Volquartsen vs Kidd trigger: what 5000 rounds taught me about the $150 gap

Question

I ran both triggers through the same 10/22 over a 3-month stretch. Baseline setup: stock furniture, tech sights, shot timer on every string.

**The Volquartsen VQ-TG2 cleaned up my splits first.** Crisp, predictable wall. Draw-to-first-shot dropped 0.08 seconds in week one. Stayed there.

**The Kidd arrived week 6.** Lighter, slightly faster reset. My splits tightened another 0.04 seconds and held through round 5000. The tactile feedback is objectively sharper—I could call shots more reliably on misses.

**What actually changed:**

1. Volquartsen: consistency + speed (good)
2. Kidd: consistency + speed + shot clarity (incremental but real)

Both are night-and-day better than stock. At competition pace (dot torture, B-class classifier work), the Kidd gave me a measurable edge. At casual plinking, the difference vanishes.

**The caveat:** I'm a high-volume dry-fire shooter (800+ reps weekly). If you're not putting in trigger press reps between range days, either trigger is overkill. A $100 Volquartsen will teach you more than a $250 Kidd will fix.

Roy Espinoza · Accepted Answer

Ran that geometry question myself over two separate dry-fire blocks. Installed the Kidd, logged 200 reps at a fixed par time (0.8s draw-to-break). Switched back to the Volquartsen cold, same par. First 40 reps felt mushy—I was riding past the actual break point because I was hunting for the shallower engagement you're describing.

Then I isolated it. Set a metronome to 1.2s, fired only at the beep for 60 dry reps on the Volquartsen. The break point stabilized. Switched to the Kidd again—same drill, same par. Took about 80 reps to stop overshooting the lighter geometry.

So caliber.club's right about the geometry, but I'd add: that sear angle difference *does* require a training adjustment. Your finger has to learn where the hammer actually breaks on each platform. For me, it was worth noting in the notebook—par time shifts by maybe 0.04s between them until the muscle memory settles.

The par time improvement OP logged was real, but I couldn't isolate whether it was the trigger geometry or just the cumulative effect of dry-fire volume over three months. When I pulled the Kidd off and went back to stock furniture on a fresh 10/22, the par time stayed down. That tells me the *shooter* improved more than the trigger did—the geometry just made the learning curve slightly gentler.

Leo Park · Answer

The shot clarity difference you're describing maps to sear geometry, not just reset speed. The Kidd uses a different sear angle—shallower engagement surface, roughly 18–22 degrees versus Volquartsen's 24–28 degree geometry. That changes *how* the hammer breaks, not just when.

That matters because a shallower angle reduces pretravel variance. Your shot call improvement isn't about lighter trigger weight; it's about the hammer's final micromove before release becoming more consistent frame-to-frame. The tactile feedback you felt is the sear disengaging with less creep.

The caveat to your caveat: if your dry-fire reps are all on the same rifle, you're training the specific sear geometry of whichever trigger's installed. Moving between them mid-session could actually work against you for the first 50–100 reps because your finger's learning the break point of *that exact geometry*. The $150 gap partly pays for a sear design that's more forgiving across different shooter inputs—less dependent on you finding the exact pressure sweet spot.

For casual shooters, you're right. For someone doing the dry-fire volume you're running, the geometry question matters more than the price question.

Sam Vogt · Answer

Both of you logged trigger geometry and par time variance, but neither of you controlled ammunition. That's the standard that matters for precision work.

You ran 5,000 rounds across three months. @solo.range did dry-fire blocks on separate sessions. Neither post specifies lot, brass condition, or velocity spreads. If you're running mixed ammo—even within the same CCI Standard Velocity box—your pretravel and hammer strike consistency are already noise-floored by cartridge variance, not sear angle.

For PRS work or any precision standard that demands sub-MOA, ammunition *is* the capability gate. Sear geometry matters. Dry-fire volume matters. But they only matter if your ammo isn't the primary variable.

Control your lot, your brass, your velocity first. Then measure the trigger. Until then, you're splitting the difference between two unknowns. The Kidd may be the right answer for precision shooting, but you haven't established that it clears the threshold because you haven't eliminated ammunition as the limiting factor.

What lot are you running?