I came across an attractive short barreled 19-3 (1972) at one of my LGS's. The owner had picked up a bunch of guns in a package deal from a local guy, and he was just starting the process of going through them all. He saw the 19-3 and said "this is probably the only one you would be interested in". It was tight and pretty clean with no flame cutting to speak of, but it did have ugly rubber grips on them. As I worked the cylinder though, the gun would almost seize up. I gave it back to him and he tried to diagnose the issue. He said that it could be a bent ejector rod, a bent crane, or maybe something else. He also said that it may just be extremely dirty as it hadn't been used/cleaned by the previous owner for almost 40 years.
He said if I wanted to roll the dice on it, he would give it to me for $300.............
So I brought it home, took off the rubber grips, and totally cleaned the heck out of the revolver. It was loaded with dried crud (I assume old oil or lubricant) that came right off with little effort. Usually I use a pair of magna stocks with a Tyler T grip on my snubby 19's or 66's, but I wanted to try something different. So I found an extra set of square butt target stocks I had laying around and my friend helped me modify them for a round butt.
This is the result. The action is perfect now and the stocks make the grip a little beefier. I don't usually like to modify things, but this worked out well.
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Model 19-3 acquisition/project
Linear Mode
