How do you like that super lengthy trigger pull on that new or older Spyder mechanical trigger frame? Not much eh? Well I'm going to try to help you shorten that as much as possible and lighten up the heavy pull force as well. What may be a benificial modification on an electronic trigger frame may not necessarily apply to a mechanical frame because they are two completely different designs that share a similar function. For those of you wishing to lighten and shorten the pull in hopes that you will be able to walk a mechanical trigger frame, sorry it's just not going to happen. The only rational way this would be possible is to purchase an electronic trigger frame like the ESP, Sprint, IPI or CAMD trigger frame and install it to your Spyder. They are all direct replacements and will fit perfectly.

How Can You Shorten The Pull Length?

You can shorten the pull and lighten it as well by combining a few different modifications:

• Install a lighter trigger spring.
• Minimize the pre play.
• Minimize the post play.
• Minimize the full sear travel.
• Polish the mating surfaces of the components.

Installing A Lighter Trigger Spring

A stock Spyder trigger spring has thick gauge coils and makes the pull relatively heavy. You can find a lighter spring in a couple of different manners to relieve the normally heavy pull:

• Look around your house and find all of the clicky pens, mechanical pencils or any other small spring driven object or device with a similar spring and strip it of its coil(s). There are no full functioning clicky pens around my house any more because of this. You will find that they will have different diameter springs in them with different tensions as well. For a mechanical Spyder you'll need something that is around 3/16" - 1/4" in diameter.
• Another resource of springs is to visit your local hardware store. Any reputable hardware store such as ACO, Home Depot, Lowe's or even a ma and pa 'Joe's Corner Hardware Haven' should have an array of springs ready for purchase in different sizes and tensions. These types of springs will most likely be longer but you can simply cut them to the length you want.

Now that you have a variety of different springs, compare them to your stock Spyder spring and put the ones that have a lighter tension to the side. Choosing the right one for you will be trial and error. I went through a few springs before I found the one that suited me best before I was totally content with the results.

As stated earlier, you may need to cut the spring(s). You can start by cutting them to the same size as the stock spring. If the results doesn't suit you, you can stretch them and cut it once again to a similar size as the stock spring.  This will lighten the spring slightly depending on how much you stretch it and how many coils you snip. I would suggest only clipping 1/2 a loop at a time then test the results until it suits you.

Unlike an electronic trigger frame, you can actually make the trigger pull too light on a mechanical frame. If you make it too light, the trigger will not respond forward quick enough for the next pull and will cause your marker to miss shots. This will be most noticeable when pulling fast shots. The trigger has to be pushed forward a certain distance before the spring activated sear catch on the back portion of the trigger will catch the front/bottom portion of the sear so it can release the striker. You can experience this by gassing your marker up, pulling the trigger and holding it in the back position. Now let up on the trigger just slightly and pull it again. You will notice that the marker will not shoot. This is because the sear catch on the trigger is still above the front/bottom portion of the sear. Let it forward a bit more and it will be positioned under the sear and will release the striker. When pulling the trigger fast you need a spring that will push the trigger forward quickly. If the spring is too light, this will not happen and will cause the missed shots.

Minimize The Pre Play

The pre play is the distance that the trigger goes forward after released from a pull. Before you modify the pre play, you must decide weather you want the safety to be functional or not. To acquire the absolute shortest pull, you would need to render the safety non-functional. My personal recommendation would be to sacrifice the very small difference in pull length and make the safety functional to avoid any possible accidents that could be caused by making it non-functional. We're only talking about 1/16" here so that's not a great sacrifice as a trade off in the name of safety.

There are a few different ways to shorten the pre play in the trigger:

