Is End Shake Desirable?

[FrankB]

It didn’t have end shake when I gave it to him, so I’m assuming he’d have to cut the yoke barrel. My son bought a couple of 100 round packs of really hot .357 magnum rounds, and gave me one. I blasted through the entire bag as quickly as I could reload, and didn’t experience any thermal expansion. Just lots of laughs and hoots from the usual suspects at the range. I called the go between today, and told him NO END SHAKE. If it does have end shake, I have a yoke stretching tool. There aren’t many gunsmiths around here, at least none that I know of.

[FrankB]

Got the gun back today, and it’s perfecto! I need another set of boot grips, but they’re on the way. Shot Federal 158gr JSP .357 magnum.
Barrel lengths on revolvers are 3”, 2.5”, and the lonely 4” that was swapped out. There might be some undetectable end shake (I can either feel nor measure any), and B/C gap is a tad under .006”. PERFECT! It’s amazing that .5” can look so much longer, and 1” can appear so much shorter.

[That Guy]

If it does have end shake, I have a yoke stretching tool.

Does it take a lot of skill to use one of those correctly? I just looked it up and Brownells would be willing to sell me one, and the price isn't even that bad.

[FrankB]

Does it take a lot of skill to use one of those correctly? I just looked it up and Brownells would be willing to sell me one, and the price isn't even that bad.

To be honest, I simply took a pipe cutter, and ground the cutting wheel down to 1/16”. I use the closest fitting drill bit as a mandrel, and go slow. It works wonders on older gun.
@That Guy. Here’s the tutorial I originally used:

[OlongJohnson]

There is also the shim option.

https://triggershims.com/

A lot harder to screw up.

[That Guy]

Yeah, improvising a tool to do something I've never done before and can't reverse doesn't seem like a good idea. If I'll stretch the crane, I'd better do it with an appropriate tool.

Brownells does also sell Power Custom's cylinder bearings. The thought occurred to me too that the likelihood of messing up would probably be reduced by using those. Unless there's more to it than disassemble gun, add spacer, reassemble gun? We're talking about a Ruger revolver in my case.

[FrankB]

Shimming requires more disassembly. Stretching is simply a matter of separating the cylinder and yoke. It is important to have the proper mandrel size, or in my case, plenty of drill bits to choose from. As far as the tool is concerned, Brownell’s tool is just a pipe cutter with the cutting wheel ground wider. Ordinary pipe cutters are cheap. The cutting wheel pops out with one C clip, and can quickly be ground down by chucking it in a drill, and running it against concrete. I have used shims in the past, and they work fine.

[RevolverJIM]

To install the end shake shims, it's necessary to completely disassemble the cylinder.

Be careful when removing the ejector rod, on newer S&Ws it's a "righty/loosy, lefty/tighty" thread.

[Wingate's Hairbrush]

On a S&W, endshake is desirable and necessary for proper function, and deliberately built in to the design; approximately .001" is ideal.

Stephanie's Kuhnhausen quote surprised me; I distinctly recall the shop manual stipulating that endshake didn't need repairing until around .005" to .006", but don't have the book in front of me. Kuhnhausen suggests combining the yoke stretch and shim methods for best results: stretch to .003" endshake remaining, then use a .002" shim.

Stretching is the factory method. To each their own, but proper tools and training I'd argue are the way to go with many revolver fixes, and this is one of them. For instance, to do it correctly, you can't just stretch the yoke and call it good; you're supposed to slightly overstretch it, then use a yoke face cutter to remove a little material and have a properly squared yoke face.

[RevolverJIM]

And it's surprising how "unfinished/unsquare" some yoke faces are.