Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Savage 99 trigger job

Has anyone here ever worked on or had someone work on a savage 99 trigger? As I understand there are some inherent risks if its filed down too low.

only real trigger job for savage 99 i know of.

LOL

Roy, Roy, Roy, ever ready to learn something new.

If by inherent risks you mean the gun can go off at any time if it's done wrong?

Yeah. There's a risk if metal is removed.

The 99 is a hunting rifle. Not a bench rest rifle. If looking for a low trigger pull, buy a new Savage with AccuTrigger.

The only thing that's safe to do on 99 triggers is to polish the surfaces. Not remove any metal at all.

Truthfully, just picking up a dummy round and working the trigger a lot can lighten it up.

That train left the station a few years ago. I'm just here for the entertainment value.

A few years back I bought a Savage 99 at a gun show for a ridiculously low price. When I got it down to the ranch to try it out, while chambering a round it went off unexpectedly. It is a damn good thing I follow gun safety rules and the rifle was pointed down. Scared the hell out of me. I took the buttstock off the rifle to see what was going on and there was the worst home made trigger job ever done on a Savage 99. I posted pics of it back when it happened here at this site.

The rifle was in otherwise pristine condition and is now my go to .308 with all new trigger components installed. I did not touch them, just installed NOS parts into the rifle. Out of over 30 Savage 99's I have worked with, this one has an amazing trigger now with zero polishing. Go figure.

What new components did you install on the trigger?

Be advised there are 2 distinct trigger-sear designs. Pre mil and post mil with the tang safety.

The pre mil sear and trigger mating surfaces can be polished up for smoother travel. If you shorten either one it can lead to slam fires.

The post mil assembly can be slicked up a little but it's not at all easy to work with. I've seen some really buggered up post mil guns. It takes a new sear to fix them and those are dam hard to find anymore.

There was a couple of lawsuits on postmil 99's that slam fired that hit Savage hard in the pocket book. It was never determined for sure if it was just a small manufacturing flaw or work done by somebody later, but I agree with Lightfoot that tang safety 99's can be touchier.

This was a post mil late model Savage 99 C tang safety model. I replaced all of the trigger assembly components with NOS.

Never owned a tanger but after 20 odd 99s, I never had one that needed and messing with the trigger.
Long, not light but easy to learn.
Trigger mania and 1/2 moa groups are silly for big game rifles.

I had one tang safety that was a real bear on the trigger.

Bought a snap cap and worked the lever / pulled the trigger a few hundred times and it lightened up a lot.

I've owned dozens of 99s over the years. Some had horrible triggers, some were better, and some weren't bad at all.

But I never messed with any of them. If I really didn't like the triggers, I got rid of them.

The trigger on any old gun (or any new gun for that matter) is the most important thing to me, even more important than the condition of the bore. I have to have confidence that I can manage the trigger. I can overlook a less than perfect bore, but I will not tolerate a poor trigger. And that applies to all my rifles, not just 99s.

I have had dozens of 99's and shot them all. Never had one with a trigger that I could not learn to shoot accurately. Suggest you learn to shoot with the trigger its got. Its not that difficult and much better than messing up the trigger and getting a slam-fire.

This right here folks is the whole ball of wax in a nutshell. Never have I missed my target because of trigger pull.

While I rate bore condition as paramount in selecting a rifle (it's the heart of a rifle, all the fancy wood, nifty mechanisms, sights/scopes, and wonderful triggers don't mean diddly squat if the bullet isn't directed true to the target), the trigger is a close second. I always felt the Rube Goldberg trigger/sear mechanism of the Savage 1899/99 was the Achilles Heel in the system.

Sure, abominable triggers can be overcome/lived with but it's way better to fix them or replace them than to waste time on them if you can help it - and unfortunately there isn't much help in that regard for the Savage trigger. Put on your magnifying goggles and study the pre-mil trigger closely. There are subtle angles involved that absolutely must be maintained when polishing, and as others have stated the removal of steel to shorten the sear "bite" will only lead to regret.

I think, from looking at a bunch of Savage triggers over the years, that they may have cut some corners in steel selection and heat treating. If the rifle has been used a lot you can see slightly rounded sear bites, and the fact that infinite dry cycling will "improve" a trigger pull is a subtle indicator of that too. Other gun makers of the era took greater pains in that regard, I wonder why Savage didn't. (Tear down a well used 130 year old Ballard for example, and while admiring the utter simplicity of the trigger system note too the sharpness that typically remains on the corners after God knows how many thousand cycles. The steel is glass hard.) A couple licks with a Cratex stone and the Savage trigger on the other hand is as polished as it'll get. I suspect also that Savage wasn't too persnickety about consistent trigger spring temper either. Savage made a wonderful knockabout rifle, and the higher grades were the same inside as the cheapest grades were - the poor man and the rich man played together on an even playing field in that regard. Extra money didn't buy you a better trigger, only perhaps a minute's-worth more attention in the fitting room.

All that's to say, don't muck about with Savage triggers - if you don't know exactly what you're doing. Learn to live with what you got, and if you can't/won't then horse trade it for something else.

I always enjoy the "How can I improve my Savage trigger" threads.

Rather than mess with the engaging surfaces, which if done wrong will create a slamfire situation, has anyone attacked the spring by either narrowing or thinning it to reduce trigger resistance? Talking about the pre-mil flat steel spring.

Never fiddled with the spring myself. I did buy an H years ago that actually had 2 springs piggybacked in it. One was clipped shorter. I don't recall what the pull was like. I just put in 1 new spring and went from there.

I think getting the spring tension too light is equally unsafe.

I don’t do triggers