• You can glue a thin washer to the frame itself above the end of the trigger between the body and trigger frame. This will push the front portion of the trigger down and at the same time push the pre play back. You would need to try different washer thicknesses first before glueing it into place.
• Before my recent modification, I cut a small piece of aluminum from a thin gauge wall hook and glued it directly to the top area of the small portion on the end of the trigger. You'll want to file this surface flat before applying the small plate to rid the surface of the raised casting seam. The size of the thin aluminum rectangle was, 3/32" wide X 7/32" long X .032" thick. It was a bit tedious making the small plate but it moved the trigger back far enough to make a sufficient difference in the pre play and have a functional safety at the same time. As with using the washer, you would need to try different thicknesses until you found the correct one for your needs.
• You could glue a piece of material of the correct thickness to the body above the end of the trigger. Manipulating it in the correct position may be trial and error but you can temporarily tape the piece to the body and check the results til you get it in the right spot then mark it. Once marked, glue it in place.
• I recently performed a modification that I'm not sure anyone has tried before with a mechanical trigger. It works great though. I drilled and tapped a 4-40 X 3/16" set screw into the front portion of the trigger, similar to the way the top adjusters are installed in the trigger of an electronic Spyder trigger frames(see above photograph). This needs to be performed with a bit of precision or there's a good chance you may fail. The hole needs to be drilled all the way through in a perfect 90* angle from the top surface using a drill press and must be placed somewhere in front of the pivot point where the trigger pin goes through the trigger. If you try to hand drill this hole, chances are you will drill it on an incorrect angle and drill through the side wall of the trigger. You will only have about a .030" - .040" thickness(about the same thickness as 6 - 8 stacked pieces of copy paper) between the hole and outside wall of the trigger. A #43 drill bit is required for the 4-40 tapped hole and I would suggest using a flare end tap as it will make starting the tap into the hole much easier. When tapping a hole, always saturate the tap with tapping oil and occasionally reverse the direction of the tap about a turn when it feels like it's binding. After tapping, clean all oils from the hole with alcohol and use some blue Loctite on the set screw to keep it in place. Another word of caution; be careful where you place the hole for the set screw. If you put it in the incorrect place, you can inadvertently put it directly below the striker pressure relief hole in the body. If you make this mistake, the set screw will fit directly in the hole and no matter how much you adjust it, you will see no adjustment results because the top of the set screw will fall into the hole. Just take your time, plan ahead, use the correct tools and procedures and you can have a fully adjustable pre play adjustment for your mechanical trigger frame. If you wanted to take this a step further, you can drill a hole in the trigger frame just below the set screw. Since the tapped hole was drilled completely through the trigger, you can invert the set screw and make the hexagon void in the allen screw available through the hole that you just drilled in the trigger frame. You can now adjust the pre play from the outside of the trigger frame similar to the new CAMD e-frames. A bit of pre-thought and calculations would be needed to make the hole in the precise location. Making the hole a bit larger than the set screw would assure easy access to the set screw. There would now be no need to remove the trigger frame at all to adjust the pre play.

Minimize The Post Play

The post play is the distance that the trigger goes past the point where the sear releases the striker. Minimizing this will leave no extra distance in the full swing of the trigger after the sear has been released.

There are a few different ways to modify the trigger frame to accomplish this:

• You can drill and tap a flat end screw into the plastic of the trigger frame directly under the spot where the trigger spring sets. Be sure that the screw is exactly in the center of the return spring of the trigger. You would need to put the spring in place and mark a circle into the plastic frame using a tool such as a scribe. Drill the hole from the top of the frame in the center of that circle to the corresponding tap size of whatever screw you decide to use. I would suggest using a screw size a bit smaller than the inside diameter of the spring so the spring won't get caught up in the threads of the screw. You will need to file off length from the screw until you've reached the correct measurement of the pull. After you attain that measurement, screw it in and glue the head of the screw to the plastic on the outside of the trigger frame. You could probably just screw it in and not glue the head of the screw to the plastic and make this adjustable from the outside of the trigger frame, but I'm not sure that the plastic could take the stress of the trigger bearing down on the end of the screw continually. This could possibly push the screw through the threads in the plastic. Once you have the screw cut to the correct length, there will be no further need for adjustment anyways.
• Drilling and tapping a set screw in the middle of the top finger groove of the trigger is another option. This will butt up against the plastic frame in back of the trigger but you would need a reasonably long set screw to do so.
• Attaching a piece of material such as a block of cut plastic to the trigger frame in back of the trigger is another option but may look a bit ghetto. You would need to calculate the correct thickness for this piece to stop the trigger in the precise position. This mod would require some calculations but would be relatively simple. Just glue the fabricated piece onto the trigger frame behind the trigger and you're done.
• Probably the most popular post play modification is installing a solid cylinder inside the trigger spring. This will stop the end of the trigger from being depressed any further down than necessary which in turn stops the post travel at that point. You can use an array of materials for this piece but a solid metal such as steel seems to be the most practical. It will not wear or flake easily. You can cut a portion of a screw or bolt that will fit loosely inside of the spring that you have chosen. Use a solid smooth portion of the screw or bolt as a threaded portion may get caught up in the coils of the spring. The steel cylinder that sets inside of the 1/4" diameter spring of my Compact has a 3/16" diameter and is 1/4" long. These dimensions may not necessarily pertain to your marker so make your parts fit to your particular specifications.

