Ruger Redhawk Cylinder Throats

[silhouette_shooter]

Just picked up a spankin' new Redhawk in 41 Rem Mag. 4 of the throats are right on the money, the other two are just a little undersize. Those 2 undersize throats shoot low, the other 4 group less than 1.5" at 25 yards no problem.

Don't really want to send back to Ruger since past experience has proven that mediocre accuracy meets their standards.

Just wondering if there's a gunsmith out there, (I'm sure there is), that specializes in Redhawks.

Other than that I really like the revolver, .

[RobS]

Possibly this forum member:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/member.php?29606-DougGuy

[Silver Jack Hammer]

DougGuy

[06ackley]

DougGuy did both my 357 and 45colt Redhawks and did an excellent job.Just send the cylinder assembly to him and let him work his magic.

[44man]

Agree but a slotted rod with fine wet or dry paper and a short time to fit will work too.
Doug is the best but I bet he does a lot of hand lapping too.

[DougGuy]

Actually I do very little hand lapping and I quit using the slotted aluminum shaft and graduated to Acro laps, machined on my lathe as needed for whatever caliber they are needed for.

The reamer, tightly piloted is the trick. Getting the tightest pilot bushing you can in there is THE trick to turning out throats that can be held within .0002" of each other. Obviously the pilot has to be less than .0005" difference between the throat and the pilot bushing to maintain these tolerances at the finished job. I like to cut the throat with the reamer, and do as little follow up lapping as I can because the throats remain more perfectly round at this point.

The Acro lap is an expanding mandrel lap that as you tighten the end of it, it expands the diameter of the mandrel, and it cuts very precisely in the throat and it's very consistent. The throat remains parallel with no chance of it becoming belled, and it remains round.

Sometimes I will lap an ovaled or belled throat just to get a pilot bushing to fit snugly rather than drop back to the next smaller bushing. This ensures concentricity as the reamer cuts because you can't stay on center if that pilot is allowed any slop at all.

I have a small drill press that I am probably going to convert over and make a special jig JUST for the purpose of lapping throats with. It will maintain the lap being perpendicular to the cylinder better than a cut off case head will.

Ruger cylinders are tough animals. The steel in them does not like to cut easily, the metallurgy of it's grain structure is that it likes to pull and tear out from the walls rather than cut smoothly, you get some that have weird spots in them that don't want to cut at all like the throat next to it, but you won't get a really smooth cut with a reamer no matter how sharp or fine the cutting edges are on it. It's Ruger steel. Should have made the Titanic out of it! They get this stuff in on rail cars from the mill in long 2" or 2 1/2" diameter rods, it's some specially treated alloy that is also proprietary to Ruger. Cleaning up tool marks behind the reamer just comes with the territory, it's simply the nature of the work. Ruger stainless cuts really nicely by comparison.

[DougGuy]

OP your cylinder is typical of Ruger production, not sure how they do the RH now but used to be they used a Hitachi machine with 3 reamers chucked into it, they would gang ream 3 holes at one time, index the cylinder over and ream the remaining 3. As the cutters wore they cut smaller and smaller throats and when Ruger replaced them, they might replace the worst worn one or two and leave the third cutter until it wore too small to keep using. Result of this, you have cylinders with 3 "pairs" of throats, each pair cut by the same cutter, and it is very typical to see cylinders with uneven throats in pairs because they had 3 cutters of all different diameters from being in differing stages of wear.

The thing to do with your cylinder is make all the throats even, and this will make the smaller ones match the others when this is done. Normally for .41 caliber I would use a .4125" reamer and it allows the shooter to size boolits to .412" and this alone will cure it from leading (if leading was caused by undersize boolits) and usually shrinks groups noticeably. It will make each throat shoot more to the same point of aim when they are held within .0002" of each other. If you will send a PM I can give you more information if you'd like your cylinder throats fixed.

[azrednek]

Don't really want to send back to Ruger since past experience has proven that mediocre accuracy meets their standards.



Don't bother sending it to Ruger. I got a new 45 Convertible Blackhawk and the cylinder mouths were all undersized. No two in a cylinder were the same size. I spoke with two different Ruger reps at the last NRA Convention held in Phoenix. At best Ruger would test fire with factory jacketed ammo. If it met their accuracy specs they would just send it back to me. One Ruger rep was at least understanding, claiming to be a former "lead slinger"..

