is cocked, you’ll notice the trigger is free to move all the way to the stop. The geometry inside my trigger stops movement of the sear, just like on my Remington trigger, which has a much better safety than the factory trigger. On the factory Remington trigger, there’s a sheet metal handle that comes up to block movement of the sear. After so many workings with a heavy load in the trigger, it starts flattening metal out and wearing it down, finally to the point where it doesn’t work. There’s not enough load on any parts in my trigger for wear to be a factor.
Performance Shooter: And that rimfire trigger will break at 6 ounces? Do you think that’s too light?
Jewell: Not for a competition shooter. Once they try one, they won’t want to go back.
Also With This Article
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-By Todd Woodard
For more information, contact Jewell Triggers, Inc., Dept. PS, 3620 St. Hwy. 123, San Marcos, TX 78666, telephone (512) 353-2999, fax (512) 392-0543.
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