Beretta Neos $1.50 bic lighter trigger mod.

So a really ugly Berette Neos followed me home the other day. Got home threw some concrete anchors in the chamber and started dry firing. The trigger was as bad as everyone says it is. TONs of creep. Creep doesn't bother me as much as how incredibly gritty the trigger was and how heavy the trigger pull was. I don't have a trigger pull measuring gadget but I do have a fish scale. Using it as an impromptu trigger scale I was getting around 6.5lbs give or take a couple of oz.

I've read up on several threads on the internet on trigger work. Lots of talk of using a Bic lighter flint spring to replace the sear spring to lower the trigger weight but not a whole ton of detail. The bic spring was about 2x the length of the original spring. I knew it had to be cut down some but I didn't know how much. Using a digital scale I measured the spring pressure of the original spring when fully compressed in the two piece housing. This wasn't a super precise measurement but it gave me a number to start with. Original spring was around ~1200g to fully compress it. I cut the bic lighter spring to 3/4" long. Fully compressed in the housing it was reading around 700-750g to compress it. I didn't want to go too light and risk the sear not catching and making a Class 3 weapon so I started with this as my baseline. Because the spring is longer I had to hold it compressed while putting everything back together which was a little tricky but not too hard. Test squeezes of the trigger gave instant feedback that the trigger pull was obviously lighter. But... there was still a ton of grittyness in the trigger pull even without the striker installed.

Just compressing the two pieces that hold the spring I could feel a ton of grittyness. I wrapped some 1000 grit sandpaper around a qtip stick and used it to smooth out the inside of the larger housing. I then worked the 1000 grit around the smaller piece to smooth out the beveled top section. A little more with in the hole in the receiver to smooth out the sharp top edge. Followed this up with some 2000 grit to polish everything up. I put a light coat of grease on the small part and the spring and reassembled everything back together.

I used a hard Arkansas stone to polish the edge where the sear engaged. There is a big tooling mark in the middle of the ledge on mine. I didn't remove enough material to get the tooling mark all the way out just ran it over it enough to polish the surface and put everything back together with a little bit of CLP for lube.



Trigger pull is now down to about 4.25-4.5lbs, much more acceptable. All in for 15 minutes and a $15 mini bic lighter and a huge improvement. All of the grittyness of the trigger pull is gone. There is still a ton of creep but to get rid of the creep you have to actually add material to the underside of the striker. I don't trust epoxy or glue to do the job and I don't have any silver solder so that mod will wait. It can also render the safety non functioning and I would prefer to have a working safety on my pistol as I might keep this one on a thigh holster when tooling around in the woods.

She's a heck of a shooter even with the extreme amount of trigger creep. I threw every crappy old 22LR I had in my closet and some good stuff as well. About 200 rounds of Winchester white box. A box of 20 year old Thunderbolt. It's taken me 20 years to shoot up that shitty dirty as 500 round brick but I finally done it. Two magazines of Golden bullets. Two mags of Federal automatch. Two mags of 40gr Winchester Super X. 4-5 mags of Winchester M22. 38gr Federal AE. It digested everything without a hickup so far. It is no target pistol but it makes a heck of a fun little 22 plinker for $270 after tax. Much more reliable than my Walther P22 which has never make it through a magazine without some type of problem.