Carmoney

Craig, please try to remember there are wheelgunners from Oklahoma and Tennessee who are trying to follow the discussion, OK?

Patrick, the only concern I would have is you might not be able to easily install a replacement front sight on it. The newer guns have front sights that are pinned on, but a 686-2 might have the front sight and ramp that is integral to the barrel. This is something to keep in mind, since you might not have easy access to revolver gunsmithing where you live!

....or maybe just accept the RO's call on the target and move on? That's what I have generally done, even when I'm not sure I agree with the call. Overlays are misused as often as they are used. When you're using rough perforations on brown cardboard as your scoring lines, nothing you do is ever going to be 100% accurate.

Thank you for the kind endorsement, Dean, however I must in good faith admit that my turnaround time is now about 6-8 weeks. My schedule will only allow me to work on a couple guns per week, and each one takes a number of hours to complete. Cd662, the problem you are describing will probably be resolved after installing one or perhaps two .002" Ron Power endshake bearings. There are other possible issues, but that would be the place to start. Be careful taking apart and reassembling the extractor mechanism. It is very easy to bend and cross-thread stuff if you're not cautious.

Me too!

Then you generally have to fit the hand to the window, and then to the ratchet. Sometimes you get lucky and they drop in pretty decently without a lot of fitting work, but you can't count on that happening. Heck, for that matter, sometimes the floating hands work out just fine and don't even need replaced! The tight chambers can be reamed easily enough, too. The real thing I hate about S&W guns of that era (mid-'80s through mid-'90s) is the rough finish on all the internals. I mean rough, people. Tough and time-consuming to work on, and tough to make smooth. With the proper effort, most of them will slick up OK, but why make things difficult? I tell people to buy them if they can find them dirt cheap. It's still a 5" 625 and most of them are plenty accurate and can be made to function pretty well. But it does take substantially more effort to bring a 625-2 into the realm of being reasonably shootable, in most instances.

All 625-2s and some 625-3s have the floating hand. All 625-2s have chamber dimension problems (way too tight). These issues can be fixed, but I recommend just avoiding the 625-2s. The late '80s were not good years at the S&W factory, in terms of general QC. The late '90s and early 2000s were much better times. I deal with a lot of 625s. Here is my personal preference of the 625 variants, in descending order: 625-6 625-8 625-4 625-3

By the way I agree with the others who said it's probably fine for now.

I tried replacing a hammer nose bushing once..........you'll note I said once. I won't make that mistake again. Definitely a factory job.

Apparently, shooting the IRC has re-stimulated my interest in ICORE! I printed off the application for the WGR today. Sam was just running out the door when I got home, but he seemed interested in going along also.

So the members of the super squad won't have to set their own steel? Seriously?

Looks like Area 5 is shaping up to be a serious destination match for the revolver crew this year! Looking forward to it!

Hey guys, I wanted to give you a quick heads-up that Ricardo Lopez is signed to shoot Area 3 this year! It's pretty exciting to have a chance to shoot with the reigning IPSC World Revolver Champion! Plus he's a great guy. We definitely need a few more wheelgunners signed up, though. Get those apps in!

You're damn right. John is awesome at ICORE Limited. I shot pretty strong--if it hadn't been for a split-second brain fade that caused me to pop a couple extra rounds (which of course I didn't even need!) on a "shots-limited" stage that cost me 20 seconds in penalty time , I would have finished second in Limited--and John would still have won by over 40 seconds. That's a big frickin' margin, folks! A good chunk of it is the Standards, which John always shoots very well, but even if you factor that out, he's still the dominant force in Limited. My hat is off to John, even if he did get insanely lucky and managed to steal the shoot-off money from its rightful winnner. Also noteworthy is the fact that Josh Lentz may be establishing the same dominance in Classic Division. Did you see how he trounced Craig and Cliff? They better hope Josh gets kids and a mortgage (as Jerry once said about Nils) pretty quickly, or they're going to have to find a place to hide even deeper--Open Snubby, perhaps? Rich deserves kudos as well. A 2.something on the standards?--wow. Any time you can put that much pressure on Jerry you are doing something right. Jerry's not getting any younger, but ICORE shooting is still right in the center of his wheelhouse. From here on we will be seeing a real race for top Open every year, and that's a very cool thing.

Somebody at Springfield misread your note and thought you were asking them to sponsor a match. That's the entry level sponsorship package you received. You should donate it to a match.

