by Dick Jones
Contributing Editor
Shooting is a sport that evokes passion, and Mike Byrd, of B&B Precision Machining, one of my lifelong friends, has such a passion for shooting that he’s converted his front yard into a recreational pistol/rifle/ shotgun range. His front yard contains multiple plate racks, dueling trees, a Texas star, multiple gong targets in various sizes, and stands for four by tens, a popular target for shotguns and pistols in three gun competition.
Targets range from ten to 100 yards and sometimes we’ve been known to use a 100 yard silhouette as a stop plate for pistols. There’s a door with keys in a functioning door frame, a stair step barricade, (as used in three gun matches) loading tables, and seating for when you just get too tired to shoot.
Mike holds weekly sessions, and invites his friends over for impromptu challenges. We take turns dreaming up scenarios and everyone shoots his way through, then we dream up another plan and continue. As you can imagine, the round counts of these events can get pretty high, and I’ve often wondered just what his neighbors think is going on over the hill. I can imagine someone thinking the place was some kind of training camp, and hence I’ve named Mike’s range the Taliban/Tea Party Training Center (T/ TPTC), since I can’t imagine two more diverse groups with names that begin with the letter, T.
Most of the firearms used relate to Three Gun competition but I recently brought a wheel gun to the party. It wasn’t an ordinary wheel gun like my 637, five-shot, carry gun, it was as tactical as a revolver can get, or at least it was until SHOT Show this year, but more about that later. I brought my S&W M&P R8, an eight-shot, N frame, wheel gun that my wife, Cherie, used this year in the Bianchi Cup. I shot my very first match with an S&W revolver, and I won the civilian class with it. It was a four-inch Model 19 and I still have it. I’ve been fond of Smith revolvers ever since. Another favorite revolver being a six-inch Highway Patrolman, Model 28 that I used to win multiple Metallic Silhouette matches and earn a AAA classification.
When Cherie was choosing a handgun for shooting her first Bianchi Cup, I showed her the R8 and she was hooked. She’s always favored revolvers, and the smooth trigger and great sights reminded her of her favorite .22, another S&W, the Model 18. With a Bladetech belt and holster, some Five Star Loaders and loading block, and Winchester target ammunition, she was ready to go. Recently, I’ve been shooting the R8 and I decided to take it to a T/TPTC. Yes, reloads were a little slower, but it was remarkable just how effective a tactical revolver can be. Other than reloading speed, I felt absolutely no handicap over match tuned STI and Kimber semi-autos.
Before you shrug and think I’m pulling your leg about a revolver staying in the hunt with double-stack semi-autos or striker-fired guns, take a few things into consideration. First and foremost is absolute certain reliability. Our recent session at T/ TPTC occurred on a pretty cold day.
Some powders are temperature sensitive and all metals are affected by extreme cold. All the semi-autos were serious competition guns, the R8 was almost totally stock. All three semiautos had some form of malfunction that needed to be cleared. The revolver was 100% reliable.
I love semi auto pistols as much as anyone, and I’m really happy that double stack 1911s can be purchased for less than the price of a family car.
The modern striker-fired guns are super reliable, accurate, and have great triggers, but there is one issue that no autoloader can ever get around. All semi autos use the energy of the previous shot to prepare them to fire the next round. If there’s a bad round, the operator has to perform the task of cycling the gun to get it in condition to shoot again. This is not the case with the revolver.
With a revolver, the operator supplies the energy to bring the next round into position and preloads the spring that drives the hammer. It’s true that no double action revolver can have both fast operation and the crisp, short travel of a 1911 trigger, or that a revolver will ever have the capacity of a double stack, striker-fired pistol, but that reliability factor will always be an important issue. There’s no need to learn a fast tap/rack sequence, no need for another hand, or a reposition of the grip because if a round fails to fire, you simply pull the trigger again. As long as this is the case, the revolver will continue to thrive as a viable firearm in the minds of thinking men who need absolute reliability.
Revolvers can have quite functional triggers if properly set up. The M&P R8 came with a fairly smooth and decently light double action trigger.
