Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Need Help Taming Double Action Revolver Squirm

Daily quality dry-fire practice. Make every hammer release count and when you find you can no longer hold a good sight picture call it a day. Only practice and re-enforce a solid release, might only be a dozen or so "shots" the first time. You should be able to work up to 100's of dry-fire "shots", but put your full concentration and consider every "shot" as if your life depended on it. It's surprising how when you really concentrate on sight picture and squeezing off a shot it is very mentally fatiguing.

I'd say put in a couple weeks of quality dry-fire practice before your next range session and you should be amazed at the improvement in your shooting.

Hacks have taught people to stage double action triggers from days of old. It's wrongheaded. The double action pull needs to sweep all the way through, from start to finish, without delay or change in pace, all the while keeping the sights aligned on the target.

Are you staging the trigger?

This. I started doing that after reading McGivern's book. Another thing from his book that helped a great deal was to focus on the release of the double action trigger as much as the pull during dry fire practice, i.e., keeping the sights aligned through the release, too. That alone will improve your accuracy a lot.

And, like I said earlier, if you're doing it right, you will develop a blister, then a callus. When you have a nicely callused trigger finger, you will have put in enough time to have a really good double action trigger pull.

I started doing that after reading McGivern's book. Another thing from his book that helped a great deal was to focus on the release of the double action trigger as much as the pull during dry fire practice, i.e., keeping the sights aligned through the release, too. That alone will improve your accuracy a lot.

With mastery of an interrupted trigger pull, there is no need to break your shooting grip (to thumb the hammer). It's very fast, but still very deliberate.


It does require a serious commitment to training.

I'm not trying to be a dick, but you don't seem like a very good shot.

So you probably shouldn't coach shooting.




Dave

BS. reading a book ain't gonna learn ya how to shoot. Find a coach that can shoot and start going to range with a 5 gallon bucket of your ammo and SHOOT, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot,... repeat as necessary.

Ain't cheap !!! $$$$$$$$$$$

Good Double-Action Revolver Shooting

A recent internet discussion tried to establish a pat set of instructions for good DA revolver work. This got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing). While the objectives of good DA revolver work are widely known, there can be no ‘pat’ set of instructions that will work for all shooters. The foundation element of good DA revolver work is the grip, and you simply cannot tell someone how to do that. The variables of hand size, hand strength and handgun grips make it an individual journey, which can be made easier by a shooting coach that knows his stuff. Once that is accomplished, the objective is to send the shot away with as little disturbance as possible to the sight picture.

I learned DA shooting in an environment where they shoved you a rack-grade, fixed sight S&W and your need for a paycheck served as incentive to keep your scores above 70% for sixteen weeks. Some of us were shooters before we arrived and in short order we were getting at least some 9’s and X’s on a B27 from 50 yards. We didn’t bitch about the trigger; it wouldn’t have been well received. We simply paid attention to what the R/O said and applied ourselves to the task. By the third month, several of us were crowding a Distinguished pin. So don’t tell me it can’t be done and done very well, with stock revolvers.

A couple of years later, I learned some things from an old armorer and started doing DA action jobs- but not on cop guns. I soon learned what worked and what didn’t. Wheelguns were hot then and regular guys all wanted a PPC trigger for 40 bucks.

You can lose reliability real quick by over-lightening either the mainspring or the trigger return spring. You can in fact make the action so sluggish that a really fast shooter can ‘outrun’ it. Stick with stock mainsprings, resist the urge to back that screw out too much and never cut more than one coil off the stock S&W return spring. Leave the single-action sear alone. The rest is polishing the moving components that comprise the DA stroke and you can get a very nice, reliable trigger that will never cause a misfire or retard the trigger reset.

There’s defensive shooting, competition shooting and exhibition shooting.

There’s a time to shoot fast and a time to shoot slow. Some guys ‘stage’ a DA trigger for precise shooting and pull it straight through quick for close work. That works pretty well for me. All things being equal, a smooth, reliable action won’t make you shoot any worse. But no matter how good you make a DA trigger, it will never replace an ingrained application of the basics, a will to excel and a lot of practice with a single purpose of making every shot go exactly where you intend it to go. You get those things down and you’ll be shooting so well you won’t need a crutch.

They put hammers on DA revolvers for a reason, all right; to take advantage of a fine trigger pull when precision is needed.

A polished DA shooter can do fine work in the double action mode, but he'd get laughed off the range at a bullseye match.

If I have to make a shot in any situation that requires real precision, I'm shooting single action.

Double action revolvers are my favorite handguns, but I've never really focused hard on shooting them double action until a couple of years ago. My trigger control has improved but controlling the revolver is more difficult. Unless the grip is made of soft rubber like a Hogue monogrip or the old Lett grips that Ruger used to put on their GP100, I can't seem to control the squirm. With any wooden grip (except the huge old S&W target grips) the gun rotates clockwise (looking down at it) and jumps up in my fist incrementally. This, of course, causes my second shot to strike a different POI. I've tried gripping harder with different fingers and I've tried several different grips to no avail. I've considered getting full checkered wood grips from Herretts, but that's quite an investment. I'd rather improve my technique.

I really want to be able to use wood grips on my favorite Smiths, can anyone help? Probably I should mention that I have relatively small hands, so I can't use grips that cover the backstrap.

Nice targets posted above but strongly think they were slow fire DA shooting ie: stacking the trigger.

Try PPC. Our club league first stage was 12 shots/6 seconds and that's with a reload.

Again, nice targets, Sir.

Balance a coin on the ribe on the barrel. Try to work the trigger and keep the coin on top. Sooner or later you will get tired of picking the coin up and learn to handle the DA pull.