The Best Revolver in the World [2020 Update]

so I've been looking through the lucky gunner content archives lately and I decided it might be time to update a few of those older videos there are things I've changed my mind about since I started making content for lucky gunner almost eight years ago there are videos that could use an update based on new products that have come out and new information that's become available and sometimes I just wish that I had explained certain things a little better so today we're gonna watch a few highlights from one of the most popular videos in the lucky gunner archives and I'll interject periodically to offer revisions and other commentary if this turns out to be a format that you guys like we will try more of them in the future for now let's take a trip back to 2015 and watch some clips from a video entitled the best revolver in the world this is my Smith & Wesson Model 66 and it's the best revolver in the world okay let's pause it right there I promise I'm not gonna stop this thing every five seconds but I gotta say something here a not insignificant number of people who watched this video pretty much just stopped right here and raced to the comments to let me know that some revolver other than the Smith & Wesson Model 66 is in fact the best revolver in the world and that's totally my fault at the time our blog had a pretty decent following but this is one of the first videos that we actually posted to YouTube and I knew that in order to get an audience there we would have to use some kind of sensational title to grab people's attention us just how things work well it did work kind of but a lot of the attention that video has drawn over the years has been from angry people who think I have bad taste in revolvers I did ask for it though anyone who bothered to watch past the first 10 seconds of this video found out that it's not actually about one particular revolver being superior to another okay that might be an exaggeration but only slightly I have some good reasons for belief in this model 66 is about as good as a fighting revolver can be but first we need a little background I've always been a big fan of revolvers what I am about to spend way too much time explaining is that I like revolvers but I think semi-autos are better in most respects this video is really about me shooting and studying revolvers as much as possible to find out if maybe I was wrong about that so let's just fast forward for a few seconds so for the first half of this year I shot revolvers almost exclusively every week I was at the range with a few boxes of 38 special and a couple of wheel guns trying to find that one that would give me a balance of shoot ability and concealed ability after a lot of trial and error the revolver I landed on is the Smith & Wesson model 66 it's a six shot 357 Magnum made in 2004 and based on the Smith & Wesson medium-sized k-frame that's a design that goes all the way back to 1899 the K frames are a good middle of the road size they're not awkward to use like the small J frames and they carry a lot easier than the bigger L and in frame Smith & Wesson's I picked the 66 in particular out of all the other K frames out there because of the adjustable sights and the option to get a three inch barrel it's a nice balance between the short sub those barrels and the full-sized four-inch barrels that are more common the gun weighs just over two and a half pounds when it's fully loaded and in the holster that's about 20% heavier than my M&P it's also a little longer and the grip sticks out farther but I can still conceal it with some effort okay I really should not have glossed over that point so quickly the difference in the size and weight of those two guns is actually a pretty big deal this video was supposed to be the conclusion of the wheel gun Wednesday series that I had started on the lucky gun or a lounge blog about six months earlier my original goal was to find her Evolver that was roughly equivalent in size and weight to my everyday carry gun and then see if I could learn to shoot that revolver just as well the eventual conclusion was that even when I set up a revolver with what I consider to be the ideal configuration the best revolver in the world it was still not any better as a self-defense tool than a boring mostly stock plastic 9-millimeter in hindsight what I actually did was pick the smallest revolver that I could already shoot fairly well which ended up being a model 66 and that's quite a bit heavier and larger than the M&P compact that I was carrying at the time but you know it doesn't really matter if a compact 9 is your starting point anyway you look at it there is no service caliber revolver in the world that's as easy to carry as a compact 9-millimeter that's also as easy to shoot as a compact 9-millimeter I did get around to making that point eventually but that really should have been the focus of this video instead I got sidetracked with all kinds of other stuff like how much fun it is to customize a Smith & Wesson k-frame so the first thing I did to the 66 was change out some parts to improve the action I installed a few different springs until I found a combination that lightened up the double action trigger a little bit but would still reliably ignite the primers on my carry ammo and thanks to this excellent vintage 20th century instructional DVD from Jerry Miculek I also smoothed out some of the rough spots in the action the final result is a buttery smooth double action trigger that breaks at about eight and a half pounds I changed out the factory adjustable rear sight for the more durable rough country site from Bowen classic Arms the original front sight was a fiber optic which I liked but it had a rounded profile that made it tough to get good