pre cock hammer falls

Yes, this is by design. No, it makes no sense. The first click is a 1/4 cock notch. It's an artifact of the manufacturer of the hammer not wanting to have to make two styles of hammer. The second click is the "captive half cock", a safety feature. If the linkage on your gun fails and the hammer falls without the trigger all the way back, the hammer will be caught and the gun will not fire. It's the third of the four safeties built into the 1911-A1:

1. The thumb safety postively engages the sear, locking the sear and hammer.
2. The grip safety prevents the gun from firing while you are spinning it on your finger through the trigger guard.
3. The half-cock-notch captures the hammer if it falls when the trigger is not pulled fully to the rear.
4. The "disco" (disconnector) prevents the gun from firing when the slide is not in full battery. This is the quirk you take advantage of when disarming someone pointing a 1911 at you - Grab the top of the slide, push it back, and twist the gun to your left until the trigger finger breaks off. Wussy combat instructors like Massad Ayoob twist the gun the wrong way because they don't want to get punched in the face with the student's free hand. Of course you will be disarming and then shooting the student who comes at you with his leet combat skills expecting you to try to twist the gun the wrong way (Don't try to figure out how this all works with a real gun).

I have no idea what is going on here, but it looks safe:

 

An entertaining and educational adventure is to try your hand at sear spring tuning. Do NOT start out by applying pliers to ypur factory spring! Get a few Colt sear springs from Brownells and play with those. Or for real adventure, try out your pliers on the Clark 4 finger sear spring.

 

Trigger pull weight. With the Clark, you can balance the trigger pull and reset very precisely.

While you've got the gun apart, use your fingernail to detect roughness in the hammer notch (the full cock notch - What looks like a 90 degree angle) and on the engagement edge of the sear. You can remove roughness with a very fine stone, being careful NOT to change the surfaces, but only to polish off burrs. This stone is the best single stone for use with a 1911. You can use it for deburring, for trigger track smoothing, and for disco track smoothing. Sometimes running it over the inside of the slide rails is a great improvement. This stone should be used with only very light pressure while taking care that contact is even. for use on small parts, set the stone on a level surface and move the part over the stone, rather than the stone over the part.

 

That's why I said don't work on your factory sear spring. Anything you do with a spare sear spring is undone by putting the factory spring back in.

And those burrs are going to come off on their own... Maybe messing the gun up when you are faced off against a whole team of derby girls and can't afford a jam. Every smith's bread-and-butter is the reliability package. You can't shoot a gun for two hours and say "yep, she's good to go". It won't do for SD or target work. Get a smith to work it over if you don't trust yourself.

Four examples of what I've seen burrs do to a 1911:

• Hold the grip safety down, disabling the safety. Likely to go unnoticed.
• Jam the slide solid just back from lockup, disabling the gun.
• Jam the trigger hard in the tracks, disabling the gun.
• Cut a case and hang onto it, disabling the gun. The mag wouldn't drop and the slide wouldn't budge. Fortunately I carry a rawhide hammer in an ankle holster.

 

Grease picks up dirt which could be a disaster on the hammer, sear, and disco - A tiny bit of caked powder residue in the hammer hooks and you are in full-auto land - After the fourth round in full-auto the gun is pointing at your head. Gunk between the hammer and frame could slow down the hammer and result in misfires. I use grease on the rails, bushing, and slide lugs. The rest of the gun should be run wet with Ballistol to prevent caking of powder residue.

Grease is okay in the slide lugs because the barrel lugs don't even nearly sink to the bottom of the slide lugs. The rails need grease because they would throw off light oil in no time. Same for the bushing.

For extended range work I spray down the gun with Ballistol every 50 rounds or so and wipe it off. This also prevents leading when the barrel starts to heat up.

For a carry gun dry lube is a better plan. A little Johnson's Paste Wax with some Boron Nitride powder added makes very good dry lube.

 

Hammer hooks and sear engagements are tiny little things that are designed to operate unimpeded. Note that the sear and disco are just sort of floating around loosely held in place by the sear spring. They need to be able to jiggle when they need to jiggle, and they need to be where the hammer expects them to be when the gun is cocked. Note that "Assembly Lube" is just heavy oil, but it can hold parts in place pretty darn well. Grease is like glue compared to assembly lube.

You are not doing much shooting, so I'm not surprised you aren't seeing much dirt. I shoot at least 300 rounds every week - I do a total teardown and cleaning every 1200 rounds. I have seen lots of solid caked residue with all lubricants except Ballistol. With Ballistol I get soft black gunk that washes right out with... More Ballistol. Hoppe's with a little 0-20 synthetic motor oil added would probably behave about the same.

Grease doesn't attract dust and debris. Grease just sits there and the gun fills up with primer and powder residue (and if you shoot lead, lubricant residue) and whatever falls on the grease stays in the grease and gets churned around in the grease, and reacts with the grease to form caked sludge. Dust and dirt in the air get added to the mix. So do textile fibers if you carry.

 

Yep, dry firing sprays the oil that went down the hammer everywhere it needs to go. JMB was a genius that way

No, I'm not be sarcastic, though it even looks like I am to me.