Cylinder reaming by Bob Mcleod

M

mec

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He is an engineer with Coleman Chemical in Chicago. Bought himself a .4525 cylinder reamer to fix the RUGER PROBLEM and found a commonsense way of paying for the thing. For a very nominal fee, he reams other peoples .45 ruger chambers.

Let me tell you, he's for real and handles a cylinder throat reamer like- well, like an engineer. what kind of effect this will have on your ruger is a matter of pot luck but my cylinder came back with a read out showing the pre- reamed measurements to be .4505 on three chambers and .4500 on the other three. Now they are all .452. I shot the groups in the attached picture with250 Houston cast RNFP Cowboy bullets over 8.5 unique. A 945 fps load from this barrel. the immediate improvement I could see was that the rather odd long throated forcing cone in this barrel no longer fills up wiht blow by lead. the groups are about the best I can do and no doubt the revolver will do better.

Reach Bob at rmcleod17@attbi.com
 
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yep Creeker. It's in last month's american handgunner. the standing up target was shot one and two handed and the best hits actually came from one handed shooting. Strange but true. AK calls these things "walking sticks."
 
MEC-

Your post is really pretty important. Ruger ought to be sued for poor quality control for some of what they ship. I just talked to a gunsmith who said he charges about $72 to ream cylinder throats, depending on just how long it takes. He said it was interesting that I'd ask about Ruger .45 throats, because he'd just received a customer's gun that had throats just a bit over .429". That's more like .44 Magnum territory than .45 Colt!!

I was prompted to ask by Brian Pearce's story on the .45 Colt in the present issue of, "Handloader". He said that reaming should be an easy job for any good gunsmith, but those don't grow on trees anymore! And, who wants to shell out maybe $75 for something that Ruger should have had right to begin with?

In this case, the dimensions are so far off that I wonder if that owner bought the Ruger at a store where dinglaling clerks took apart a couple of Rugers and put a .44 cylinder on a .45 by mistake...not sure if it would fit, but I've met young clerks who are stupid enough to do it.

By the way, the gunsmith said that his customer didn't ship the gun back to Ruger for repair because it would cost about $50 to do it, and he couldn't be sure they'd get it done right. This is not inclining me toward buying a Ruger .45, in spite of John Taffin's enthusiastic articles on how well his Ruger .45's shoot. I guess he got good ones, but what are the odds?

Lone Star
 
MEC-

Thank you for the kind words. At $25.00 plus $7.00 shiping and insurance, I obviously am not going to quit my day job!

I love .45 caliber firearms, and was unaware of the "throat problem until I bought my Blackhawk Bisley. The engineer in me just won't let me accept anything mechanical that is sub-par and I couldn't find a local 'smith to take care of the problem, so I bought the tooling. I've done quite a few now and the feed back has been very good. Thanks again
 
Nothing wrong with the prices MEC quotes. My gunsmith charged me 20.00 to ream cylinders and 12.00 to cut my forcing cone to 11 degrees. Thand for the info Mike.
 
I'm going to be checking out other bullets/loads in a leasurely sort of way and this will probably include some Dry Creek 262 keith types. It appears the the wierd measurements in the ruger are pretty universal but the effects of it are somewhat unpredicatable. Sometimes they shoot very well without any treatment.

An odd circumstance with this revolver is that it actually shot some loads BETTER with it's short factory barrel than with this long job. Now that the cylinder throats are optimum, it will be interesting to see if this is still the case. My modal groups run 1.5 and a bit over with acps and colts.
 
same song different bullet

This barrel dislikes the lyman 452424 SWC but did very well with this Hornady lead 255 over 8.5 unique. I may be starting to see a bit of accuracy advantage after reaming.
 
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Not exclusive to Ruger.
Have seen too many late Smiths with undersized chamber mouths and quite a few where they weren't even alike in the same cylinder.

Sam
 
I had a Ruger SBH Sam that had one throat larger than the rest. My gunsmith made a gauge to fit the larger throat and reamed the other 5 to match. This stopped the flyer I alway had with that gun. BTW the package arrived today. I'll get it unpacked tomorrow. Seems heavy?
 
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