Revolver mods and what they're good for...

I wrote a piece enumerating the various modifications that one can perform to a carry revolver to make it more useful, and which ones may cause more trouble than they're worth.

Hey, Look!

"One stretch of dominance that was nearly as total, if somewhere in between New England’s in the AFC East and Rome’s in Europe and the Mediterranean littoral, was that of the medium-frame, double-action revolver, which reigned supreme in the United States for something like a century.

If we define the Age of the Medium-Frame Revolver as running from the first adoption of Colt’s Model 1889 by the U.S. Military to the abandonment of the Smith & Wesson Model 65 and Ruger Service-Six by the NYPD in favor of semi-automatic pistols, that’s a solid 105 years of duty."

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The time I moved up to a six-shooter...

It was '02 or '03, back when I still wore an old Royal Robbins "shoot me first" vest in public, that I switched out the Sig Sauer P230 in the vest's BUG pocket for a Smith & Wesson 442, to which I soon added a pair of the old, long since discontinued, hard plastic Crimson Trace LaserGrips*.

The hours and hours I spent in nightly dry practice with that little double-action-only .38 Special J-frame probably did more for my handgun shooting than any other single thing.

Twenty years ago, in autumn of 2005, I was working at Coal Creek Armory and one of our wholesalers, Chattanooga Shooting Supply, had some S&W 432PD revolvers at closeout pricing. Intrigued by the thought of a 20% in capacity over the .38 Centennial, I bought one.

It didn't take long for me to swap the CTC grips over to the .32 Mag revolver and swap it into the BUG holster, replacing the 442. Two decades later, it's still there.

*I keep meaning to swap over to a set of the newer LG-105 J-frame grips, but have thus far failed to get around to it.

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Writing Elsewhere...

• Revolver Malfunctions


• 1968 Pontiac Catalina


• Flashback: Ruger American Compact and LCP II

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #257...

That little .32/38 Terrier just really does it for me. What a classy little gat it is. Most guns I'm being kind of ironic when I refer to them as "gats", but this '48 I-frame? This is unironically a gat.

I just noticed I have a Tyler T-grip sitting here on my desk and got excited for a hot minute, but then I checked and it's a #4, which is N-frame sized. Sad trombone.

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Thanks, I hate it...

On the one hand, the sort of people who would buy this thing are basically announcing that they have too little common sense and too much money and it is morally wrong to allow them to keep it.

On the other hand, not even suckers deserve to be swindled like this.

Hey, look!

For many years, revolvers from mainstream wheelgun purveyors like Ruger and Smith & Wesson stuck to six-shot rimfire revolvers no matter the frame size, purely out of tradition. You had to venture off the beaten path with a High Standard Sentinel or Harrington & Richardson 999 if you wanted the experience of a nine-shooter in .22LR.

Smith & Wesson’s small-frame .22/.32 Kit Gun had been around in one form or another since the early 20th century, but is wasn’t until the late 1990s that the cylinder received an extra two charge holes, bumping the capacity by 33 percent to eight rounds.

The current J-frame offerings, in 8-shot .22LR or 7-shot .22WMR form, combined with newer rimfire loads designed with personal defense in mind like the Federal .22LR Punch or Speer’s .22 Magnum Gold Dot Short Barrel, offer a viable alternative to the recoil sensitive or folks with infirmities that interfere with using a heavier caliber.

Meanwhile, in larger revolvers like Ruger’s Single Six and the medium frame Smith & Wesson 617, the larger cylinder can swallow as many as 10 shots of .22LR. This is a capacity equivalent to most rimfire semi-auto pistols, as well as delivering the same potential benefits to the double action trigger pull as the eight shot N-frame.

Click through to RTWT...

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Ballistic Testing...

At the range yesterday doing ballistic gel shooting with a few loads in two different chamberings, one of which was .327 Federal Magnum. The test gun was this Taurus 327 TORO with a Gideon Judge optic.

As a control round, I used a .32 H&R Magnum Hornady 80gr FTX Critical Defense. The Critical Defense did not expand through 4LD, and I didn't expect that ti would. It came to rest backwards in the gel block, 13" in.

The .327 Federal Hydra-Shok 85gr projectile, normally an iffy expander in 4LD, proved that even an iffy projectile can expand if you put enough ass behind it. It mushroomed nicely and came to rest, also base-first, at the 14" mark, just beyond the Hornady bullet.

The 100gr .327 Fed Gold Dot worked exactly as predicted: It expanded like a catalog photo and was found tangled in the denim on the far side of the 16" gel block. This is pretty much identical to what you get from 9mm 124gr +P GDHP and HST, which are pretty much the current gold standards, and it's what the load was designed to emulate.

That's the load I'm going to sight the dot in with.

