Bad to pull trigger during cleaning?

[diabolist]

Someone told me not to dry fire without the slide in place. Why is this necessarily bad? (I want to clean all action parts with both hammer up and down, and "lowering the hammer" is a lot of work).

[Chrushev]

Because the hammer follows through with a lot of force and is designed to be stopped at a certain point. With the slide gone, there is nothing stopping it and so a lot of unintended force is being put on the the hammer assembly that may break it.

There is plenty of "stuff" between the hammer and where the explosion happens, so the hammer and all that is generally fairly clean. You may need to clean it once every several thousand maybe even 10's of thousands of rounds... in which case I think its worth taking the extra time to "lower the hammer". You certainly dont need to clean that part of the gun every time.

[himurax13]

When I clean my pistols I usually focus my attention to the barrel, the area where the barrel sits, the rails, the bottom of the slide, the face of the chamber (where the firing pin hole is), and the magazine well. I generally don't clean the firing control area since it is generally not needed. If done properly, I can usually finish cleaning and lubing in less than 10 minutes per gun (if I was being anal about it). If I am feeling really lazy, I just boresnake the barrel, wipe off the feedramp, and use a magazine brush on the magwell, then oil the slide and barrel.

If you dry fire without the slide installed, you can risk damaging your firing control parts as well as the lower reciever.

[therza2071]

What gun is it?