Italian Screw Problems

[Driftwood Johnson]

You can try all the other brands of screwdrivers, and when you start breaking tips, try another brand, or you can just buy the Brownells Maga-tips in the first place. If you manage to damage a tip, Brownells will replace it.

Uberti screws are notorius for being soft, locked in place, and easy to ruin.

Cutting screws requires relatively soft metal to begin with. Most screws are then hardened after they are cut. For some reason, Uberti does a lousy job at hardening. To tell you the truth, I don't think they harden them at all. To compound the problem, the softer the steel a screw is made of, if they are driven home with a lot of torque, the threads will distort and conform to the threads in the hole, tending to lock them in place very tightly. There is a Gorilla named Bongo who runs around the Uberti factory with a screwdriver, late at night after everyone has gone home. He over tightens every screw he can find.

Gun screws tend to have very thin slots. Hardware store screwdrivers have wedge shaped tips, so the force is only applied to a narrow line where the tip of the screwdriver meets the top edge of the slot. That puts so much force on the soft steel that it deforms. On hollow ground screwdrivers the faces of the blade will be parallel. When a properly fitted screwdriver is placed into the slot, the tip will bear on the flat inner surfaces of the slot, and the force of the screwdriver will be spread out over a greater area, causing less damage.

One trick for getting stubborn screws out, once you have a properly fittin screwdriver, is to place the screwdriver into the slot, and give it a couple of sharp raps with a hammer. The shock will often help break the screw loose. WD-40 is not a penetrating fluid. It is a Water Displacement fluid. You may have better luck with a penerating fluid like Kroil. Even so, if you apply penetrating fluid to the top of a screw, it may not be able to penetrate past the head of the screw and get down to the threads, which is where it needs to get to do its job. If at all possible, if you can get to the backside of the hole and apply penetrating fluid directly to the threads, or into the threaded portion of the hole, you may have more success.

[Virginia Gentleman]

I am considering hardening my screws with Kasenit and then re-Nitre bluing them to prevent the screw slots from getting ruined.  Anyone else try this?

[Manyirons]

Local black powder smith has a solution for this problem! Makes screws of either tool steel or stainless tool steel, sends em out for professional hardening, screw slots cut to fit standard dimensions and deeper for better engagement.

If ya break or bugger one of these, yer name is 'klutz' or 'superman"! Aint cheap, but a lifetime screw without problems....what a joy!

[Wrangler Rich]

Let's assume that we are talking about those spring screws on the bottom of the reciever that are for the lever return and the lifter lever.  The best solution that I have found is to replace the springs and screws with ones from The Smith Shop.

http://www.thesmithshop.com/


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