Wanting a smith but not getting a 357 to shoot 38 in. Looking at the hot 125 loads and some heavy cast loads. Is the new smiths fine for this or Ruger better. Thanks.
The Rugers are a little beefier and, IMHO, handle recoil better.
Am assuming full size revolvers, 4 or 6 inch barrels and not some sub nose flame thrower.
Rugers are generally considered to be more robust. I tend to agree for the most part and have a GP 100 in the safe with a 6 inch barrel, have considered another 4 inch barrel one as well. With .357 mag loads it isn’t bad, and I do not find it to be intimidating to fire. The rubber grip helps a lot. I do not consider smith’s guns to be weak in their designs and most of their 686s are pretty well thought of. That said, both factory guns should last longer than your hand will want to comfortably fire very hot loads.
If a diet of heavy .357 loads is your intent and you want a Smith, simply skip the K & L Frame offerings, and find yourself an old N frame .357. The Model 27s and 28s will handle them with ease.
From a design standpoint, the Ruger’s are more suited to handle a steady diet of heavy loads. Their a more modern design, and do away with some of the weaker points in Smith’s design. However, but a 686 and a GP100 should be able to withstand a good deal of punishment. You may want to consider other big points when trying to choose between the two, like the availability of aftermarket grip options.
Grips!
You are exactly right. Ruger uses a grip peg instead of a “normal” grip frame. Your hand is insulated from recoil if you choose you use Letts or Hogues. IME hot loads out of GP100’s are no big deal. The Letts soak up most of the punishment.
That depends. An L frame Smith is going to shoot tens of thousands of rounds of the hottest magnums without trouble. I have never personally seen a broken forcing cone on a K frame Smith but I have seen a couple of pictures.
When the US Border Patrol issued revolvers in the mid 1980’s we had two primary guns; The Smith 686 and the Ruger GP100. This was at a time when we were issued 125 and 110 grain magnums, we practiced and qualified with them shooting thousands a year through each gun. We had many more Rugers go down for timing issues than we did Smith’s. The other thing I noticed with the Ruger, On my SP101, after shooting 90-100 rounds the build up on the yoke is so bad that the cylinder will not rotate, Smiths do not do that either. You will not get a comparable trigger on a Ruger that you will on a Smith.
The new model 66 with the 2 piece barrel solved any issue with the old one piece barrel. That would likely be my pick if in the market for a new, full size revolver in 357 Magnum. I picked up the Model 69 (44 mag) last summer and have about 1000 rounds through it so far.
The reason Rugers are beefier than Smiths is that one is cast and one is forged. You need more material in a cast frame. The cast frame handles heat differently than forged also, if you run a Ruger hard and get it real hot, it may start seizing up.
Good luck with your decision.
I had a gunsmith tell me that the Rugers are only beefier because the casting of the parts requires more material to make them as strong as a real revolver. But good point on the extra weight of a Ruger making hot loads less painful to shoot.
My pwrsonal experience was that a steady diet of hot loads will loosen up a .357 K frame.
And later, when shooting IHMSA the general experience was similar with N frames & 44 mag where the blackhawks had no issue.
Can’t speak to the DA rugers though.
I know that the 4.2 inch Ruger GP100 I just bought is built like a tank.
Define “hot loads”, are we talking about full power factory ammo within SAMMI specs, or actual hot loads that push the envelope of what the brass, primers, and firearm will handle?
If a steady diet of factory loads is the goal both brands will do fine as long as the Smith is an L frame or N frame. The Ruger GP100 is probably a bit stronger than an L frame Smith but not enough to matter much.
If you’re really wanting to hot rod a .357 Magnum revolver, buy a Freedom Arms model 83 in .357 Magnum. Five shot cylinder, heavy frame, made from 17-4 stainless steel, super tight tolerances. There is data safe in those revolvers that would probably wreck a GP100, or any S&W. We’re talking 158gr bullets at over 1700 fps.
Max loads in the early 70s speer and sierra books. And some Keith favorites.
