Cylinder Moving Out Of Lock When Closed

I recently purchased a very lightly used Taurus 96 .22 LR and it arrived today at my dealer and after an inspection I took it home. After a bit of cleaning I noticed something that has me a bit concerned. When the gun is closed and when it is in lockup, there is a just a bit of rotational cylinder play to the left or right, just a hair, between 1/32 inch and 1/64 inch. I judged this to be acceptable, its a little bit more play than my Rossi .357, but it seems fine. Double action trigger is very comfortable, right about 6.25 lbs (I measured it with some freeweights and wire). There is no front to back cylinder wiggle (end-shake).

What worries me is this: When the hammer is down and the cylinder is closed, with moderate hand pressure I can cause the cylinder to rotate about a 1/4 inch in one direction, its not enough to move the cylinder to a different chamber, but more like the cylinder stop isn't catching the cylinder completely. When I cock the hammer or pull the trigger the cylinder moves back into alignment. The only occurs with two cylinders. When the gun is in lockup, hammer back, I cannot do this.

Is this a situation that would require immediate repair or is it acceptable if I have no problems with lead shaving or accuracy?

UPDATE - This thread seems to describe a similar situation, where cleaning is advised: http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=536939 I'll give that a shot, and post an update.

UPDATE: Fixed!

I took everyone's advice and give the pistol as complete of a teardown as I could and cleaned every nook and crannie. The problem wasn't gunk in the internals but actually the bolt spring (at least that is what I think it is called). When I removed the screw located in front of the trigger guard on on the bottom of the pistol (set at a 45 degree angle) that screw released a tiny spring and rod that were connected. It looked to me like someone had trimmed some coils off of this, which is funny because none of the screws are buggered and everything else looks untouched. This bolt spring actually looks like a miniature takedown detent and spring from an AR-15 lower.

Well I can't get the part from Numrich, and I may be able to get it from Taurus without having to send my pistol in. So what I did was I cut the head off of a finishing nail and inserted it in the channel between the frame screw and the bolt spring so that it will take up the slack from missing coils and therefore put a put a bit more pressure on the cylinder stop. The revolver now stays in lock on all cylinders, and functions normally. I'll call Taurus and see if I can't get them to send me a replacement, because while this works, I'd rather have factory parts in the gun and not my own rigging.

One of the problems is that the part that I assume is the bolt spring is not shown in its proper orientation in the schematic either in the Taurus Manual (page 21, part 22) http://www.taurususa.com/pdf/revolver-manual.pdf or on Numrich's site (part 21) http://www.gunpartscorp.com/catalog/Products.aspx?catid=9159 This may not even be the correct part at all. If anyone has an original manual or knows what this part is called so that I can order it, I'd really appreciate it. Again, thanks for all the advice, if this gun is half as accurate as it looks, I'm going to love it.

Well OF, here's the promised range report.

Range Report:
Well, I took the revolver out this weekend to see how she’d do but unfortunately I had some real trouble with it. I could not get a single cylinder full of ammunition to fire without a misfire. It’s a real shame, as the gun itself is great, nice balance, good sights, super trigger, accurate, but not reliable.
At first I tried firing Federal Bulk Pack out of it with the adjustable trigger set on its lightest setting which is right around 6.25 pounds but I only got 4 out of 6 cylinders to fire. I thought perhaps I had the trigger set too lightly, so I adjusted it to the maximum tension, which took the trigger up to about 12 lbs, but it had no effect on the ignition rate. I dug out almost all of my 22 ammo and tried ten different varieties and never got a full cylinder to fire, the closest I came was 5 out of 6 for Federal AutoMatch and Remington Subsonic. Other brands varied from between 2 and 4 cylinders firing and the only consistency was inconsistency. The brands I attempted were as follows:

Aguila Super Colibri
Winchester XPert 22
Winchester 555
Winchester Super X Subsonic
CCI Stinger
CCI Mini-Mag
Remington Golden Bullet
Remington Subsonic
Federal Champion 510
Federal Bulk Pack
Federal AutoMatch

The accuracy of the pistol was very good, by the time I got around to checking accuracy I was very aggravated and wasn’t doing my best shooting, but grouping was very consistent, and at about 8 yards in poor light with mixed ammo I was able to keep my shots in about a inch and half group using a shooting stick. It shot a little high and to the right, but I’m sure I can adjust the sights to take that into account. After about 50 rounds extraction was a bit difficult, but I never had to resort to using anything other than my hands to eject the spent casings. That just could be how a 22 revolver works, as I haven’t shot one in years, or more likely its due to using the Super Colibris which are a bit shorter than a standard 22 LR, and would leave residue in the chambers that I put the longer 22 LR rounds into.

Unless anyone knows of anything that I could try that would fix this myself, I’m going to have to send the revolver into Taurus and see if they can repair it. We’ll see how long it takes and if they actually fix the problem. I’ve heard mixed reviews on Taurus’s customer service, so we’ll see. I really, really, hope they can fix it, as I really like this thing and want to love it.
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Here’s an image of the inside of the frame where you can see the firing pin, it’s slightly off center but seems to be flush with the frame. I thought it might be an issue with the firing pin being too short, but if its flush with the frame, I don’t think that is likely.

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Here’s an image of the cylinder, there are a lot of machining and tooling marks on the face of the cylinder, and I don’t know if this is normal. Some of the indentations seem to match up with the firing pin, but I can’t imagine the firing pin could leave those kinds of marks, and I don’t see any damage to the chamber walls. Also I’d expect to see that on a hard used gun but the internals and externals (with the exception of this part) seem very close to pristine.

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Here’s an image of the mainspring, you can see that I’ve adjusted the screw that changes the angle on the mainspring (thereby changing the trigger pull) to the maximum pressure, but it didn’t seem to have any effect on my ignition rate.

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Here’s another close-up of my cylinder, with some spent casings. You’ll notice the tooling marks on the face of the cylinder and the very light strikes on the casings. These casings were removed and reinserted so the position of the marks are not consistent.

David E, you are right, and I should have caught that. I ended up scratching through that description and writing in "chamber" on the work order I sent out today along with the revolver to Taurus. We'll see how long it will take to fix. If FedEx doesn't steal it, and Taurus has the parts and skill to repair it, I'll be happy.