S&W cylinder takedown

[JB White]

Just a few pondering thoughts about a procedure I'm sure most of us have done more than once.

Understanding it has been SOP to place a few spent shells into the cylinder prior to turning the assembly off the ejector rod, how much actual benefit is there in the practice? Given the tight tolerances of the star/ejector and the alignment pins, do the cases actually help? The cases allow for a lot of room using a soft construction to boot. Seems the edges of the star would have to give way and the pins would suffer before the slack in the brass would be taken up and come into play.

This came up in conversation a few nights ago. Not having a revolver to pull apart at the lodge a few of us were left trying to recall the procedure from memory. Had us all doing this ->

Then this after a while ->

[Tuna]

I have taken more then a few cylinders apart over the years and have never used any cases in the cylinder. Never had any problems putting them back together.

[M1Garandy]

If memory serves, at least some of the earlier S&W's only had one pin for the extractor star to index on.

Also, the shaft on the extractor star has a groove in it that would prevent it from turning anyway as it engages with a projection in the bore of the cylinder.

Perhaps the fired cases are a belt and suspenders approach to keeping a tighter fit between the extractor star, ejector rod and cylinder when it is disassembled and reassembled repeatedly?

[JB White]

This is about as far as we got the other night

I looked at some books and at least Woods says to drop cases into the cylinder. I can't see where it matters aside from being possibly a little damaged vs. very damaged.