A while ago I posted about my father's first duty gun, which he was nice enough to gift to me before he passed last year. After I got it home, I cleaned it and eventually made it to the range where I put I think maybe two cylinders of 130gr 38Spl through it and called it good. Took it home, cleaned it, put it away.
A couple of weeks ago I dug it back out; I wanted to see if it fit me as well as I remembered it doing, put some snap caps in the cylinder for some dry-fire practice, and...
I'd pull the trigger in DA mode, the hammer would go forward, but the cylinder would still turn. I could not thumb the hammer back. This was when the revolver was pointed down at the ground. I also couldn't open the cylinder latch.
If I pointed the revolver at the ceiling and tried again, I could then thumb the hammer back; I could also pull the trigger in a DA pull and it would function just fine. Cylinder would turn and hammer would come back as you'd expect.
Edited to add - honestly the orientation could have been the other way around (pointing up = no function, pointing down = function...I don't recall which way was which, but there was definitely one orientation where it worked as you'd expect and one orientation where it wouldn't)
I (very, very carefully) took off the sideplate, re-seated the sort of loose arm, added some lubricant as the insides had pretty clearly never been touched since the 1970s, very carefully buttoned it back up, and it seems ok...but, the inner workings of how these things function is a bit opaque to me.
Anyone have any idea of what could cause that? I somehow doubt that me just putting 12 rounds of mid-level Rem-UMC 38 ball would break anything, but...no idea. I didn't see any obviously broken, fractured, or otherwise unserviceable parts. I would hate to think that it was something kind of lurking there for decades, too...heaven forbid someone actually need the thing when it was a duty gun, and that happened.