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BOOM

I've got a box of .327 Federal Magnum 85gr Hydra-Shok that I ordered from Lucky Gunner a while back that I keep meaning to chrono and do some terminal ballistic testing on.

The Hydra-Shok is generally a dated design and not a projectile I'd normally recommend as a first choice, but the claimed muzzle velocity for these things is 1400fps and I have a working theory that even Hydra-Shoks'll do okay if you put enough ass behind them, and the 45,000psi .327 Fed cartridge has plenty of ass.

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Space Cowboy

One of the silliest lines I've heard regarding the Taurus TORO revolvers is "A red dot on a revolver? Isn't that like putting a spoiler on a horse-drawn wagon?"

No, it is not.

It is like putting a GPS in a horse-drawn wagon. A wagon may be slower than a car, sure, but it still needs to know how to get to its destination.

On that note, here are some thoughts of mine on life with the Taurus 856 TORO...

Tab Clearing...

• A look at the retro-styled Heritage Roscoe, to tide you over until the next issue of RECOIL: Concealment hits newsstands this month with my feature-length review.


• The Day the US Conquered the British Empire: June 6th, 1944


• Tightening Your Accuracy and Performance Standards

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Dots Don't Go Everywhere...Yet

I'm on record as mentioning I'm not a huge fan of the 3" J-frame, and that steel J-frames in general don't have a ton of applicability in my world.

Small revolvers fall into one of two categories in my world. Either they're a pocket/ankle gun, or they're a belt gun. For me, a 3" J-frame is too long for a pocket, and a steel-framed one is too heavy for a pocket. I've pocket-carried a S&W 432 (and a 442 before it) for almost 25 years now, but a steel gun would make my winter coat hang funny.

"But you could carry a 3" J-frame in a belt holster!" you say. Well, sure. But I could also carry a Detective Special, a Taurus 856/327, or a 3" Smith & Wesson K-frame in a belt holster with no more real difficulty and get a 20% ammunition capacity boost. In fact I have been carrying an 856 TORO for a year now.

This is what makes the new R.O.C. J-frame red dot mount from Shield Arms a real head-scratcher for me. It mounts to a Smith J-frame using the sideplate screws, but all the photos show it on a Model 442. That effectively makes the gun too big for a pocket and anyone who's actually carried an ankle gun should get a good belly laugh out of the idea of sticking an MRDS in the most dirt-and-lint collecting spot where it's possible to tote a blaster. (Even IWB, the 507k on my TORO needs blowing clean every few days.)

I guess you could use it to mount a dot on a belt-carried 3" 640 or something, but all the J-frame revolvers in Smith & Wesson's current catalog lineup that could really benefit from a small red dot... think the 3" Model 60, Model 63, or Model 317 ...all have adjustable rear sights, which means that they're already compatible with an Allchin-type scope mount.

I mean, I get that red dots are awesome, but we're a ways off from a functional MRDS solution for pocket guns.

(H/T to Gorillafritz.)

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Is Novelty a Necessity?

In a post about the Heritage Roscoe on social media, a reader asked what the new offering from Heritage would do that a double-action revolver hadn't already done, or if maybe it would do it in a different or better way.

That got me to thinking on how a segment of the market demands novelty as the justification for a new model.

In the case of the Roscoe, you only have to look at the name of the manufacturer, "Heritage", to realize that cutting edge novelty isn't exactly their milieu. After all, their bread and butter offerings are inexpensive plinkers that are functional and cosmetic clones of a 151-year-old revolver design.

Sometimes the retro is the point. Colt has done reissues of their WWI and WWII era M1911 and M1911A1. Springfield Armory sold bunches of their "Milspec" model, so much so that they brought the GI, or as we called it in the shop back then, the Even Milspeccer Milspec.

In the case of the Roscoe, what it does is bring the basic blued-steel 5-shot snub-nosed revolver back to market at a reasonable price. Smith & Wesson still offers the Model 36 Classic, but the MSRP on that thing is better than double that of the Roscoe. 

Of course, fifteen or twenty years ago there would have been no call for a gat like this because its main competition would have been the ocean of used Model 36's, but these days even J-frames aren't immune to price pressures from collectibles. A Chiefs Special that's priced like the Roscoe is gonna be a beater, and one that looks like all shiny and new is going to present the owner with that classic quandary: How much do you want to shoot a gun when a turn ring on the cylinder can knock a Benjamin off the value?

You could do like a lot of collectors: Put the pristine Chiefs Special in the safe and buy a beater 36 to shoot. Or you could buy a shiny Roscoe and shoot it.

New revolver from Heritage Mfg...

Fifty rounds of 130gr FMJ, seven yards, double action

Just announced at NRAAM: The Heritage Roscoe. It's a classic 5-shot .38 Special snubby, in carbon steel with checkered wood grips. (Basically, it's the return of the Taurus 85 in a retro format.) Suggested retail is well under four hundo, so street prices should be quite reasonable.

