Protocall Design covered it well.

The only additional suggestions I can make are to really check the chamber recesses for crud and hone the chambers before spending money on a chamber reamer.

Be sure the chamber recesses at the mouth of the chambers are clean. Any crud in them gets pounded flat every time the cartridges are fired until the crud is not evident. A toothpick works well to clean them. An end mill is overkill. This is another common cause for binding cylinders. The hammer does not offer enough leverage to overcome a binding cyl.


S&W chambers are seldom truly under sized, but they are tapered for accuracy. When you use a reamer, it’s a straight reamer and you remove the taper.

But the fact is, many chambers come from the factory with less than satisfactory chamber finishes.

Look in your chambers with good light and a 5X glass. You'll see the factory machining marks, those can be your problem. They not only grip the sides of your cases like friction tape, they collect fouling like a magnet.

A simple inspection for burrs or dings in the chamber mouth and recesses is an excellent first thing to do. Quite often one burr in one chamber make all six chambers hard to extract. Polish out any that you find.

Then I polish all chambers gently. The simplest for me is 800 to 1000 grit paper wrapped around a wood dowel (like a Chinese food chopstick) with a slit cut in the end, just slightly smaller than the chamber diameter. Mount in a Dremel tool or small power drill and spin in the chamber. It only takes a couple of seconds per chamber.

You can even go up to 2000 grit, the chambers will look like mirrors!!

One caution is to stay out of the chamber throats, you don't want to affect the throat area at the front of the chambers.

Of course .22s chambers are simplest to do because they don't have actual chambers, they have charge holes, no shoulders, (except .22 Magnum chambers, they have shoulders).

The secret to success is to keep the dowel moving in and out of the chamber so you keep the chamber walls straight. If you don't move the dowel or any polishing device for that matter, in and out, you risk creating waves or wallows in the chamber walls and cases will stick even worse.

Good luck and let us know how it comes out,

__________________
Jim
S&WCA #819