Carmoney

Good one! (Sure sounds like something Cliff would say....)

I'd be curious to see how you measure trigger pull (everybody seems to do it a little differently). And I'd be curious to know what ammo you're shooting, and the number of occasional misfires you're able to tolerate. I can make any 617 have a 6- or 7-pound pull. That's easy. Making it go bang reliably enough for competition shooting? Well, that is another matter altogether.......

Isn't that kinda like saying "but she has a great personality"? Yeah, well, there's nothing you can do when you're trying to make a revolver function reliably with rimfire ammo. They simply take more energy (i.e. more mainspring tension) to light the priming compound. All rimfire revolvers are "3:00 A.M. girls" in terms of DA trigger pull. It's that or go home alone.

Once upon a time, that was true. He says he "outgrew" that.

I've never figured out how to get a 617 under 8 pounds and keep it reliable enough for match shooting. And believe me I've tried. The DA trigger on my 617 is every bit of 10+ pounds.....but it's nice and smooth, and it doesn't misfire!

Drop 'em in the media, let the tumbler run overnight. They'll be squeaky clean by morning! (Jeezus, I can't believe we have 34 posts and 707 views on a thread about cleaning friggin' moonclips......)

Man I love that story..... Yeah, that was a special day, the day when I first got the ol' 25-2.......

I use a pile of old mixed moonclips I've accumulated over 20 years. I suspect most were made by Ranch Products, they were the original manufacturer. I really like the Hearthco clips in my 8-shooters, but I don't think they're necessary for the .45 wheelguns.

Hey Bob, I believe Mark H. at Pinnacle can drill out the frame and install a new bushing if you decide to spend the bucks to keep your old gun in service as a back-up or whatever. (I actually have the same problem with "my first blaster," the old 25-2 that Sam shoots. It was well-used when I bought it in 1988!)

That's what I do. And what I recommend. Plus if you hang out with Bob, you never have to wait for a table at Red Lobster.

Ditto. Doing anything beyond this to clean moonclips is creating extra work for nothing.

Dave H. told me he was planning to do that, and I'm not at all surprised he followed through. Nice job, Dave!

Happy birthday to the "other Jerry M." (Obviously, COF stands for crusty old fart!)

Nice!

Steve, I have three Maxfires you can have. I'll stick them in my car.....stop by my office or remind me next time we're at a match together, OK?

Glad to hear they changed the date of the Pro-Am. Sounds like S&W woke them up to the issue.

I'm shooting cast lead bullets for most local matches, and even some of the bigger matches. My 25-2s don't like lead bullets, the rest of my guns (revos and autos) shoot them just fine.

Judas Priest. This is possibly my biggest pet peeve with this competition shooting stuff. Why can't big match organizers make a better effort to coordinate dates and not run matches right on top of each other?? I suppose people figure there's not enough cross-over between the Pro-Am crowd and the IRC crowd to worry about. However, there are a significant number of serious shooters who will now have to choose between the two. And that sucks.

Back when I shot my 646 more, I messed with several different bullet shapes, and I can tell you that nothing else reloads as consistently as a true round-nose bullet profile. Hollowpoints and flat-points will give you trouble on reloads, at least on occasion. That's one of the real downsides of shooting a 10mm/.40 revolver, in my view--there are so few choices out there when you're looking for a round-nose bullet.

Absolutely--for maximum ignition reliability, it's important to have centered primer hits. Several problems can cause this symptom (e.g., yoke that's not straight, carry-up problem, cylinder stop problem, worn center-pin hole, etc.). Also, if it's hitting the primers off-center the bullets may not be well-aligned when they enter the forcing cone. All of these possible causes can be corrected, some more easily and inexpensively than others....

EXACTLY.

Yeah, again my mileage varies. I went through the whole trigger stop thing years ago, thinking I needed to eliminate that overtravel, then I realized it wasn't actually helping my shooting one bit, and perhaps affecting my accuracy detrimentally on longer, tougher shots. I've come to believe that a closely adjusted trigger stop may have a tendency to cause the trigger to contact the frame while the bullet is still in the barrel--which of course is exactly what you don't want--particularly when you're cranking away in double-action mode. It's worth noting that many of the top shooters in the other divisions have discovered the same thing, and many of them have deliberately added a bit of overtravel to the trigger pull on their pistols.

I used Rainier plated bullets for several years with good results--but after an incident at the Summer Blast where one came apart in my barrel, spraying several close targets with a thousand little pieces of shrapnel--I'm done with plated bullets for good. Jacketed bullets are no more expensive than plated bullets these days. So now I'm using cast 230s for local matches and jacketed (currently Zero brand) bullets for big matches.

Thanks, bro!

....and a good strong grip on the gun sure helps!!