Dewey Vicknair is correct about the function of the cocking hook, and the area of free travel permitted by the much wider cocking axle key arc in the hammers.

It is extremely doubtful that the key slot in the cocking hook wore out to the point that the hammer/sear relationship wore out as much as your photos illustrate. You are quite a distance from the sears engaging the hammer notch, and even a tiny bit would have been enough to make the gun no longer able to be cocked. It would have taken thousands of further unsuccessful attempts to cock the gun to accumulate that much additional wear.... highly unlikely.

I think I would start by checking the fit of the original cocking axle to the cocking hook. I know that one end of it was fractured, which led you to have a new cocking axle made. I would want to know if the hammer on the unbroken side was able to come to full cock or sear engagement. If so, then I would tend to think there is something wrong with the newly machined cocking axle.

I had been under the impression that the "tits" or integral keys on the Lefever cocking axles were not all perfectly in line... rather that the center key was several degrees different than the keys for the hammers. This is why I have previously found that the cocking axle is directional, and that it usually has an x or hash mark on the right end. This is probably what gunny encountered when he reversed his and fixed his problem.

But I just checked a Lefever cocking axle, and it appears that they are all in line, and this particular axle has no mark on one end. Also, the fit of the cocking hook to the axle is very snug with no rotational slop, as Dewey Vicknair noted above. Now I am left wondering if there was a subtle design change, and that there are two versions of cocking axles with a slightly different key alignment. I will try to check the cocking axle on another Lefever I am working on to see if it is different.

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