How To Evaluate A Used Revolver

Safety Checks

These should be instant dealbreakers, since they could lead to dangerous safety issues. Any kind of structural crack should be a no-go. Most commonly, you’ll find the problem manifested as a 6 o’clock crack on the forcing cone, or running lengthwise through the frame just south of the rear sight.

Here, some users confuse the seams of a revolver’s side plate or trigger group with a crack. As a general note, cracks are typically irregular, whereas the seams of removable pieces tend to be continuous curves or unbroken straight lines.

You also want to make sure the previous owner didn’t muck anything up with a sloppy trigger job. When the hammer is cocked, it should stay cocked. Wiggle it with moderate pressure back and forth and side to side to test sear engagement. If the hammer slips and comes forward, that’s bad news!

More insidious are barrel bulges. Some will be ridiculously obvious — a ballooned-out section of tube often indicates a previous owner stuck a bullet and then shot another one behind it. In such cases, the barrel’s strength and accuracy are immediately questionable. With particularly bad examples, you’ll be able to feel the dimensional differences.

I also like to check the cylinder gap. Ideally, you should just be able to see daylight between the forcing cone and end of the cylinder. Between 0.004″ and 0.009″ is ideal. If the gap is tighter, you’re likely going to be encountering sluggish operation of the cylinder as it gets fouled. If the gap is much looser, the shooter will encounter velocity loss as a result of a larger quantity of escaping gas. If the gap is particularly egregious, sometimes the case when a shade tree “gunsmith” changes out a barrel, you could get velocity loss significant enough to stick a bullet.

If you don’t have a set of feeler gauges, here’s a trick that works for me. A dollar bill is about 0.004″ thick. If you can just get a dollar bill into the cylinder gap, it is ideal. Fold the dollar bill over once real flat, and the creased corner will be just under 0.009″ — about your max acceptable range. Supposing you can wiggle a credit card between the cylinder and forcing cone, the gap is far too large.

Also, if the cylinder can be wiggled forward and backward by more than about 0.002″ when closed, it has end shake issues that will need to be corrected.