Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Smaller Frame 357?

I’ve got a 640 with a 2 1/8” barrel and it shoots much better than one would think. Great guns.

My favorite for carrying, is a 4" Ruger Security Six. Accurate, light, and accurate!

My all time favorite smaller frame .357 is a S&W 19 2/12"barrel, W/round butt.

Virgil B.

The new Colt King Cobra Target seems like it would fit. Colt “D” frame size, 4” barrel, adjustable sights, and a very smooth action.

I am thinking of getting a 66-2 with a 4" barrel which has been lightly used. I think it is a bit overpriced at 600.

Handled a King Cobra for the first time this morning, a 3" fixed sight version.

Con: The sights. The rear notch is too narrow for the front sight so there's little or no daylight around the blade and with the rear notch being silver colored you can't distinguish it clearly anyway. But that's just for the groove rear sight version, hopefully the black adjustable rear sight will be more compatible with a blade a bit further out on a 4" barrel.

Pro: Everything else. Build quality seemed very good, cylinder latched and unlatched smoothly and easily. The thing that stood out immediately was that DA trigger. It's supposed to be around 9 pounds and was definitely lighter than the normal 11-12 pounds of most revolvers and it had a very smooth stroke with a surprise break, no stacking at all. I have to say it was one of the best DA triggers I've tried on a new production revolver.

Overall size was great as well. It was smaller than a new Model 10 I'd looked at a minute earlier and was pretty much just right for a "smaller" .357. Price is the big stumbling block, a revolver going for close to $1000 is hard to swallow when I'm still trying to get my head around .357 Ruger Blackhawks selling in the mid $600 range.

Just beware colts king cobra (at least the original one) is pretty short cylindered. If I seat 158gr lswc’s at the crimp groove, they won’t chamber on the Colt. The same loads fit in a 3” M60 Pro with ease. The 3” M60 is a real nice trail gun, but it does buck a bit with .357’s.

My only handgun for the past 4 years here in Alaska, has been an sp101 4.2" with a reflex sight. 180 grain swift A-frames over 15 grains lil gun for exactly 1200 fps for moose and bear protection. 158 grain speer tmj over 8 grains of unique for small game. I don't use the phrase "kit gun", but it's my main trail gun. 29 oz with reflex sight. Anything lighter, I wouldn't have put away the hundreds of lbs of beaver, grouse, ptarmigan or snowshoe hare. The lighter ones don't settle down. I wouldn't want a shorter barrel either. The 4.2" pistol fits in my pocket, plenty compact.

You must have one hell of a pocket.
I'd like a pic, never seen a sight on a Ruger wheel gun.

I wonder just how miserable those magnums are in the lcrx .
. .

If it's in halfway decent shape it's a little under priced. I bought a few of them years ago for $300-350 but today's market is closer to $750-800

Buy it!

I've got the 3" LCRx. It bucks with the full house 357 loads, but not painful for me. The grip absorbs a lot of the shock.

Pics before and after:

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbt...gnum-reccomend-a-black-bear-defense-load

Dropping the burris in favor of a trijicon. Both will fit the same alchin mount.

What didn't you like about the Burris?

When I used to shoot a lot of .357 Magnum (back in the 1980s when I was a huge advocate for it as a defensive caliber for concealed carry) out of my FBI-configured Model 65 (three inch bull barrel, round butt frame), I noticed that 158 grain loads were a lot less punishing in recoil vs 125 grain. It never made logical sense to me (you'd think it would be the other way around), but I couldn't deny the obvious.

My perception also. I went completely to 158gr for everything except target work.

Family Deal, it looks fantastic. When it was bought it was 325 and buried in a gunshop case. The owner of the LGS in question has a single digit IQ.

Hi pa,
It won't hold zero and is heading back to burris for repair. Guess I'll have to spend the big money on trijicon. When it's returned from burris, I'll probably just keep it as a spare.

Well, that's lame. I've been mulling the purchase of a couple of them for a .45 colt and a .357. You're prior reports of frequent use in another thread were encouraging. I looked at Trijicons as well but the price is certainly off-putting for wanting two of them. For what it's worth, their model with the smaller square window is more durable than the one with the bigger round window.

Pa, this is the second burris to loose zero on me. First was a burris timberline 2-7. Both of these are made in the Philippines.

Was issued a brand new trijicon agog and brand new m4 carbine for my third and final one-year tour in Iraq many years ago.

I dropped to the ground hard a half dozen times, hard enough to chip my elbows. The optic never lost zero the entire deployment. Before that, I had an eotech holographic on my issued m249 machine gun. Everyone else had aimpoints on m16 a2's. Never had issue with any of them. Zero was confirmed every time we had a convoy leave for missions. Only issue was a dead battery on an aimpoint occasionally.

Anyhow, what I'm getting at is my limited experience with illuminated sights from the above mentioned brands has been positive. Goodbye Burris.