I am working through my Brazilian contract 1917 project and the cylinder has a serious amount of endshake.

The bearings obviously help, but how many is too many? I have .002" bearings. I am starting to think I should have bought the .004" ones. I also don't want to put a package of bearings in the gun when perhaps peening or replacing the yoke is more prudent.

-Zach

I would be more concerned about the BC gap than the number of individual bearings. When you correct endshake with bearings you increase the permanent BC gap. I'm guessing you need to correct about .010 of endshake? That's probably going to leave a gap outside of acceptable specifications.

As to putting lots of bearings in the gun, I see no problem with it. The bearings can't go anywhere or shift around.

You are correct about the barrel/cylinder gap, but I am not even a little concerned with that. I am going to rebarrel the gun.

I guess the bearings can't exactly go anywhere, but I don't exactly feel right about it. Especially since i think they'd be somewhat easy to lose during disassembly and cleaning.

-Zach

They are not going to just fall out once they are in place. I have had the devil of a time trying to get one out when It had the wrong thickness bearing in it. Personally I wouldn't ever put more than two endshake bearings in. I put in a lot of these bearings for myself and others and one 4 will usually at least make the endshake tolerable. I have also seen it where people got the endshake to zero and the revolver would lock up after a few shots. So don't get too carried away with taking out endshake.

You would have to unscrew the ejector rod to remove the bearings. As this is rarely done, at least on my guns, I wouldn't consider it a problem. If you are really concerned about it, a bag of .004 bearings is $16. It sounds like you plan to put some money into the gun so that's a relatively small expense.

Thanks guys! Looks like I will be buying the .004" bearings with my next purchase. I already have more money into the gun than it is worth, but I want to learn how to fix S&W revolvers and I figure learning on a less than pristine gun is a good place to start.

-Zach