There is more to the story as they say. The 625-3 was a new model and gun built with newly installed CNC tooling mixed together with the old guard manual machines under new management and British ownership led by Steve Melvin. The first issues of this gun were full of so many problems there were rumors that some of the employees were behind it. I got one of these and so did a couple of gun writers and a bunch of pin shooters who were chomping at the bit to get them. My gun was sort of typical with crooked barrel, off-center cut forcing cone, .002" or less cylinder gap which started to drag on cylinder face from residue, hammer side plate binding, terrible DA stacking and knuckling trigger, rear sight fell off, but very very accurate which was a tease and a half. My gun went back to the factory three times costing me close to six months whereby they fitted a new barrel, corrected cylinder gap and rear sight and then re-stamped the gun's serial number ? The DA trigger problem was mostly due to the rubber Pachmayr grips screw interfering with the mainspring travel. A condition that continued until they discontinued these grips. I always had a hard time with the fact that both the factory and Pachmayr never realized this was occurring.
So after such a rough start with such a wonderfully designed revolver it took a while but the factory must have really reached out to insure all 625's got the royal treatment cause I've had three and shot dozens back when pins and plates were a big part of my life and the later issued guns are really nice. It was a smart marketing move with a very popular competition revolver at the time. During the late 80's S&W was getting into competition big time sponsoring a team or two, putting some big name shooters on the pay roll and offering special race gun services etc. I never Ransom rested one that wouldn't shoot 200 grain lead H&G's into a tight group. So overall I'd agree with the consensus that these are great guns unless of course you got one of the first of them.
Regards
