By John Siers a.k.a. “Gunsmith Jack”
Part 2 of Gunsmith Jack’s article has some great technical advice for anyone working on one of these inexpensive pistols. Why not pick one up at a bargain price yourself, and see if you can turn it into a neat little pocket pistol?
Complete disassembly and reassembly of a Raven poses no special challenges. With a design this simple, there’s not much that can go wrong with the gun. Most of the issues I’ve seen with the “rescue” guns involve damaged or missing parts. Broken grips are common, and the grips are important because they serve to retain the safety and the disconnector. Of all the parts of the gun, good grips are becoming the hardest to find. There are lots of used grips out there, but some of them are barely in serviceable condition, if at all. New reproduction grips are available but cost enough money to drive the price up out of what people are willing to pay for a Raven. I think what I need to do is to find a local geek with a 3-D printer, give him a good set of Raven grips to map and model, and see what he can do. Meanwhile, some Ravens came equipped with wood grips, so maybe I’ll try making some myself out in my woodworking shop. They are simple enough that blanks can be cut out with a scroll saw and fitted from there.
The Raven magazine can be disassembled, even though the base plate is staked on. You just need to depress and captivate the spring through the witness hole, then tilt the follower to take it out. After that, the spring comes out easily.
As for the other parts, they are available from the usual suppliers and don’t cost that much. There’s no particular part that fails often, so I sometimes cannibalize one gun to get parts for another – easy to do when you are buying them in lots and some of them look more salvageable than others. There are three springs that I always examine carefully and replace if needed: the recoil spring, the striker spring, and the sear spring. I usually don’t run into issues with the trigger spring, extractor spring, or the magazine catch spring, but those are readily available as well.
The sights on the Raven are nothing special, and like many guns designed for pocket carry, they are molded into the slide. Putting any better sights on the gun would be a machine-shop project at best, and I’m not sure how well that zinc alloy reacts to machining. In any case, the Raven is intended to be a short-range point-and-shoot gun, and the existing sights are adequate for the purpose. With one that has a good, clean bore it is possible to put together decent seven-yard groups.
Likewise, the trigger on the Raven isn’t likely to win much praise from target shooters. It is generally soft and squishy, with a good bit of take-up. That being said, it is usually consistent and breaks cleanly. The magazine catch is pinned into the frame at the bottom of the magazine well and has its own spring. It’s made of a fairly soft alloy, and I sometimes get guns with that part broken off. Fortunately, replacements are cheap and readily available.
One important caveat for working on this gun: a couple of other “Ring of Fire” companies (Bryco/Jennings and Lorcin) went out of business after numerous product liability suits alleging unsafe design. Most of the cases centered around the trigger / disconnector / sear design, alleging that there was “insufficient clearance” between trigger bar and disconnector and the gun would fire when dropped. Raven (and successor Phoenix Arms which continued to produce the MP-25) suffered no such allegations; but there have been a couple of documented cases of accidental discharge involving Ravens. In those cases, it was noted that the sear had been damaged or deliberately modified (possibly by some wannabe gunsmith trying to do a “trigger job”) which reduced the engagement of the striker and sear. Supposedly, this caused the gun to discharge when the safety was moved to the fire position.
The safety blocks the sear, and the earliest (sliding safety) Raven design will allow the slide to be racked with the safety ON. If the safety is then taken off and the sear is defective, you can wind up having a “war of the springs” in which the fully-compressed striker spring is fighting against the uncompressed (and much smaller) sear spring. If the sear engagement is even slightly negative, the striker spring is likely to win. The sear will be pushed down and the striker will be released. The picture shows how the sear engages the striker in the gun.
The later model safety will not allow the slide to be racked unless the safety is in the FIRE position. That doesn’t mean the problem goes away – it just means a gun with a damaged or modified sear may fire immediately when racked or not fire at all if the sear can’t engage the striker at the rear of the stroke. As a gunsmith working on one of these, the best way to make sure that the problem doesn’t occur is to examine the sear and striker carefully, make sure they engage properly and that the engagement is “neutral to slightly positive” as Bob so often says. If damaged or modified in any way, the parts should be replaced. You also need to replace the springs in question if there is any hint that they are worn out or damaged – especially the sear spring. Beyond that… well, limit your “trigger jobs” on Ravens to polishing up the trigger, trigger bar, and disconnector. Stay away from the sear and striker in that regard.
Many Ravens were made with a chromed finish, and those have mostly held up pretty well. Those that had the regular painted black finish don’t usually look nearly as good; but the good news is that if you strip the finish off, that zinc allow seems to take very well to spray-on finishes like Duracoat. With a little imagination, you can come up with some really unique-looking Ravens.
So there you have it – the “Raven 101” course. You still might never get to work on one of these, but you might want to give them a little more consideration the next time you see one sitting lonely and unloved on a table at a gun show. As guns go, they’re not as bad as some people make them out to be, and can actually be fun little shooters for very little money.
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