How I held the gun - Funny, this could hold some merit.
Check out Gunblast's re-review (rave reviews again, btw
). Towards the end, there is a slow-mo of him doing rapid fires, and the recoil response on the first shot seems consistently more violent (pitches up & back more) than subsequent shots.
So your safety spring is...strong? I don't have a pull guage on mine, but it's more than a 1911 safety & far more positive, but maybe only like six pounds or so (similar to a decent trigger weight, but obviously not a clean break or anything). I recall the the first batch of guns had a number of users who could either not disengage the safety, or found it extremely difficult, because of crappy tolerances at the camming surface between the safety block and the lever. If a lot of attention/force is required for you to depress the safety or keep it down, I can see that screwing with your hold on the gun in a number of ways.
The pain & discomfort at the grip is strange to me because my R51 is literally the most comfortable gripped firearm I own, except perhaps the much-smaller SACM 1935A or much-wider Hi Power. No sharp corners, no sharp edges, no way my hand is getting near the slide, no callouses required
. I have to conclude it's just a hand-size thing or something.
Is your safety going below flush such that the frame opening's edges are exposed, or something? That I could see being an issue. Or is it the upper surface of your hand digging into the channel on the underside of the tail where the top of the lever slides? I think I may just grip guns a bit lower having never bothered with Glocks much, but I know that a super-high grip is preferred these days (the R51 bore axis is so low that a lower grip isn't met with near as much muzzle flip). At any rate, my hand isn't mashed way up into the underside of the frame tail much.
the trigger reset is still not positive
Did the originals *click* when the trigger is released (I recall you had one)? Because the mechanism at the sear is the same from what I can tell, and didn't look to me like it'd be capable of having a reset *click* unless you intentionally added a feature to do so (hurting trigger pull quality in the process). Once the trigger disconnects (which occurs both by the slide cycling and by drawing the trigger fully to the rear) the sears (primary and trigger safety) freely fall back into the hammer notches when it rotates back (this causes the *click* in a 1911), and the trigger bar will not fall back into the sear recesses where it can move them again until the trigger is released. Because the trigger pivots, and the trigger bar is free to pivot at the trigger connection, and the tail of the trigger bar is free to move as it engages the sear notches, there doesn't seem to be any way you'd ever have a *click* upon reset. If you pull a weight off the edge of a shallow raised surface onto a lower one, there is no discernible change in the rope's tension; it's the same here with the R51 trigger arrangement as far as tactile feedback . Now, if you made the transition between those surfaces steep/sharp, and added a spring to forcefully drive the trigger bar into the sear notches as it was released, you would probably get a *click* like the 1911. But the R51 doesn't have a disconnector that *clicks* as it operates, since it isn't sliding off the edge of anything under spring tension; it just has a tail of the trigger bar slide back over the sear lever tails along an incline under the mild force of the disconnector spring.
TCB