... on which the hammers manufactured by our supplier were cracked.
I thought S&W were the MIM wizards?
Guess maybe I'm more "old school", but I find it hard to accept compressed, molded parts that are found in use on a firearm, especially one that is used for a life insurance policy. Here's a fairly good 'read' concerning MIM parts, if one cares to learn more about it:
https://www.gunnuts.net/2013/03/18/the-truth-about-mim/
I've done a lot of stuff with Ruger Mark .22 rimfire pistols over the past 50+ years and have seen a few things that Ruger attempted where the thought came to me as to
"WHY, the heck did they do that?". One of those observed quandaries involved my favorite Ruger Mark II Government model:
When I first unboxed this pistol I couldn't wait to get out back on my range and and shoot this pistol. I was ecstatic with my new purchase pretty much as it arrived, except for the aluminum trigger shoe. So, as this pistol was completely taken apart to get at the trigger, I found that the factory provided hammer looked sorta weird, and completely unlike any of the Ruger Mark pistol hammers I'd seen previously:
I knew right away what it is, and I know it couldn't have been changed because the box it was packaged in was still sealed. The one thing I immediately noticed was how the top front corner of the hammer appears to be starting to crumble off. The dang thing worked just fine for 300 rounds of CCI Mini-Mags and that hammer may well have held up for a bazillion more rounds for all I know. But, I did replace the hammer with a normal Ruger Mark II STEEL hammer as I was accustomed to seeing in all the Ruger Mark grip frames I had apart previously, along with the aluminum trigger and installed a steel cast AMT Lightning trigger purchased from Numrich back in the day, when they were selling these for $3.65 each. I kept the MIM hammer, only to show that maybe it was just an anomaly that Ruger had left over from some previous testing done.
I do have a MIM Ruger Mark II sear around here somewhere that I pulled out of another Ruger Mark pistol, but that sear is hiding out amongst some of the other questionable parts I've accumulated. That MIM sear has had one whole corner on the right top side of it, that broke off, so it was replaced with a Volquartsen target sear for the Mark II pistol involved.
I'm no engineer by any stretch, but maybe more of a pragmatist who sees some things that are not normal with his/her previous learning experience, and then changes it to what lets him/her sleep better at night on his/her
"My Pillow".