Ruined Revisited, and a Question

[Whitespider]

Well after slugging the cylinder and bore of my .45 Colt the other night I thought I’d do the same with one of my .357s.

A Colt King Cobra that has never shot worth a crap with any bullet or boolit, and consequently I rarely shoot it. I’ve heard that Colt .357 barrels typically run on the tight side but this is ridiculous, .3534-inch, and to add to the misery, the cylinder mouths run around .3593-inch.

Is this tight bore typical of Colt 38 caliber revolvers?

[leftiye]

Yup, fer a lot of them. .38s and .357s of colt parentage often have .355" grooves or smaller.

[Bret4207]

WOW! You gots issues. Have you ever tried a standard round nose 38 type boolit? You have a lot of swaging going on there and I would think a fairly soft RN design might give you the best shot at good shooting.

Failing that and if jacketed won;t shoot I'd either look for another barrel or trade it, but I'm not much of a Colt fan anyway.

[WHITETAIL]

Whitespider, I also have a King Cobra.
And I have found that the Lyman 358156
mould will shoot great out of mine.:redneck:

[bobk]

Whitespider,
Wow, that is a mismatch. Here's a question, though: is the barrel tightest right where it screws into the receiver? Myth is that this is a common problem. The barrel is torqued into the frame way too hard. The fix is to unscrew the barrel, and carefully face a really tiny amount off of the rear shoulder. Then screw it back in. If it's still a bear to get it straight up and down, take it back off and take off a wee bit more.

You can do this with a couple of short chunks of 2X4 to pad the vise jaws holding the barrel, and a piece of hardwood (hammer handle) to put in the cylinder opening in the frame, cylinder removed of course.

The other thing would be to make a lead lap to open up the area just ahead of the throat. That might be the easiest thing, if you're not comfortable doing major surgery on your revolver.

Bob K

[Whitespider]

Y'know, I don't feel I've much to lose. Lookin' back at my reloading records I've had the revolver for at least 22-years and have shot less than 5000 rounds through it. It really, really shoots bad! I even sent it back to Colt after the first 3-400 rounds because, THE BARREL UNSCREWED AND FELL OFF!

I've read the goods and the bads of fire lapping, this one might be the gun to experiment with. Kinda' doubt I can fire lap the barrel enough to mate the cilinder mouths though.