sight alignment a longer shot so I got rid of that in favor of a square fiber optic from cylinder and slide for a carry revolver you got to get rid of the hammer spur and convert it to a double action only using the single action feature on a self-defense revolver is well frankly unamerican and that hammer spur is just going to get caught on your clothing on the draw stroke anyway so I installed the spur 'less evolution hammer from apex tactical I also got an XP firing pin from apex which helps with more reliable primer ignition okay lots to talk about there let's start with the phrase using the single action feature is on American that has probably upset even more people than that the model 66 is the best revolver in the world unamerican was meant to be a joke because I kept noticing people using that word to describe any kind of behavior that they didn't approve of it wasn't a very good joke a lot of people took it as an insult to anyone throughout all of history who has ever carried a single action firearm I did want to make a point that I knew a lot of people would have a hard time swallowing but I didn't really bother to explain that point in any detail so people got offended for all the wrong reasons sometime later I did try to clarify that message with another video called why all defensive revolvers should be double action only and that was another case where using an inflammatory title primed the audience to feel defensive from the very beginning I also again took way too many detours to make what should have been a very simple point so I'm gonna try this for a third time and hopefully it will be offensive for all the right reasons if you have a modern double action revolver that you intend to use for self defense thumbing the hammer when you're practicing with that revolver is a crutch to compensate for the fact that you don't know how to shoot in a real fight to save your life you will not have time to [ __ ] that hammer and doing so introduces opportunities for your thumb to slip or fumble that are not present if you simply fire the gun double action running a double action trigger is not a hard skill to learn you can do it in just a couple of weeks of dry fire practice at home 10 minutes a day and once you've got it down you will rarely if ever feel the need to [ __ ] the hammer and fire that gun single action even on the hard shots you can quickly learn to finesse that trigger without disturbing the sights now that comes with a couple of caveats like I know that some people with health issues don't have the physical strength to pull a double action trigger they would probably be better off with a different gun but if that's not possible obviously you just do what you have to do to get the gun to go bang I also know a lot of revolvers have really heavy and gritty double action triggers especially some of the new ones don't put up with that get it fixed or get a different gun it's really hard to learn double action with a bad trigger fortunately you've got plenty of these days the Ruger LCR is tend to have a really nice trigger right out-of-the-box the GP 100 and the SP 101 are pretty decent especially if you drop in a wilson combat hammer spring and then dry fired a bunch the Kimber revolvers and the new Colts also have good double action triggers from the factory with Smith and Wesson you pretty much have to go with either a performance center model or an older well broken end gun like this one these days I am not nearly as emphatic about the issue of the hammer spur if you learn how to run the double action trigger I don't think it's that big a deal if the gun has a hammer spur now I prefer it to not have one at least not one this big but if you put some serious practice into your draw stroke and that hammer isn't snagging on your clothes then don't worry about it just make sure that you test it when you're wearing multiple layers of clothing because that tends to make the snagging problem a bigger issue I also got a lot of questions about why I would go with a spur 'less hammer on this model 66 to prevent snagging and then add this giant rear sight now that's a good question I did eventually have some snagging problems with that rear sight that I had in the video it wasn't so much the sight itself as the big gap that's between the sight and the top of the frame now I've got a different set of sights on the gun now the front fiber optic is from Dawson precision and it's much shorter than the original one that allowed me to use a much shorter rear sight blade from Bowen so that gap is now much smaller and I've also filed down all the sharp edges to make it as snag free as possible but honestly it's really still not ideal if I was gonna set up the best revolver in the world today it would still be a three-inch Smith & Wesson Kay frame but I'd probably change a few things first of all I would start with an older model because the action tends to be much smoother and there is no internal lock where the guns soul leaks out I would also use a fixed sight revolver like this model 64 and have a gunsmith machined the top for a larger set of semi-auto style fixed sights the end result would be a lot like this model 64 belonging to darrell bulky with custom work by Ted Yost you a bigger site picture but you still have a nice snag free profile for the front site I would have a fiberoptic insert or a tritium insert and then I would have the hammer spur mostly bobbed but I would still want a little rounded off nub left behind that hammer spur does have one advantage it lets you check for high primers you can partially [ __ ] the hammer so that the cylinders freed up and then spin that around when you've loaded your ammo to make sure there are no out of spec rounds that are gonna bind up the action but custom revolver