The issue was never safety… The smiths simply shake loose. Anything which could unscrew over time, would. And then the threads get sloppy.
Many a disappointed m29 shooter on the IHMSA ranges. High round count with full house loads to get the rams to fall at 200m.
Not that the Rugers were perfect in same conditions. Son has a blackhawk in 41 mag where the spring loaded pin that retains the cylinder pin constantly unscrews. But much less critical than the SW issues.
It’s also not a fair comparison as the SAs do not have the crane.
If I ever get another Smith revolver I will extensively use locktight of the proper formula for the screw size. On every threaded fastener except the barrel. It was always stupid stuff that would come loose.
An excellent point.
What’s the intended use of this revolver? If it’s for range use or carry while hunting/hiking there’s not a thing in the world wrong with a single action revolver. A Blackhawk or even a Vaquero is likely to outlast you, even if you feed it an unrelenting diet of hot loads.
If you want or need a double action, buy the gun you like more. If you manage to break something, it can be fixed.
I have been shooting Smith revolvers for 30 years and never had one shoot loose.
I understand about the old M-29’s and silhouette shooters. They were running tens of thousands of heavy, hot loads so there should have been no surprises there. My 2 oldest highest mileage smiths are a 13-2 and a 686 no dash both of which have tens of thousands of magnums with no issues, besides smoothing the action.
I was shooting some of my old reloads in my SP 101 the other day and had trouble extracting them, the 686 was fine with them.
Depends on what you put through them I guess. A local shooter who is a dedicated revolver enthusiast, has an 8+" 586 that has been shot a tremendous amount - all power levels (bowling pins to bullseye). He said at some point in the gun’s career, he sent the gun back to S&W to have the barrel set back a thread due to the cylinder gap increasing in size.
For the Smith, get an L or N frame. The K frames will work but aren’t built to take the same level of punishment as the larger frames.
The Ruger GP-100 will keep pace with the Smith but the Ruger trigger is not quite as easy to tune to the level of a finely worked S&W. The Ruger is less susceptible to peening at the cylinder stop notches if you plan to use it for speed events.
In the last 20 years S&W has made its entire revolver line much more hardy and robust by improving metallurgy and making certain subtle design changes. They no longer suffer from frame stretching, forcing cone splitting, and shaking loose after having fired tons of hot or magnum loads. A very few years ago our favorite 5 shot air weight would not have withstood the number of rounds that we now put through them. I don’t consider the older Smiths defective by any means, but they have been improved.
When Ruger designed the Security-Six to compete with Smith’s K frame, the engineers beefed up areas that had been considered weak in the Smith revolvers. That was 45 plus years ago.
I know a lot of skilled guys and girls who shoot a lot and no one I have ever heard of subjects a gun hand or wallet to continuous magnums. This whole steady diet thing honestly is bull. And as long as you load within the proper limits set forth in reloading manuals you will not hurt anything. Unless you are using a magnum to hunt with where humane quick kills should be insisted upon ( which would then mean you would choose something better than a 357 anyway) pushing to the extreme limit with handloading is not at all a good idea.
Having said all that a smth l frame or ruger will do just fine as will an n frame. Even a k frame if limited to say 1000 rounds of full house magnum annually would give up and shoot loose about fifty years from now
Yeah, shooting a 6" revolver in .357 with .357 loads will pretty much clear the firing line at my local range. At least you’ll get a lot of dirty looks. The design of it seems to reflect a lot of sound back to the line, and the corrugated tin roof doesn’t help.
Can’t speak for the smiths, but in a lot of reloading manual rugers are good to go with the hotter loads.
Must be a bunch of wimps, or some really hot .357 loads. A .357, even a snubbie like my friend has, has never bothered me when I am shooting next to it, even indoors, not nearly as bad as a full house .44 mag next to you from my experience, and not even the same zip code as a 5.56 with a PSW556 brake, which is one of my banes.
For personal best, if you want to clear the firing line, a .300 Win mag with a muzzle brake will do it faster than shit unless you want to jump to a .50BMG, but the BMG ends up with a crowd want to look at it, lol.