Originally Posted by
Sidheshooter
A couple of things might be worth considering. First off, when you are in the process of feeding rounds into the cylinder, your wheelie isn’t going totally vertical. In your first reload, you’re feeding more at 45 degrees, and there’s a hitch. Your second is more towards inversion of the chambers, and everything slides in smoothly, but I’d still find a way to get the cylinder going so the chambers are as vertical as possible, with the cylinder face parallel to the ground. Even with spring release speedloaders, it’s not a controlled feed: as soon as the rounds disengage from the loader, all you have is gravity to overcome friction. I use HKS loaders, so *all* I have is gravity—I don’t even have any token initial inertia with those things.
So I grip the cylinder during the active reload portion of my "speedload" so those holes are facing straight up. I use Ayoob’s ‘stressfire,’ as taught to me by Mas in the early 90s, FWIW.
As noted, if there is minor crud accumulation in one of the cylinder chambers, a 45-degree angle may not give gravity enough to overcome the extra resistance. Also, I chamber-check each of my carry rounds, including what goes into the (typically) 2 speedloaders pocketed for spare ammo, before putting them in the HKS’s. Modern ammo is pretty consistent, but I still have yet to see a box of name ammo without a round or two that are oddly crimped, or somehow slightly misshapen—even with "premium" ammo that’s been in production since Obama was another Hawaiian (eg. Fed 129 hydra-shok; in a box of 50, I’ll get 48 miniature faberge eggs, and two rounds that look like a child’s crayon drawing of a rocket ship...)
With cheap range fodder, you can’t check them all without making a part-time job of it, so I try not to get hung up (heh!) on practice reloads at the range with cheap stuff. A reload that hangs/delays with HP carry ammo is a session stopper for me, however, not that it really happens with anything bigger than a j-frame running stock rubber grips; those are just flat-out hard to speedload, and even more important to grip so the cylinder is vertical.
Anyhoo, combine a powder flake with an ever so slightly out of round round, and that 45 degree slide becomes impassible. Fortunately, lead is dense; gong vertical will allow almost anything that will fit into a chamber to drop in past minor crud and crimp weirdness.
JMO.