S&W Model 21 TR Special bbl choke

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
OK, here are a couple of pix of reworking the bbl on my beautiful, but flawed, Model 21 Thunder
Ranch Special.

First, a shot of the original clocking of the barrel. This is after unscrewing the barrel, cleaning the threads
and mating faces and screwing back in until hand tight. Note that the front sight (blurry) is about 40
degrees short of clocking the front sight to vertical. THIS is why it had 0.004" thread choke. Model 21 original clocking-small.jpg

And, after trimming the bbl shoulder so it would clock up about 2 degrees short, adding blue loctite, and then clocking it to align
the front sight, I checked the back face with a 90 deg facing tool. Here is a shot of the first super light cut, just to see how the back
face was cut at the factory. NOT flat, or even close, but fairly square.

back of barrel 01 small.jpg

This is the worst thread choke I have run into, and this is the first one which did not spring back fully after the overtorqued situation
was solved. This gun still has about 0.001 of thread choke, which will have to be firelapped out. I have done or had done about
8 bbls and this is the first that didn't elastically snap back to normal. But, I never had one with 0.004 of choke, either. Most are .001
to .003, and are perfect after resetting the barrel.

IMO, few shoot lead bullets any more, and very few can shoot a decent group with ANY handgun, so the makers have decided that
the extra work to get a perfectly set up revolver will be money spent for zero customer impact. They are only slightly wrong about
that, some of us can tell the difference.

Bill
 
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