Adventures in gunsmithing - Rossi 68 - Part 1

This all started when I noticed that my dad's old Rossi 68 .38 Special revolver was acting up. The double-action trigger pull was sometimes not cocking the hammer, instead it was just advancing the cylinder only.My first inclination was to just strip it down to clean out all the gunk. I was guessing that something was quite literally gumming up the works.I started following the directions from the The Gun Digest Book of Firearms Assembly/Disassembly Part II - Revolvers. Starting off was no problem at all.Step four was the problem. It seems that the extractor rod had seized up in the extractor. The act of unscrewing it didn't unscrew it -- it broke it off.:-(At this point I decided to soldier on and just buy a replacement for it. I was doubly-bummed out because my brother Pete wanted this one. Don't worry, I'll make it better somehow.The rest of the gun came apart easily. I used some Simple Green (recommended by Bob in the AGI gunsmithing series) to get off the gunk that really was there. It's good stuff I have to say.After washing and rinsing with water (it feels just so wrong to dunk a gun in water!) I put the whole thing in a slow oven (I think I had it set to 230) for around 15 minutes to get everything completely dry.It went together easily (other than the broken bit).The problem remained though. This is both good and bad. It shows I didn't screw up the lock-work at all and things were exactly as before. With a bit of further research the problem is sear click.The double-action lever is slipping off the trigger and not pushing the hammer back.BTW: Look at all the dried oil on there! It's all over all the internal parts. It's kinda bad looking. The Simple Green pulled all of it off easy enough and I replaced it with CLP after things were dry. I didn't put it together wet but things were well lubed.The problem part is the lever on the bottom-right of the trigger. It's held on by the pin that's visible and projected forward by a spring that is captive inside. (You can browse the pictures and see it if you want) The problem is that it's not moved forward enough. I would have to take off a few thousandths of an inch on the top and that should fix it.I'll do that some other day. Probably when the new cylinder comes in.[smugmug url="http://photos.vec.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=14926160_Gb9ih&format=rss200" imagecount="100" start="1" num="100" thumbsize="Th" link="lightbox" captions="false" sort="true" window="true" smugmug="true" size="L"]