smithing is not cheap and we've already established that I'm probably not gonna carry this thing so that makes it tough to justify the expense you might have noticed the plug here in the hole where the internal lock would normally be Smith & Wesson doesn't make the three-inch version of the model 66 anymore they're getting really tough to find so I was able to save quite a bit of money by getting one of these that was made after they started putting the internal lock in all the revolvers now our attorney says I'm not supposed to give instructions on how to disable a safety device on a gun but he's not here today so all you have to do is just remove the side plate and then you and then it works just like any pre lock revolver now I don't care who you are that's funny we still do have lawyers who won't let me go into a whole lot of detail here the lock plug that I have in the video is one that I had hacked together in my garage I have since replaced it with a much nicer one that I bought from site pusher tool calm now I will just say that if you are forced to shoot someone in self-defense and you do it with a gun that has a safety feature you have disabled that's not gonna look good to the DA reviewing your case it may be a little easier for you to defend having done that if you have also converted the gun to double action only since Smith & Wesson does sell DAO guns without locks either way just be aware that plugging the lock on your gun puts you at a legal disadvantage even if your actions were completely justified okay let's look at one last clip I got really comfortable with emergency reloads using the Safariland comp two speed loaders I never did find a speedloader pouch that I liked so I just keep the reload in my front pocket with this setup I can reload in about 4 and 1/2 seconds if everything goes smoothly one of the only benefits of having such a low ammo capacity is that you get in lots of opportunities to practice reloads at the range it doesn't take long to get plenty of repetitions even if you don't set aside much time to specifically work on reloads okay let's back that up a second that is actually not a very good reload right there speed loaders rely on gravity to get the rounds in the chambers so the gun has to be completely vertical now I'm gonna have to stand up to do this the gun can't be tilted toward you or over to the side or anything like that it's gotta be straight up and down so that the rounds drop free that's why I was having trouble with that reload in that particular shot I know that revolver reloads have been the topic of some internet drama recently I have no desire to debate the finer points of the various techniques it's not that I don't have an opinion it's just that I think it would probably be a waste of your time to talk about it here on the list of handgun skills you are likely to need the revolver emergency reload is close to the very bottom I'm not saying you shouldn't know how to do it and you have to load the gun anyway when you're practicing so you might as well learn how to reload it quickly and of course you're gonna need to know how to do it if you shoot competitively but if you actually end up pulling off a revolver reload in the middle of a close-range gunfight you very well may be the very first armed citizen in the United States on record to have ever done it that's how rare it is even in law enforcement I am only aware of one case where it's ever happened and it only happened because the officer was reaching for his backup gun but he happened to find a speedloader in his pocket instead if you're really concerned about not having enough ammo in your gun to get yourself out of trouble I highly recommend you just carry a gun that holds more bullets or carry a second gun even with semi autos emergency reloads almost never happen in justifiable shootings with armed civilians now maybe that's because people aren't fast enough to pull off a reload before the gunfight is over or maybe it's because very few people actually carry spare ammo with them but I think the main reason is that most civilians self-defense encounters are resolved before a reload is needed I say all that because I think I gave way too much weight to the issue of ammo capacity in this video if I were to compare a Packt nine-millimeter - a revolver today I would probably come to the same basic conclusion that I did in this video but I definitely would emphasize different points ammo capacity would just be a minor footnote yes more bullets is more better they're nice to have but probably not as important as we would like to think I believe it's possible to make a good case for the semi-auto without even mentioning ammo capacity but this was just one of many articles and videos that I've done comparing revolvers in semi autos the most recent was pocket pistols versus snub nosed revolvers and in that context I think the snub-nosed actually comes out on top if you think I forgot about the issue of reliability you might want to check that one out you can't really do justice to the semi-auto vs. revolver discussion without being more specific about what kind of revolvers and what kind of semi autos you're comparing it's a complex debate you can't easily reduce it to a single issue of course I've never been one to shy away from beating a dead horse even so I hope you've learned something new in this updated edition of the best revolvers in the world let me know in the comments if you guys liked this format and if there are any more lucky gunner videos from the past that you would like me to update [Music] you

Channel: Lucky Gunner Ammo

Views: 1,255,909

Rating: 4.7826104 out of 5

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Id: uBQuoBBIENM

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020