Friends, if you were some dillbert that wanted to rebarrel an old 357 Blackhawk, what sort of angle would you use for the forcing cone? How does this look? It's about 57 maybe degrees.

Shooting lead, jacketed or both? Different angles are considered superior for different bullets.

Ruger currently cuts them 5 degrees. 11 degrees is a more common, but maybe not better, forcing cone angle.

Wonder if my figuring is wacky on my angle. I shot this before with a steeper angle. I'm cutting a taper on a brass rod and using emery cloth to cut it in with the tapered rod chucked in the tail stock. The 357 s spit a bunch and thought I would redue the angle and recut the crown as well. The chunk of barrel was a 357 Timberwolf barrel at one time.

IMHO, it is not so much the angle, but rather the diameter of the cone at the breech end of the barrel that really matters. Yes, it is thought that the 11 deg. angle is optimum for lead and the 5 to 7 deg. is optimum for jacketed bullets. One thing that MUST be right is the timing of the chambers in alignment with the forcing cone at the time of firing. I have recut a lot of S&W revolver forcing cones to 11 deg. in the past and have never seen one that it hurt accuracy with lead or jacketed and a majority were helped considerably.

As handy as you obviously are you could make a bunch of test barrels and test them all with various bullets and forcing cone diameters and angles. Might make a fun project. ............. Big Cholla

if your cutter is 57 degrees. Then 90-57=33 33/2= 16.5 from the forcing cone angles to center line. To cut an 11 cone you need a 68 degree angle on the cutter head. You can buy one from Brownells. http://www.brownells.com/gunsmith-to...prod26151.aspx
The rod and the deal for the crown are easy to make with a lathe.

You don't mention how you're measuring your angle/tooling. The angles quoted for forcing cones is INCLUDED ANGLE.

So, for an 11 degree forcing cone (and assuming you're using a lathe) your cutter will moving at an angle of 5.5 degrees from the bore centerline.

You also want to limit the OD of the cone to no more than 0.020 inches over groove diameter.

Gentile man, thank you kindly. I'll recut the angle on my brass rod. I already have a 200+$ order ready for Brownells and may purchase that 11% cutter they have just to have handy. Or I may just get lazy and wait for it. Go shooting instead before this, "polar vortex" yahooness hits us on monday. And a new main spring for my favorite M10, although if the wind is bad, I may thin the head of strain screw on the lathe and see if I can get a bit more oommf out of the factory one. It does look like the screw has been shortened a bit.