Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns life expectancy of an air weight .38??

so i'm thinkin' about a pocket revolver and i'm not getting a taurus or a ruger. gun's probably gonna see about 400-700 rnds a year of light plinkin' stuff 100-200 rnds of pdf ammo. so i'm wondering about how long before it's gonna become flame cut and unshootable. it took about 10,000 rnds to flame cut my 686 but you can barely see it. should i buy the 357 version (it's got a steel plate on the top strap), or shoot out the air weight and buy a new one?

It will outlast you, in fact the new ones have a steel shroud over the barrel/cylinder gap.

really? didn't know the new air weights had the extra steel; much better design. we are talking about the air weight not the scandium or the pd right?

The Sc/Ti guns have the steel guard. As to the Airweights, at $410 a copy I would just shoot them and replace them when the time came. You'll spend much more on the ammunition to do that then on the replacement weapon.

i have an old airweight bodygaurd and a newer 342 pd ti gun. i think the ti guns are a tighter gun. imho the 357 mag j frames are to much of a good thing.

stay clear of the plus p ammo and the hotter fmj and you'll be fine.

They last a long time. The one I carry 'was' a rental gun at a range.......after countless rounds, tight, cycles fine, and is very accurate.

I've put thousands of rounds through a pari of S&W 442's and managed to break the firing pin spring on one of them. I just ignored it for about a year and continued to shoot it, and it worked fine.

As for overall wear on the guns, I couldn't detect any mechanical wear, but holster wear was definately present.

Airweight handguns are meant to be carried a lot and shot a little. What you do is get an all steel one just like it for practice.

Bigrocks,

You specifically mentioned .38 Special in the title, so sticking with that you will probably never flame cut an airweight shooting a few hundred rounds per year. The max .38 Special pressure is 17,000 psi, the max .357 Mag pressure is 35,000 psi. In the scheme of things, even the .357 mag isn't considered much of a flame cutter.

Buying the .357 Mag version is never a bad thing, but if you're planning on only firing .38 Special there isn't any advantage.

I recall an old Shooting Times article where they tried to kill a S&W Airweight. They stopped testing @ 10,000 rounds and it was still going strong.

Yessir, all the none steel guns now have it.

I have an old model 37 airweight that has been with me for 30 years. A gunsmith bobbed the hammer and worked the action.

This gun has been carried as a backup and at times my primary weapon .

In all that time this gun may have been shot 100 rounds. The J frames are just not that enjoyable to shoot.

Nope. Especially not in lightweight configurations. This is why it's such a huge mistake when guys buy their wives or recommend to their girlfriends they get one as a first gun. Guaranteed to turn them off to shooting.

I shoot mine a little. Probably have a thousand rounds through it in the past two years.

There have been some instances of cracked frames reported, apparently from over torquing the barrel. Look under the barrel in the yoke cut for a hairline fracture.

It's not common, but can occur.

Your 686 is flame-cut? Never heard of one getting flame-cut. After 10,000 rounds? Wow.

I thought that was the reason Smith devoloped the L-frame revolvers, to avoid the problems they were having with the Model 19 and 66.

Some body must have shot some daum hot stuff in that 686.

I've always shied away from the titanium lightweight 38s. I noticed that right after they came out, a lot of them turned up for sale. I just assumed that they were too dang unpleasant to shoot.

My adult daughter found herself a good deal on a Taurus titanium, and asked me what I thought. Scratched my head, and ran some recoil calcs, and decided that I could give her a 110 grain target load at 750 FPS that has almost exactly the same recoil as 158 grainers at 850 out of my wife's steel 3" 38.

She bought the gun, I loaded up some ammo, and she found that the gun can actually be quite pleasant to shoot.

She uses 125 grain +P for self defense, figuring that in her lifetime she will probably still have at least 49 of the original 50 rounds.

As nearly as I can tell, you can't get enough MV out of a 2" barrel to reliably open a 158 grain bullet.

The main point of the L-frame was to give the revolver a full-diameter forcing cone. The K-frame forcing cone is cut at the bottom to give clearance to the crane and kinda resembles a flat tire. The reduced diameter in that area weakens it.

The K-frame cylinder window needed to be enlarged to provide the clearance, so a larger diameter cylinder was needed. S&W also added a little more metal at the frame corners and presto - the L-frame.

Not to be a dink, but I'd like to see a photo of the flame cut M686. My guess-from-afar is the top strap is stained and not cut. Also, flame cutting that does occur usually just stops at a certain point without affecting the strength of the revolver, even on notorious flame cutters like the .357 Maximum.

yep, definnetly flame cut but you have to clean the gun to see it. drag a pic across it and you feal it. if i could fugure out how to get pics on this thing i would post them but for know just wondering about the air weight. nice to hear smith is reenforcing the top strap. i'm guessing on 10,000 rounds it may be more. about 3-5000 where factory. hand load if i remember right is 158gr lead swc 3.2gr bullseye; not real HOT kicks like a .22. as far as the j frames not being fun to shoot, their not the most pleasant. me? i think the .44 is fun so the j frames are not a problem. now the 357 sc is not for me; that was worse than the 500. guns you don't shoot often are useless. thanks for the info guys!