Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns S&W 44 Mag 8 3/8 hogleg

My Dad's cleaning lady brought over a couple of pistols today. One is a Colt Commander stainless, which I know enough about. The other is an S&W 44 Magnum with an 8 and 3/8s barrel, Hogue grip, blue, red front sight. Not a cherry. There's some rusting on the adjustable blade, and the bluing looks kind of "off." I suspect pretty strongly it got misted-rusted at some point and was reblued matte without too much stupid polishing.
Two matters of concern, there is a really obvious flame cut on the topstrap, a small amount of fore and aft play in the cylinder, and while I haven't measured the gap yet, it's probably on the high end of tolerance.

We are looking at it, we have both wanted a shooter hogleg for a long time. This one is no cherry, if I got it the first thing I'd do is try to get some kind of shield brazed onto the top strap. We'd probably just shoot Special loads in Mag cases, no Dirty Harry stuff, thanks.

Crane S/N is 9923x, if that's a clue as to age.

So, what's acceptable gap and fore-aft for this thing? And a decent price?

The end play can be shimmed with washers from Ron Power, no biggie. Flame cutting usually stops and doesn’t get any worse after a certain point, in other words it’s not gonna cut itself in half.

8 3/8” guns are generally the cheapest barrel length now that silhouette isn’t a thing, they’re unwieldy for anything but a tree stand or range gun and can sometimes be picked up cheap. They are a blast to shoot and generally easy to shoot well.

Just buy the damn thing.

$500 on the low end $750 up top.

I agree. Large steel frame Magnum revolvers that get fired a lot develop a certain amount of flame cutting and then stabilize. Cylinder endshake can be fixed in 10 minutes by somebody who knows what he is doing. 8 3/8" Smiths are great shooters. Like Travis says, just buy it.

The S/N is on the bottom of the butt. Should begin with an S or N.
If the Hogues are polymer I'd take a hard look underneath 'em for rust.

Okay, good advice. I've got to take Dad's dogs to the vet so I'll take another look, maybe peek under the grips. We will probably grab it just because it's something we've both wanted forever, a shooter, not a cherry collector. The question is the price....fair, right?

Just out of curiosity, Kid, do the washers go on the crane end? As I said, the gap, which I'll measure, seems kind of wide already. I've got feelers.

IIRC they go down inside the cylinder to force it toward the rear when the crane is reinserted. They come in .0025” thickness and maybe.005”. It doesn’t sound like much but it won’t take many to tighten it up. Alternatively you can swage the end of the crane and refit it but it won’t last as long as the original fitting due to the thinner edge the cylinder is bearing on.

I wouldn’t sweat the gap too much, I saw a Ruger once that shot fine with a .017” gap. May have lost some velocity but accuracy didn’t seem to suffer.

I went and looked under the grips and the Hogue extension thing, it's a three-letter SN so I know it's newer than 1980, AHS series. No rust, so that's good news.
Then I found out that the reason the guns are there is because someone ELSE wants to sell them to someone ELSE and because my dad has a zillion guns, he's supposed to know the value? Sorry for wasting your time, at least until it's offered to me. I told Dad to tell the seller to go look that stuff up on Gunbroker.