I have also had pretty good luck swapping hammers on S&W revolvers of the same general era. As GunGeek said, normally the original hand will work fine if swapped to the new hammer. The sear can be a problem, so in some cases I swapped the original sear into the new hammer as well. About 90% of the time, you can make the new hammer work without any complications beyond swapping one or both of those parts.
