Miles Research and Design LLC · Texas
Weighed. Fired.
Certified.
Miles Research and Design LLC is a Texas company operating a dedicated bench for firearm trigger testing. We record the full force-displacement curve of every specimen, hold the procedure constant, and publish the method alongside the numbers.
Operated by Ethan Miles, an engineer whose working life has been spent measuring things and explaining what the measurements mean.
Move across the curve to read any point
01 — What the instrument records
At least twenty scans,
every trigger, same host.
A trigger is not one number. Advertised pull weight describes a single point on a curve with several distinct regions, and most of what a shooter actually feels lives in the rest of it. Every specimen is scanned at least twenty times, before and after live fire, and more when break-in behaviour is being characterised. Each platform is tested on its own dedicated control host, and that host never changes.
Pull weight, actual
Peak force at sear release, measured rather than quoted. Compared directly against the manufacturer's published figure.
Consistency
Standard deviation across ten consecutive pulls. A trigger sold as 4.5 lb that ranges from 3.8 to 5.2 is a different product than one that holds.
Take-up distance and force
How far the shoe moves before the wall, and how much resistance builds getting there.
Wall definition
The force gradient where take-up ends. This is the difference between a glass-rod break and mushy creep, and it is visible in the curve.
Overtravel
Movement after the break. Affects control and follow-through.
Reset distance and force
Forward travel required to reset, and the spring force returning it. Short, positive resets drive faster follow-up shots.
Lock time
Elapsed time from sear release to primer strike, captured with firing-pin sensors.
Full force-displacement curve
The complete graph. Two triggers can share a pull weight and share nothing else; the curve is where they separate.
02 — Test protocol
The same procedure, in the same order, every time.
Repeatability is the entire product. The protocol is published so that a disagreement about a result can be settled by rerunning it rather than by argument.
Install and document
Fitted per manufacturer instructions on a dedicated control host that is never modified. Installation photographed.
Break in
Fifty dry cycles, or the manufacturer's stated break-in if it differs. Deviations are recorded.
Scan
Ten force-displacement curves minimum, captured on the TriggerScan with force and travel recorded simultaneously. Additional sets are run before and after break-in where that behaviour is part of the question.
Verify independently
Travel confirmed by dial indicator and high-frame-rate video against a graduated scale. Instruments check instruments.
Live fire
One hundred rounds with split times recorded, then a second set of ten scans to measure what changed.
Publish everything
Curves, derived metrics, the composite score, and the subjective notes kept clearly separate from the measured data.
03 — The score
One number, and the arithmetic
that produced it.
The Trigger Performance Rating is a single figure from 0 to 100. It exists so two triggers can be compared in one glance, and it is only worth having if the reader can take it apart. Every component, every weight, and the full curve behind it are published with the result.
Consistency
How tightly repeated pulls cluster around their own mean. A trigger that varies by a pound between shots is a different product from one that does not, whatever the box says.
Wall definition
Break force measured against take-up force. A high ratio is the glass-rod wall people describe; a low one is the mush they complain about.
Travel efficiency
Overtravel and reset distance combined. Shorter total travel returns the trigger to a firing state sooner, which is what actually drives follow-up speed.
Creep
Force fluctuation through the wall, read directly off the curve. Creep is felt long before it is measured, and it is visible in the trace.
How the scale is anchored
The scale is fixed to reference triggers at both ends of each platform: a factory or mil-spec unit near the bottom, a well-regarded premium unit near the top. Anchoring it this way means a score keeps its meaning as the dataset grows, rather than drifting with whatever happens to have been tested recently. Scores are compared within a platform and never across them, because a break weight that is heavy on one action is unremarkable on another.
Subjective judgement is kept out of the number. Feel, recommended use, and value for money are reported separately and labelled as opinion, because mixing them into a measured score would make the score unfalsifiable — and a rating nobody can argue with is a rating nobody should trust.
Trigger buyers today choose between marketing copy and opinion. There is no published, instrumented, like-for-like dataset. We are building one. We do not make triggers, we do not sell them, and we have no product whose reputation a measurement could threaten.
04 — The instrument
Built around a Dvorak TriggerScan.
A published rating is worth exactly as much as the instrument behind it. The TriggerScan is a computer-controlled, motorized trigger measurement system and has been the reference tool for trigger evaluation for over twenty years, including in forensic and firearms-examination work. The laboratory is being commissioned around the TC-11 configuration below.
Approximating this with hand gauges would mean building a worse instrument slowly and asking readers to trust it. Every result we publish names the instrument it came from, and the configuration is disclosed alongside the data.
Configuration · specified
- System
- TriggerScan TC-11
- Force + travel
- Simultaneous
- Lock time
- FS-8 / FS-25
- Rest
- RS-02 professional
- Spring testing
- Adapter
- Curves per specimen
- 20 minimum
- Cross-check
- Dial indicator
05 — The laboratory
Early, and building in the open.
Miles Research and Design LLC is a Texas limited liability company formed in August 2026 and operated by Ethan Miles. The lab is in commissioning: the instrument is specified, the protocol is written, and the first published results will follow the equipment.
He is an engineer by training and by trade, and has built and run a business of his own before this one.
Testing is paid work, and manufacturers may commission it. Where a review is published, part of that fee buys the specimen at retail, so the unit measured is the one a customer would receive rather than the one a client would choose. A fee pays for the procedure and never for the outcome.
Published results publish regardless of what they show. No client reviews, approves, delays, or withholds one, and every report states how the specimen was obtained. Confidential pre-production testing is offered separately and is never published.
Contact
- Entity
- Miles Research and Design LLC
- Formed
- Texas · August 2026
- Principal
- Ethan Miles
Owner and Principal Engineer - contact@milesrandd.com
- Location
- Texas
- Vendors
- Purchase orders, quotes, and vendor accounts are issued in the company name. Manufacturers may submit products for testing; results are published regardless of outcome.