List of tasks to complete:
Fit trigger to frame.
Fit hammer, sear, disconnecter.
Trigger job.
Fit and blend grip safety.
Fit firing pin stop.
Fit extractor.
Fit thumb safety.
Fit slide stop.
Do a general de-burring and pre-finish clean up.
Refinish.
Decide on grips.
Install sights.
Test fire.
Adjust ejector.
Lock-tite the grip bushings, trigger overtravel screw, and rear sight set screw.
First the before pics.
First I threw a couple of zip ties (4 total) in the areas I didn't want the file or sandpaper to remove metal. Then I covered the area with Dykem blue.
It's very important to know what area you're working with, and how much metal you're willing to remove. The absolute worst thing I could do is weaken the frame, so I measured a lot with my micrometer prior to beginning. It seemed that the most sensitive area is the sort of dished out area above the checkering. I decided that I didn't want to remove much metal there at all. The Dykem blue helps with that, because it allows you to see exactly where your tools are working.
This was the thickness of the metal before I started working, and after it was the same. Nice.
This is after working for a bit. You can see the checkering overrun lines beginning to disappear. For this I used a small triangular file and light pressure.
Getting there... At this point I took off the zip ties and used a solvent to remove the Dykem in order to see the progress. After that I used thin strips of 220 grit sandpaper in a "shoe shine" motion to remove more of the finer scratches and tooling marks.
From this, to this:
I still have a tiny bit more to do, but that will be part of the general touching up before refinishing. The frame will be bead blasted before ionbonding, so it's not necessary to evenly polish the whole thing.
This whole process (considering it was my first time) took about 3 hours today. Next up I'll fit the trigger to the frame, which should be a cinch by comparison. :-)
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