When making any of these modifications, cock the ungassed marker and slowly pull the trigger back. See at exactly what point of the pull the sear lets go of the striker. You want the post play of your marker set as close to this release point as possible. Set it anywhere before this point and the sear will not let go of the striker. Patience along with trial and error are your best friend and they will bring you to the closest minimum post play possible.

Minimize The Full Sear Travel

A minimum sear travel is the shortest point that the sear can release the striker when they are engaged. 

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this:

• You can file, grind or dremel the back/top portion of the sear off on a slight angle. This slight and straight angle would be about 1/8" forward from the top/rear edge of the sear on the top surface and about 1/32" down from the top/rear edge of the back of the sear. Draw a straight line from those 2 points and remove that small bit of material making sure that the back edge is still sharp and straight across. These dimensions are just an example and may differentiate from your particular application. What you're doing here is creating another angle at the back portion of the sear. The new top edge is resting on the bottom of the striker and the new back edge is resting half way down the striker stop edge. By removing this material it will leave the sharp edge on the back of the sear half way down the striker stop ledge when it catches the striker. This means that it would only need to be moved 1/2 of the normal distance down to release the sear. The only drawback from performing this mod is that if you remove too much material, the sear will no longer catch the bottom ledge of the striker and your marker will continually jackhammer. There's no going back after you have removed this material, so if you did remove too much, you would need to purchase a new sear. Taking a little off at a time would be the best way to perform this mod and check the results in between until you feel you're satisfied with the results.
• A straightforward manner to move the sear catch point down to shorten the release length is to put a thick sleeve or jacket over the front sear rest pin. This has a similar end result as removing the material from the end of the sear. It moves the front of the sear up and the catch point of the sear on the striker down which leaves less length to release the sear from the striker. This would require a tube like material similar to a piece of macroline. You can use materials such as metal, plastic or rubber for this piece. As mentioned in the spring section of this article, look around your house for anything that would be suitable for this piece. When I searched my house, I found an old automobile vacuum part and the plastic nipple on it fit over the pin perfectly. I promptly cut it off and trimmed it to the width of the inside gap in the trigger frame where the pin is. The length is about 11/32" long and the outside diameter is about 7/32" - 1/4". If you use a piece with too large a diameter, the sear will not catch the bottom striker slot and continually jackhammer. If so, just find something of a lesser diameter and try it again. Another trial and error endeavor but you will not deform any parts in the process.

Polish The Mating Surfaces Of The Components

Polishing the surfaces of mating or moving components will create less drag on the parts hence yield less effort to perform their function. I would not recommend using sandpaper unless the surface was extremely marred like deep machining marks in them. If the surface is relatively smooth, using a decent metal polish will suffice and leave a nice slick smooth surface.

The surfaces I would suggest to polish would be:

• The outer edge of the sear: Most important surfaces would be the back edge, whole top edge, front and front portion of the bottom edge. You may consider the slot where the sear pin rides as well. This can be polished with a Q-Tip. Sides don't really need to be polished unless you're bored and just want something to do in your spare time.
• Sear and trigger roll pins: These pins are the pivots for moving components so you should make them as smooth as possible.
• Spring activated sear catch on the back portion of the trigger. The back and top portion of this part ride on the front of the sear, so polishing these surfaces will benefit less friction by smoothing them out. The back portion of mine had some deep machining marks in them so they were sanded out before I polished them.

After polishing these parts, clean all leftover polish residue from them with soap and water. This can be easily accomplished by using an old toothbrush to scrub them with. After the parts are cleaned and dried, coating the newly polished surfaces with a grease such as Dow 33 can only make friction much less.

Final Thoughts

I would have to say that the best choice out of all these modifications would be to:

• Buy some springs from a hardware, cut and stretch them for the perfect pull response.
• If you have the skills and means, do the adjustable pre play modification. If not just make the thin metal rectangular plate and glue it to the end of the trigger with some good epoxy.
• Cut a metal cylinder to the correct size and insert it in the center of the trigger spring for the post play.
• Make a plastic sleeve to put on the sear rest pin for a minimal sear release travel.
• Polish all of the surfaces that were mentioned.

I have done all of these and I've gone from that lengthy heavy initial pull to a 1/8" light pull with a functional safety. You will not hit 12 or 13 bps with your mechanical trigger frame but if you apply these mods in the correct manner, you should close to double the rof you were hitting previously. You will never be able to walk your mechanical Spyder trigger frame but will achieve an improved rate of fire after performing these mods. That alone would reward your efforts.

Technical Information