My 52 is put back together. but piston rod won't catch and hold when cocking. any suggestions?
I didn't put the rear pin in first, does this make a difference?
-McGinty

Without seeing the gun it is very hard to know what is exactly going on. It really makes no difference which receiver pin you put in first, however if you noticed the safety on the T01 trigger works by snapping over the rear reciver pin, when the safety engages the safety lever pushes rearward and blocks the trigger. When you push the safety forward it clips to the rear receiver pin. If you did not get the flat spring that is attached to the safety back in correctly it might cause this problem but don't know if this is the case or not. The flat spring must go over the top of the first receiver pin and then the rear receiver pin can be pushed in after, this keeps the spring from going under the pins, kind of hard to explain without pictures. You could do a easy check for this first, put your gun in a spring compressor if you have one and tap the receiver pins back out and see if the safety spring is in correctly. Only other things can think of offhand is that the trigger itself might have a problem and if you used all stock parts then spring spacing should not be a problem. Would check the safety spring first though if the gun worked before you took it apart is not real likely anything failed.

... Figured it out. The piston rod would cock and hold when trigger assembly was out of the gun but not after gun was put back together. The solution was to remove the washer I added to the top of the spring. Greedy me caused a problem that didn't exist. Of course I figured this out after unnecessarily taking apart the entire trigger. ...the plus side is that now I understand the trigger and it got a good cleaning and polishing.
-I.B.McGinty

Is there some kind of other trick to the T01 trigger/safety. I did this a while ago, so memory is not as good, but when I compressed the spring with the complete T01 assembly, there was some additional resistance, the trigger cocked, and then after it slid in. I pulled the trigger and then I used my punch to realign the "drooping" safety lever through the rear pin hole and put the front pin in, then put the rear pin in.

What did I need to do to avoid the additional resistance and the trigger cocking??? Remove the safety and put in later?