Eremicus, Please note, my statement concerning autoloaders included the proviso that those exhibiting the most serious reliability issues were those of recent design. You mention the HP and ol' slab sides, both of which were originally designed to function and deliver accurate shots in harsh conditions. As mentioned, the shortcoming of autoloaders lies in their ammunition. Finding ammo that works as well as revolver ammo is an expensive headache. A further issue with modern pistol designs,esp such offerings from the 1980's onward, is their abysmal level of accuracy at distance. Believe me, you do not want to have to stop a rabid critter at spitting ranges, to use one of my earlier examples, but modern hicaps essentially force one to do so. This brings up another one of my pet peeves, which is filling the air with bullets. Inaccurate hicaps practically invite this practice, and its a great way to create unintentional disasters. I personally have dropped guns more often than I care to admit, and while it is true that they were dropped on rocks and dirt, rather than concrete, I have yet to have any cylinder freeze, so I have no experience, and thus no useful input regarding "frozen" wheelguns. I will, however, relate a true story of an associate of mine, who was fond of extended pack trips into the back country. During one trip, he ran a trap line, and his favored trapline gun was a Ruger Single Six with the 22 Mag. cylinder in place. Well, he got all involved in other things, and managed to leave that SS out in the elements when he broke camp. He didn't realize he was missing the gun until he returned. Busy in life, he forgot about it until the next spring. Took him a few weeks to get the time to make another pack trip, this time to retrieve the gun. He did find it, and after an entire winter and spring outside, it really looked like Hell. The wood stocks were in terrible shape, so he taped them together. Removing the oxidation took most of the finish off, but the bore was good. We loaded her up with el cheapo Aguila hollowpoints from the area store, and every one of them went pop when the hammer dropped. Whats more, that ol veteran placed all those little bullets into a neat cluster at 40 long paces.