There was little backlash and it was easy to prep the trigger and have only a slight movement when the pull fell through and dropped the hammer. The process of properly prepping the trigger is the secret to successful double action shooting. As an instructor who adheres to the teaching of former Federal Air Marshal instructor Chris Cerino, of Chris Cerino Training Group, I see trigger management as the most important aspect of pistol shooting. The R8 has a nice trigger out of the box but I had a little more cleaning up and lightening done. I also installed a small foam pad inside the trigger guard to cushion the small amount of backlash there is. This is an old trick from the days of Police PPC matches.
Chambered for the old reliable .357/ .38 Special, the R8 sports a 5” two piece barrel. There’s an under the barrel rail for lights or lasers and the top of the barrel sleeve is drilled and tapped for an included upper scope mount base.
The big N frame now sports eight chambers as opposed to my old Model 28’s six, the cylinder is machined to allow use of full moon clips.
The front sight is interchangeable, the rear is a standard version of the excellent S&W adjustable rear sight. The grip is a synthetic rubber grip with finger grooves. I think I might prefer the old standard S&W Target grips, but I’ve had pretty good success with the standard grip, and Cherie liked it better than the big wooden grips. (I want to try the Hogue Big Butt grip when I get a chance.) The finish is matte black, the frame is Scandium alloy with a black stainless cylinder. Empty weight is just over 36 ounces, light enough to carry well but heavy enough to handle the recoil with little disturbance of sight picture.
The M&P R8 is not a glamorous revolver. It’s a workhorse designed to serve the purpose the purchaser plans for it. It would make an admirable service revolver with eight-shot capacity and weighing only an ounce or so more than the old S&W Model 19 which was the Cadillac of service revolvers when every police department depended on wheel guns. It’s a viable choice as a home defense gun with a rail for laser and flashlight. It would be an admirable hunting sidearm, coming with a top-of-the-barrel scope mount and, of course, it made a dandy revolver for Cherie’s bid in the Bianchi Cup.
I’ll admit that I didn’t show up my friends at T/TPTC. Fact is, everyone knows a semi-auto is better suited to this kind of game. Well, everybody but Jerry Miculek. What I did accomplish was to have some great fun with a great gun and use less ammunition but hit the same targets. I suspect the reason my accuracy was better than the semi-autos was the little bit of extra time the revolver required for me to run the trigger. I can say that I didn’t experience a single malfunction and every other shooter did. It was really cold and the 1911s were a little pickier than usual. Smith & Wesson’s N frame guns have served shooters well since before the late and great Elmer Keith shot the 600-yard deer, and they continue to serve us today.
Feeding your revolver with Five Star’s Revolver Loading System
The biggest downfall of the revolver is the unloading and reloading process. It simply requires too many actions to do it fast, unless your name ends in Miculek.
There are ways to speed things up. Smith & Wesson makes full moon clips for use with the R8 and I used them some. Because there’s only a small area of purchase on the rim of a .38 Special round, they are a little flimsy and awkward to use. Jerry Miculek normally uses revolvers chambered for 9×21 or .38 Super for this reason. The .38 Super round is more accommodating for full moon clips and has a shorter extraction stroke.
I decided to use the speed loader system designed and made by Five Star instead of moon clips. They’re machined out of 6061 billet aircraft aluminum.
Internally, they have a pair of durable Orings to ensure a smooth twist of the knob every time.
The assembly hardware is made from high quality stainless steel pins, wire springs, and precision ground bearings. Assembled and hand tested to ensure quality with all the main components manufactured in-house using over 20 state of the art CNC machines, Five Star speed loaders even have a small amount of lubrication captured between the O rings.
The range block is the other part of the system. It’s a block of aluminum billet, machined to hold 64 rounds of .38/.357 and bears the same quality of machining and finish as the loaders. We ordered the range block, which comes with two loaders, and two extra loaders to allow Cherie to have enough loaders ready to run through the Bianchi course without needing to load another loader.
In reality, the range block works so well, she could have shot the match with only one loader, though for most action pistol matches this wouldn’t work because you have to move. In the Bianchi, the shooter stands in one location for each stage and you can bring your range bag with you.
To use the system, you fill the holes in the block with rounds and simply place the speed loader on top. You rotate the knob to the right to lock the rounds in. When you load the gun, you start the rounds in the cylinders and turn the knob to the left, a much more sensible approach than most loaders which operate in the opposite direction. This has never made sense to me since I learned “righty tighty, lefty loosey” when I was a small boy. Not as fast as the push system of some loading systems, but certainly a very nice system and much higher quality.