Before having the cylinders reamed to .452 it shot jacketed ok but lead was all over the target. Afterward the shot to shot accuracy with lead remarkably improved. I still need to get the forcing cone elongated to remove a tight spot to get the maximum accuracy.

[silhouette_shooter]

Yeah I can't believe Ruger when it comes to cylinder throats, they charge top dollar for those Redhawks and considering the trigger they put in the gun you would think they'd pay extra attention to the rest of the gun. Unbelievable.

[azrednek]

Ruger doesn't have any real competition to their single action revolvers. I imagine it would only cost a buck or two more to get it right. In the early 70's I got a junker 30 Carbine Blackhawk. Ruger bent over backwards to make it right shipping a new replacement to my dealer. Included was a letter of apology and details of how it was inspected. After the sad 45 Convertible Ruger didn't even bother to answer my letter.

[silhouette_shooter]

Thanks everyone . . . 1 ea Ruger Redhawk cylinder East bound (on way to DougGuy). Really like the gun, Wolff Spring kit made the trigger workable. Still a wee bit heavy but it's a heavy gun so it's OK. Max load of magnum gunpowder behind a 210 Hornady XTP makes for a very manageable gun/ load combination.

[DougGuy]

OP your cylinder came in here not looking too bad but two throats like you said were wonky, one of them would take a .410" pilot smoothly until it got 3/4 of the way through then it bottomed out on a ridge or a burr with a solid metallic sounding "thunk." Rather than drop back to a smaller pilot, I elected to lap this hole until it accepted the .410" pilot all the way through so it would remain concentric. You should have no more fliers now unless they are called at the firing line. I could not hold your finished diameter to .410" if a .410" pilot already goes through the holes. Throats are all very evenly sized and are right at .412" which will still shoot j-words quite accurately and should you shoot cast you should probably size at .411" although it is possible to hone out a sizer until the boolit fits your cylinder throats with a light drag, *THIS* is the perfect fitment of boolit to throat and is easily achieved, and this would only be needed with the hardest of alloys.

A full house load with cast boolits BHN18 or less will see the pressure of firing obturate the boolit to the size of the throats before it even leaves the cylinder. It will do this with your XTP bullet as well. With enough pressure behind the bullet/boolit, every sixgun becomes a 6 port sizing die. This is why it is so important to have the throats all even with each other. It doesn't matter nearly as much what the throats are sized to as long as they are even and close to but not smaller than groove diameter.

With the trigger spring lightened and the throats done, if the forcing cone is good you should have yourself a right good shooting Redhawk.

[DocSavage]

Have a Ruger Bisley that needed the chamber mouths opened up to .452 as from the factory they were .449-.450.
Called Ruger on the problem after asking how a .452 bullet passing thru a .450 chamber mouth is expected to engage the .452 rifling. Ruger said that the specs for the chamber mouths were "normal",had a local smith open them up to the right diameter.

[azrednek]

Seems like I'm hearing it to often about undersized and inconsistent chamber mouths on new Rugers. My older Security-Six and three-screw Blackhawk 357/9MM Convertible chamber mouths are all near perfect. I can only speculate that it is due to a manufacturing short cut or simply Ruger don't give a dam. Anybody have any idea why??

[Markbo]

Doug just to piggy back on this a little I have an FA 97 that all cylinder throats will pass a .410" pin gauge but a .411" will not pass through..just light finger pressure, not trying to force the pin. Should I size cast boolits to .411"?

[.452dia]

I Have a Ruger Alaskan that I bought new and had to send back to Ruger before I ever fired it. The crane fit and alignment was visibly off and the chamber/barrel alignment was off. Ruger Customer Service was great and I had the gun back in 10 days with a new crane. I haven't fired this gun much yet but I plan on using heavy lead bullets with gas checks. Would a gun with a short barrel like the Alaskan and in a caliber like 454 benefit from having the cylinder throats reamed? The gun is not made to shoot at distance so what other advantages would this provide?

[apen]

Seems like I'm hearing it to often about undersized and inconsistent chamber mouths on new Rugers. My older Security-Six and three-screw Blackhawk 357/9MM Convertible chamber mouths are all near perfect. I can only speculate that it is due to a manufacturing short cut or simply Ruger don't give a dam. Anybody have any idea why??

