HomeSmith Custom Trainwreck: The Wonder Twins

[Shotguncoach]

Projects Short & Sweet and Short & Stout taught me the joys of the 3" heavy barrel, round butt, fixed sight K frame. Both of those guns were intended to be fancier than they are, but they both shot so well with their original barrels and cylinders (even though they were crusty, torn up, and nasty looking on the outside) that I just couldn't justify taking apart a pair of 3" guns to make another pair of 3" guns. That meant that the parts kits have been languishing in the pile for many months.

Recently a couple of prospects wandered into the price range of a nice Trainwreck and joined the stable. It was time to do something fancy.

Project name: The Wonder Twins

The Wonder Twins are a pair of round butt, 4" heavy barrel model 10-8's. Twin 1 has a much nicer finish than Twin 2.

 

[Shotguncoach]

I needed something to do while Muffin Top was going through rust & boil cycles, so the first order of business was finding a set of cylinders that could be made to time properly in the 10-8 frames. The cylinder and ejector rod from a 64-3 kit dropped into Twin #1 like it was made to be there and timed perfectly.

Twin #2 wasn't so easy. The other two 64-3 cylinders and the 67-1 cylinder all had varying degrees of slow carry up. Before I started playing with oversized hands, I decided to try one last thing. My last hope was a 64-7 cylinder, but it had the newer style ejector with different shaped lugs. I installed the hand from the 64-7 kit onto the 10-8 trigger and plopped the 64-7 cylinder in.

Well, I tried to plop the cylinder in. The 64-7 ejector rod was too long for the 10-8 lug position, so I had to swap the ejector rod from the 10-8 onto the 64-7 cylinder. That worked. It snapped right into place and had perfect timing. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than to be good.

A few minutes with a range rod confirmed that everything lined up correctly. Looking good so far!

It was right about here that I noticed that Twin #1 didn't have the stock alignment pin in the grip frame. That was one piece that I didn't have, so I made one by chucking a 1/8 x 1/2 roll pin into my drill press and spinning it against a file until it was the proper diameter to fit in the hole.

Unexpected side trips are all part of the Trainwreck philosophy...

 

[Shotguncoach]

All the insides of both guns were moved to the outside and then put into a labeled bullet box for safekeeping. The label was important because I was about to have 3 different K frames apart at the same time.

After being stripped down to nothing, the twins were each clamped into the vise, the MGW frame wrench was installed, and bloop off came the barrel. The replacement barrels also both were run through the frame removal cycle to get the little frame stub from the cut-up gun off of the barrel.

Coming from the automotive industry, I have to say that I am quite surprised at the small amount of torque required to remove a Smith & Wesson barrel. Maybe I'm just extra strong. Yeah...that's it.

Anyway, once the barrels were off it was time to find out if I was lucky again. A quick thread clean up was done on both frames and the barrels before the index tests.

Once again, it's better to be lucky than good. Both frames had a barrel that indexed where it should. Yay!

Twin #2 had a pretty rough finish and as long as I was rusting and boiling Muffin Top it was a good time to do the same here. The appropriate barrel was added to the appropriate pile-o-parts and the fluff & buff was done before Twin #2 went off to join Muffin Top in the sauna.

 

[Shotguncoach]

For the next few hours it was back and forth between the bluing station on the back porch, the big vise in the garage, and the fancy air-conditioned workbench.

While Muffin Top and Twin #2 were going through rust and boil cycles, Twin #1 had its' barrel installed, headspace and endshake set, the yoke straightened and reamed, and a full action job.

Installing the barrel wasn't as difficult as it was tedious. I wanted to sneak up on top dead center and avoid over clocking the barrel and having to back it off. That meant quite a few iterations of setting up and taking off the frame wrench to check the progress. The end result looked perfectly centered but I wouldn't know until the range test.

I had all the tools to trim the barrel stub and recut the forcing cone, but they weren't needed. Twin #2 came out with a cylinder gap of .010" and a whopping .007" of endshake. The good folks at Triggershims.com came through with a .005" endshake bearing that made everything happy again...as well as improving the already good timing. The rear gauge check passed with the .060" go gauge slipping in easily and the .068" no-go gauge having to entry at all.

After the barrel was on it really just kind of fell together. Everything I did after installing the barrel was just part of a regular trigger job. Looking at the end result I'm starting to regret not refinishing Twin #1 to fix the big scratch in the sideplate and the area on the frame where the previous cylinder rubbed in the open position. Oh well....that's what they make cold blue for.

With one twin finished, it was time to get back to working on Muffin Top.

 

[Shotguncoach]

Twin #2 finished its' last rust cycle right about the time that Muffin Top went back into the safe. (Well.....I don't know if it was really done rusting. Let's just say that I was ready for it to be done rusting. How's that?)

The frame and sideplate did their last boil while I watered the garden and fed the dogs, then it was off to the carding wheel in the garage. After the carding was complete everything was plopped into a bath of 30W motor oil to stop the rust process and I took a break to enjoy some frozen pizza and a beverage.

The finicky frame wrench on/frame wrench off barrel install took just as many times this go 'round as it did with the other guns. I guess I just need to get used to that.

Installing the new barrel allowed me to change the ejector rod to the stainless model 64 rod instead of the blued model 10 rod. There was just a smidgen of difference between the two barrels but it was enough to make a difference.

Twin #2 came out with a .008 cylinder gap and .005" of endshake, which of course meant that I needed to remove the stainless ejector rod I had just installed so that I could drop in a .003" endshake shim.

 

[Shotguncoach]

As before, after the barrel was on it was just a matter of moving all the insides back in from the outside with an action job along the way.

Short & Sweet and Short & Stout dropped by for some family pictures when everything was done.

Next up: range trip!

 

[Shotguncoach]

Range report:

Functioning was 100% on both guns, with no light strikes in either single or double action. Both guns were set to 48 ounces of hammer tension.

I brought a babbit bar to the range with me just in case I needed to thump on the ejector lug to move a barrel, but it wasn't needed. Both guns shot to center just fine. Twin #1 was good both horizontally and vertically. Twin #2 was good horizontally but the point of impact at 10 yards was a bit low.

I'm going to paint the sights on both just to make sure that the low impacts from Twin #2 were not an artifact of the stainless front sight blade with the sun coming from over my shoulder. If it still hits low then we'll break out a file and adjust the front sight.

After the range trip I decided that the goodyear stocks were just too plain for this pair. Some digging in the pile resulted in a set of Altamont stocks that seem to work OK.

 

[Protocall_Design]

Great work on the twins, they are beautiful.

You might try cooking your pizza sometime. A lot of people like it that way. I can see how it might be more refreshing when frozen, in the Arizona heat, though.

As for clocking the barrel, I have made mill vise jaws that fit different barrels and hold them exactly vertical. Then, when bringing the frame to tightness, I set a precision square on the mill table and align the grip frame to the square with the action wrench. It's perfect every time in a minute or less. S&W could do the same thing and it wouldn't take them any longer to do it right than how they do it now (whatever that is).