However, my last trip to the range, to exercise the six magazines I now have for the S&W 4586, brought its own small reward when it came time to police my brass.
Not only did I recover most of my 50 empty cases, but some kind shooter left his empty brass behind, along with a nickel, too. Neatness has its occasional reward. :)
And after discovering rusted, compressed springs in my 1975-vintage S&W66, I've keep a keen eye out for spring condition in the 4586. No rusted ones yet, but some may be a little bit weak. The two original magazine springs have visible "issues", although both worked properly the one time I used them. I'm not pressing my luck, though.
The original spring, which has some sort of yellow coating on it, seems, to my untrained eye, to be just a tad shorter than an OEM spring out of a new magazine. All I can figure out, consistent with this weapon being basically unfired since it was bought around 1990, is that the owner loaded the two magazines once, and never touched anything again until it was time to sell it. All six mags now have Wolff +5% springs, leaving me with four spare new OEM springs, and two "examples" for conversational purposes.
That convinced me to buy the complete Wolff spring replacement package.I've replaced all the easy-to-access springs already, and I'll get to the others in the course of teardown and tuning. For grins, I replaced the original recoil spring with a Wolff factory-standard 17 pound duplicate. The slide and serrations are so slippery, I couldn't retract the slide unless I wore a leather glove for more traction. I put on a Wolff known-16-pound spring, and slide retraction and overall operation went back to what I had originally. So either the original "standard" spring lost a pound of compression, or specs have changed over the time without warning.
I'm starting to see more of these minor mysteries in this handgun. The basic series was wildly popular as a cop gun in those days, although I think this particular sub-model wasn't seen much. It was, and still is, massively overengineerd and overbuilt, yet it weighs within one ounce of the standard M1911. It was so overbuilt, it was offered in 10mm, too, and the .45ACP could be easily converted to something called .45 Magnum, along with other odd calibers.
Along the way, there were -1 and -2 engineering changes, although I haven't found out what they entailed. And plenty of minor changes that were probably never documented beyond S&W's internal needs.
I was slightly turned off by the cosmetic appearance of the recoil spring guide, which, for something supposedly unfired, looks like it was dragged down 20 miles of gravel road. I spent all of $8 on a current factory relacement, and discovered the original was a hollow aluminum tube, while the new one is a stainless steel tube. The old one weighed .4 ounce, the new one, 1.2 ounces. Not earth-shattering, but I wasn't expecting aluminum in that particular application.
The S&W 45x6 series was well-liked for its solid (heavy) feel, good accuracy, and about the best SA/DA trigger pull on American auoloaders of that era.
I like mine for the same reason, which is why I'm doing a thorough check and overhaul as I bring it in from the pasture, and get it in shape as a working handgun, again. I have a project in mind where the 4586's exact set of features is a perfect match.
You can't keep a good weapon down, but when it comes to springs over ten years old, "trust but verify". After a certain spring age, just buy new, all around. Especially those tricksey magazine springs.