How to tell if your revolver is f'd...listen to it

A lot of guys love repeating the old myth that revolvers never jam. It’s true that a wheel gun won't give you a failure-to-feed or a stovepipe like a semi-auto, but they fail in a completely different, much more violent way. Revolvers are practically just giant, mechanical Swiss watches built out of hardened steel. They rely on an incredibly intricate sequence of gears and levers that have to move in absolute, perfect synchronization. When that synchronization breaks down, the gun falls out of time.

To understand what timing actually means, you have to look at the internal lockwork. When you pull the trigger on a double-action revolver, you are doing a massive amount of mechanical work. You're compressing the mainspring, but you're also pushing a tiny, hardened steel pawl called the "hand" upward through a slot in the frame. That hand catches a tiny, angled ledge on the back of the cylinder called the ratchet, or extractor star. As the hand pushes up, it forces the heavy steel cylinder to rotate. At the exact same time, a small metal tab in the bottom of the frame window—the cylinder stop—drops down, lets the cylinder spin, and then pops back up to catch the indexing notch machined into the outside of the cylinder.

The problem is rotational mass. If you shoot thousands of hot magnum rounds, or if you constantly act like a movie cowboy and violently flick the cylinder shut with a flick of your wrist, you damage that geometry. The sheer force of that heavy cylinder slamming to a halt batters the metal on those tiny ratchet teeth. The hand itself starts to wear down. Once that steel wears down by even a few thousandths of an inch, the hand no longer pushes the cylinder quite far enough.

When this happens, the cylinder stop fails to click into the indexing notch before the hammer drops. The chamber holding the live round is no longer perfectly aligned with the forcing cone at the rear of the barrel. When the cartridge detonates, the bullet leaves the cylinder and literally crashes into the flat edge of the barrel face instead of gliding smoothly down the bore. The kinetic energy violently shears chunks of lead and copper jacket off the bullet, blasting that high-pressure shrapnel sideways out of the cylinder gap. It ruins your accuracy, wrecks the forcing cone, and can easily embed shrapnel into the hands of anyone standing next to you on the firing line.

Testing the timing is a quiet workbench job. You ensure the gun is completely unloaded. You place a very light amount of drag on the cylinder with your thumb, and you slowly cock the hammer back into single-action. You need to listen closely. You should hear the distinct, metallic click of the cylinder stop locking into the notch before the hammer sears fully into the rearward position. If the hammer clicks backward and the cylinder still has slop in it, the gun is out of time. Fixing it usually requires a gunsmith to install an oversized hand and slowly file it down to fit perfectly. When I need to rebuild the guts of a wheel gun, I source my revolver internal parts and gunsmithing stones straight from [Brownells]. Stop flicking your cylinders shut and listen to the clicks, because a poorly timed revolver is a hand grenade waiting to happen.