Range Report - Smith & Wesson 625

JohnOC was generous enough to take me and nephew Dan shooting today at the Scottsdale Gun Club, and share his Smith and Wesson 625 with us.

Revolvers are very simple devices. The cartridge is loaded into the cylinder, the cylinder is swung into the frame, and the pistol is ready to fire. The cartridges stay properly aligned because the base of the cartridge has a rim. The rim is larger than the cylinder.

Now this is a very interesting revolver. Not because it's chambered in .45, but because it's chambered in the rimless .45 ACP cartridge, instead of a rimmed .45 like the .45 Long Colt.

So why go rimless in a revolver? Because you want to sell to a military that had standardized on the rimless .45 ACP round when it introduced the 1911 pistol. The military quite sensibly didn't want to stock two different types of pistol ammunition, so Smith and Wesson had to make a rimless cartridge work.

They did this with Moon Clips, stamped circles or (half circles) of metal that let you snap 6 (or 3) rounds of rimless ammunition into the clip. The clip holds the rounds ready to be inserted into the cylinder - you can see two moon clips ready to go in the picture.

This makes reloading very fast indeed. Pop the cylinder open, hit the ejector to drop the expended shells, pop in the moon clip, shut the cylinder, bang. This was the first time I'd used them, but I'd think that with practice you could reload as fast as you could with a magazine-fed semi-automatic pistol.. What you're doing is trading time-to-load away from the range for time-to-load on the range. The fit is pretty tight, so it's a lot easier if you use a tool designed to load the clips.

You'll also likely want to use a tool to pop the empty rounds off the clips, since they're in pretty tight. You can do both loading and unloading without the tools, but I probably wouldn't want to.

John is a very good marksman, in great contrast to me. I can do decent groups, but mostly only when I slow fire. John encouraged me to try rapid fire. This expanded my groupings, but I was pleased to find that I was (mostly) able to keep things in center mass. I'll work on rapid fire groupings, as a 2009 New Year's resolution.

Oh, and the standard disclaimer:

I'm not any kind of gun or shooting expert. I like shooting, and shoot a fair number of different guns, but I'm really a dilettante. Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited.

I don't do scientific, repeatable tests. There's no checklist, although that's not a bad idea. I write about what I like and don't like, but it's pretty much stream of consciousness. Opinion, we got opinion here. Step right up.

I'm not a shooting teacher, although I do like to introduce people to shooting. Maybe some day I'll take the NRA teaching class, but until then, you get a dilettante's view. You'll get opinion here, but if you get serious about shooting, you'll want to get someone who knows what he's doing to give you some pointers. It can help.

And oh yeah, shooting things is fun.

UPDATE 2 January 2009 21:05: Nice picture of speedloaders at JayG's place.