Dude......1-800-BETS-OFF.....

I gotta drive up from LAX (I had to book it that way in order to use my free ticket). I should be up there by late afternoon, early evening sometime. See you boyz there.

John Baumann made the 7-shot conversion cylinders for 27s and 28s back in the early '90s. I was writing articles for gun magazines at the time, and was sent one of the very first Baumannize guns to shoot and review. I remember shooting one at the old Midwest Pin Blasters match at Mill Creek back in the early '90s, and finished second or third overall. Team S&W members Jerry Miculek and Brian Enos also had Baumannize guns early on, which they used mostly for pin shooting. The Baumannize guns did not employ any changes to the frame--you could freely switch the 7-shot Baumannize cylinders and the stock 6-stock cylinders back and forth and both would function fine. Once Baumann proved you could have 7 rounds of .357 in an N-frame, it was only a matter of time before people started to try to squeeze in 8! I believe RPM did the first 8-shot custom N-frames, and before too long the factory introduced the 8-shot 627s, initially through a couple of limited runs through Lew Horton. This eventually led to the 627s that we know and love today.

Really looking forward to seeing everybody. Richard, I really do have a funny feeling the Hogues may wind up paying out the $1000 bounty. Not having the par times changes the game quite a bit--a good shooter having a good day could significantly beat the old par times on all four shooting positions. It would be pretty amazing to pull it off with iron sights, but it's conceivable it could happen. Seiichi, if we decide to fire up a dice game at the Motel 6 in Morro Bay, we'll leave the light on for ya!

Wow, we're only a few days out! I'm getting really excited. Who would have thought that just a few months ago I wasn't even planning to shoot the IRC this year? Then I wound up with a freebie plane ticket in my lap, and started thinking about how I might be able to put it to use..... We don't have any ICORE in this area, so for the last several local USPSA matches I have been running my S&W 8-shot revo (declaring Limited minor!) and going for all "A" hits in order to try to switch my brain over into ICORE scoring mode. Last time I shot the IRC, I blasted through the first couple stages in full USPSA mode, and had smoking fast times but marginal hits before I finally managed to settle down. While I haven't quite succeeded in getting all "A"s at the local matches, I've come close, and it's the best way I know to get some realistic practice under match pressure, and force myself to get good hits. So get this....last night I figured I might want to change out my MIM cylinder stop and spring on my sweet 6.5" 27-7 before the IRC, so I open up my gun, right? Trigger stud is broken off in there! So I'm switching to my old beater 5" 627 at the last minute. Fortunately it shoots perfectly fine, so it's no big deal....but it does point up the need to maintain a good back-up gun just in case! Anyway, my old gun is shooting those little .38 Short Colts very, very well at 50 yards, thanks to Doug Carden and DC Ammo, so if I fall down on the Far and Near Standards it's my own damn fault. I'm glad there is no par time this year. I gotta wonder if somebody will finally zero it--with no par times to slow things down up close, I think it's probably more achievable than ever. Watching last year's IRC on the Shooting USA I was kinda surprised at how many times audible fixed steel targets seemed to be mixed into the field courses? Is this a new thing? I don't think I remember seeing that when I shot the match a few years ago. Has anybody heard anything about the structure of the Sunday shoot-off? They indicated it was "improved" and "details to come later" but I haven't heard anything since. I'm off to pick up a portable DVD player for the plane trip. See you guys in a few days!!

C'mon guys, the golf carts are a pain in the ass for everybody else. It's not like PASA is all that difficult to walk. Unless you have a real disability (and I'm not talking about just being a fat baby boomer who decided to apply for a handicapped hang tag in order to get the good parking spots at Wal-Mart) or have recently undergone medical procedures, you ought to be able to handle PASA without being motorized.

Yes, plus I shot the match myself in 2007 (I think that was the year I went!) and that was before "Retro" division was started. Gotta be 2009. I thought it was funny how they pretended to search and search for something other than a S&W revolver. I finally started yelling at the TV "Go find Roger Reid, you idiots!"

OK, my TV box said that the show was first aired in 2007, but that can't be right.....right? That was the 2009 IRC featured, right?

Lots of us live in areas where they don't have an active ICORE presence. They used to require that everyone update their ICORE classification each year or it reverted to Unclassified, but frankly this really sucks when there is no ICORE club around. Yeah, you can set it up yourself and phone it in, but does that really count?

Congratulations, Javier!