Look for a review in the next issue of Concealment magazine. 

The stocks are pretty, but you'll want to swap them out for carry use.

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Hey, look!

Speedloaders are the most popular and have been for decades now. It’s important, however, to distinguish between competition- and carry-oriented loaders. HKS speedloaders, for instance, are sometimes derided for not being very speedy, but they hold on to cartridges like grim death. I once had a five-shot .44 Spl. HKS loader—the Model 44CA, intended for the Charter Arms Bulldog—roll around forgotten and neglected in the bottom of a purse for years before I fished it out, all five rounds still firmly clamped. Sure, with the HKS you need to insert the rounds and then twist a knob to release them into the cylinder, while the fastest compe-tition speedloaders literally launch the cartridges when inserted, but they can also launch the cartridges in the pouch, pocket or purse where the speedloader is carried. Save the gamer carriers for the games, where they excel.

Remember, it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll have to reload your wheelgun in a defensive scenario, but if you do, the most important thing is that the cartridges be there in your carrier. Otherwise, you’re that guy with the loose rounds in your pocket. Don’t be that guy.

A Model 19-5 with two types of speedloaders: the classic HKS 10A and an all-rubber MaxFire.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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Finding the Dot

Gideon Optics sent one of their Judge mini red dots to mount on the Taurus 327 Defender TORO, so we'll see how it does when screwed to the topstrap only an inch or so away from the 40,000 psi detonations of full house .327 Federal Magnum loads.

Of course, revolver duty is actually a lot kinder than the whiplash these optics experience when mounted on the reciprocating slide of a self-loading pistol.

I've been using a dot-sighted revolver for about a year now, and I had to learn a different technique of finding the dot than the one I have used for years with semiautos, but that's gonna take a whole post of its own...

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Git Gud Scrub

Narrow Focus Cartridge

Taurus 327 Defender TORO

When the .357SIG cartridge was still in fairly common law enforcement use, just the mention of it was a red flag for a certain sort of old-timer on the gun forums.

Someone would refer to it as "Designed to be the equivalent of .357 Magnum, but in a semiautomatic pistol" and they'd be buried under an avalanche of replies from posters with user names like "WheelgunFan" and "SixFerShur" and "Cowboy Bart" pointing out that the revolver load could fire 158gr and 180gr and even 200gr bullets at velocities that were simply not possible with the bottlenecked pistol cartridge.

Which was fine and good, but the .357SIG was intended to duplicate one specific .357 Magnum loading for one specific purpose: The 125gr JHP load that had such a good reputation with some law enforcement departments, and especially Highway Patrols.

Similarly, the .327 Federal Magnum is not designed to be a "do everything" cartridge. It's designed to do one thing, and that's offer pretty much identical terminal ballistics to the 9x19mm 124gr +P loads that are pretty much the benchmark loads for law enforcement today.

.38 Special doesn't do that. People tend to equate .38 Special and 9mm, but the fact of the matter is that 9mm... especially in +P form ...is a lot closer to .357 Magnum than it is to the old .38 Special.

Witness the following maximum pressures:

• .38 Special: 17,000psi
• .38 Spl +P: 20,000psi
• 9x19mm:  35,000psi
• 9mm +P:  38,500psi
• .357 Mag: 35,000psi

The problem is that .357 Magnum is limited to five shots in small frame revolvers. So the .327 Federal Magnum was designed to offer six shots in a Ruger SP-101 (or the newer Taurus 327) that gave terminal performance equivalent to the common medium-velocity 125gr .357 loads... and, by extension, the 9mm +P 124gr. It does this by virtue of operating at higher pressures (40k psi) and the 100gr .312" bullets having slightly greater sectional density than the 125gr .357" ones.

I suppose if you really wanted to hunt rabbits or target shoot with a .327 Fed revolver, you could load it with .32 S&W Long or .32 H&R Mag, but the .327 Federal Magnum cartridge itself is really only intended to do one thing.

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Differently Triggered

We live and we learn... Well, hopefully we do. I know people who haven't changed an opinion in years, or even decades. In my most recent column at Shooting Illustrated, I talk about triggers...

"This is going to be another in an intermittent series of columns examining the various topics on which I’ve changed my mind over the last 20 years or so as a result of being hip-deep in the defensive-pistol world.

This particular column is going to be all about triggering people by discussing what I’ve learned about triggers over that time—and why what I thought I knew about triggers before then was wrong, possibly even counterproductive..."

I really wish I'd gotten the Model 19-5 onto Denny Reichard's bench before he passed. I suppose I can just swap factory springs back in myself, but it ain't the same.