Blammer - Gun Blog

Grummz loves revolvers. I’ve never been that partial to them myself, favoring nifty autoloaders, but I have to admit there’s something satisfying about a big metal gun.

This is his Dan Wesson .41 Magnum. When it shot it was great, but there were lots of misfires, either due to bad primers or to the gun’s “timing”. Grummz explained that timing was the synchronization of movement between the cylinder, trigger, hammer, and lock-up mechanism. As you pull the trigger back:

• the hammer starts to pull back
• the cylinder simultaneously rotates
• at a certain point, a tab of metal taps the side of the cylinder and starts to slide until it walls into one of the locking grooves, at which point the cylinder doesn’t move
• thus locked, the hammer soon afterwards falls forward and ignites the primer

Since there are 6 chambers in the cylinder, the timing for each chamber needs to be checked. On top of that, the alignment of the cylinder’s bore with the barrel should be dead center before the hammer drops. There are enough variations in the metalwork that it can be significantly different, so when buying a used gun you need to check every chamber.

The other thing Grummz told me to look out for is the gap between the cylinder and the barrel. Don’t want it too tight, nor too wide. The Dan Wesson revolvers are particularly cool in this regard, because the barrels are interchangeable. The barrel is held under tension inside the barrel shroud, which makes it a consistent and straight shooter. Seeing Grummz take it apart was particularly cool; he had a tool sort of like a spark plug gapper to determine when it was correct.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Gun Gallery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.