Is this amount of cylinder movement normal?

I'm no expert, but that sounds like alot of movement to me.


-T.

end shake

Too much. Needs shimming up.

Sounds normal. When you shoot, the gap isn't widening. The revolver moves backwards and closes the gap. Or so I think.

Orange_Magnum said:

Sounds normal. When you shoot, the gap isn't widening. The revolver moves backwards and closes the gap. Or so I think.

Click to expand...

That's how Nagant revolvers work. But they're the only ones.


-T.

.005" end shake seems a bit excessive to me.

Endshake should be .001" - .002". What you have is excessive. Powers makes shims to reduce endshake. They are sold through Brownells. Very easy to install. They come in 2 thicknesses I believe.

Revolver checkout: how to tell if a particular specimen is any good, THR member Jim March

Cranes & cylinders

Excessive end shake may due to either of two causes. The first is poor fitting at the factory and the revolver came out of the box that way. The second is due to wear. In the latter case there will be a groove in the bottom of the cylinder well that needs to be ground flat. The end of the arbor or yoke tube will also need squaring up. These two operations provide true mating surfaces to minimize further wear. Excess end shake will accelerate wear.

A variation in cylinder to barrel gap as the cylinder is rotated may be due to uneveness at the arbor/cylinder well inetrface, in which case the operation above will fix it.

It may also be due to the cylinder face being not quite square. In this case I would not worry about a 0.001 inch difference unless I seriously wanted to drive tacks at 100 yards.

The cylinder gap may be different on right and left sides due to the barrel breech face not being quite square. Again, I'd leave well enough alone.

Adding a 0.004 shim will remove 0.004 from the end shake, Assuming the arbor or yoke tube face and the cylinder well bottom are flat and squared up. If they need truing up, this may actually increase the end shake before you put the shims in. The shim kit will have several shims of 0.002 & 0.004 thickness. The shims are a hard grade of stainless that will wear better than the original metal.

details

The firng pin is supposed to be free to move as you describe.

The wear groove will be in the bottom of the cylinder well. This is in the cylinder, not the frame. To see it, the cylinder must be removed from the gun and the ejector assembly removed from the cylinder. You will have to have a pen light to shine down into the cylinder well to see the groove if it does have one.

The ejector rod had a right hand thread to begin with, at some point this was changed to a left hand thread. (Right hand thread had the potential of coming unscrewed as the cylinder rotated.) It is likely to be cinched down pretty tight. You need to put a few empty cartridge cases in the cylinder to prevent the extractor star from trying to rotate and being damaged. The trick is getting a grip on the ejector rod with out marring the finish. I have used a drill chuck with good results but I think there are better methods.