I think I would rather them come that way than oversized and inconsistent. At least with undersized throats, you can open them up to the size you want for not a whole lot of money. There is probably less than 1% of ruger revolver owners that cast boolits and know what size throat they need. If they were all as discerning, they wouldn't be a sub 1000.00 revolver. It wouldn't make sense for ruger to do anything different than they are doing now. People don't shoot groups anymore...they blow up watermelons at 10 yards.

[DougGuy]

Would a gun with a short barrel like the Alaskan and in a caliber like 454 benefit from having the cylinder throats reamed? The gun is not made to shoot at distance so what other advantages would this provide?

It sorta goes like this.. In a perfect world, the dimensions of a good revolver read like a funnel, with the larger dimensions being at the case head, and everything along the boolit path getting smaller and smaller until it reaches the muzzle. This way, the boolit is swaged down bit by bit but it always seals in the bore. The proper relation between throat, boolit and bore, is to have the boolit .001" to .002" larger than groove diameter, so it can seal when it enters the bore, the throats should be .0005" to .001" larger than boolit diameter so they don't swage the boolit down smaller and this way it gets presented to the forcing cone sufficiently large enough to afford the forcing cone to wipe away a tiny bit of the front of the boolit as it turns the cylinder into alignment and lets the boolit travel into the bore.

If you cannot slide your boolit of choice (sized as you intend to load it) into the cylinder throats from the front with nothing more than a light drag fit with finger pressure, the throats are likely too tight and in this case the boolits are swaged down to throat diameter on firing and now you possibly have an undersized boolit going into the bore. Reaming the throats fixes this, and also relieves any increase in pressure that might be cause by firing through tight throats which, if you think about it, since they are smaller than boolit diameter, is just like firing the boolits into a known obstruction! Of course pressure will rise in this scenario.

Secondly, once the throats are all brought within .0002" of each other, the uneven pressure caused by uneven throats is removed from the picture, and even throats will help groups because they make the recoil that the gun produces more consistent from shot to shot.

I have often said that how even the throats are with one another is the MOST important part, even more important than the actual size, because you can always size to a drag fit in the throats. You can't size to uneven throats.

[DougGuy]

Doug just to piggy back on this a little I have an FA 97 that all cylinder throats will pass a .410" pin gauge but a .411" will not pass through..just light finger pressure, not trying to force the pin. Should I size cast boolits to .411"?

No. In a nutshell if you want to shoot .411" you should get the throats all sized to .4115" or .412" all that it does when you load a larger than throat diameter boolit is raise pressures and increase felt recoil when the boolit is swaged down by the throats.

[azrednek]

If they were all as discerning, they wouldn't be a sub 1000.00 revolver. It wouldn't make sense for ruger to do anything different than they are doing now. People don't shoot groups anymore...they blow up watermelons at 10 yards.

I have to disagree (politely of coarse) that Ruger could do a better job. I'm no factory technician or any kind of an expert. I'll be the first to say my gunsmithing skills leave a lot to be desired. Seems to me though the extra step in a mass produced handgun just can't be that expensive in my mind keeping it a sub thousand dollar item.

As I mentioned in a previous post. My older Rugers are near perfect. Ruger apparently did do it right at one time and obviously have the know-how. Some engineer likely devised a way of saving at best a buck or two.

[DougGuy]

The design is not where the flaws are. As reamers wear down from use, they cut smaller and smaller holes. Ruger saves money by letting them wear down until they will no longer shoot a factory bullet to their satisfaction, then they are changed out, one at a time. The most worn cutter is replaced, while the others that are not worn down too far to use, are allowed to remain on the tooling until they are worn. Now you have one new reamer, and two worn ones cutting throats. Each cutter plunges through a charge hole and cuts the throat, 3 at a time, then the cylinder indexes over one hole and again three throats are cut. Each reamer cuts a pair of throats adjacent to each other. You have 3 pairs of throats, each pair sized according to how much wear is on the reamer that cut them. I don't know how they cut throats currently, but for many years they were gang reamed 3x at a time in the fashion I described above.

It's quite common to see 1970s and 1980s SBH cylinders with a pair of .432" .4305" and .429" throats respectively. It's also possible that many were made with 3 rather even pairs of throats, so that tells me that they did indeed change out tooling on all 3 chucks sometimes but these are the exception and not the typical production.

Late model BH convertibles are usually fairly consistent with .451" throats on the .45 ACP cylinder and .4505" or even .450" on the .45 Colt cylinder. The roll marked Bisley cylinders in .45 Colt convertibles are typically .450"