Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns It really pains me to say this

Well, got a brand new replacement revolver back from Ruger today. And the evidence is conclusive, the people who make the SP101 product line really don't give a flying leap about their QC.

First, they never told me they were sending it. My FFL dealer emailed me out of the blue this afternoon and said he had a Ruger waiting for me.

Ran over, picked it up and ran straight home to examine it.

The Good
- The barrel is on straight(er). You can see it's still coming out of the frame just a teeny tiny bit off to the right but at least it's more straight then the other previous three.
- The chamber throats seem to be okay, at least not way undersized. They are not consistent but few factory throats are, they will all allow a .357" bullet and some allow one .3575". I'm going to get a set of real pin gauges in .0005" increments after the New Year and get exact measurements.
- And that's it for the good.

The Bad
- The cylinder still slides off of the crane. It's absolutely not supposed to do that.
- There are gross machining marks in the forcing cone and at the start of the rifling. Not just scratches but deep circumferential grooves. They test fired some jacketed bullets and even after cleaning you can see the jacket material embedded into those grooves.

The What the Bleep?
- There is an alien life form encrusting the inside of the revolver. Okay, maybe not alien but what in the world is this? It looks like mold at first but it scrapes off readily with a dental pick. I'm pretty sure Ruger uses a lost wax method of casting but could this be old wax? In 52 years of owning Ruger handguns I've never seen anything like this.

This is the 4th substandard Ruger SP101 in a row. Four. In a Row. I can see one bad one slipping through and I can see four bad ones in circulation throughout the country, but four owned by me? My karma just isn't that bad, instead I'd say one could predict a fairly reliable trend here and it does not point to a good place.

Not sure what to do. I'm not going to send it back to Ruger, they've effed up their chances to make things right 4 times now. I do like the model design, I like it a lot, so will probably just clean this one up and shoot it.

I will rip Ruger customer service a new, very large ass hole for this, complete with glossy digital photographs. I pity the nice lady I dealt with but she definitely said this would be reviewed by management before being sent out. Apparently checking for a cylinder that comes off and alien growth inside the revolver is not part of their check list.


This revolver is absolutely brand new. I got it home, disassembled it and found all this.

Front of the fire control unit






Crane assembly





Inside frame



Special custom two piece cylinder/crane assembly

Appreciate everybody's thoughts. Kind of a PITA here but not much to do but keep on keeping on.

I'd been dealing with one person at Ruger both for the last return and this one. A bit more than just a phone answerer but obviously not able to influence much higher up. Earlier in the thread I related a phone conversation with her:

"She said she had notified the manager of this product line of their 0 and 3 record and red flagged the requisition for a new one which she assured me meant that it would be reviewed by management before being sent out."

Last night I sent an email back to her reminding her of this and noted that if indeed a manager or managers reviewed this it sure as hell didn't speak well for their management. I attached some of the more hideous and incriminating pictures from this thread as supporting evidence of this.

I'd try again (try #5 but hey, who's counting? ) but it's obvious they are slapping these together as fast as possible and throwing them out the door. According to the fellows in the gunsmithing forum that crud in the pictures is most likely residue from bluing. I don't know how they make their barrels, reamer or whatever they use but it's very obvious necessary steps were missed or deliberately skipped.

Apparently it's just not worth their time to make one customer happy when they can sell junk faster than they can make it. I told her I've lost all faith in them and any assurances of "management review" were no better than politicians' promises, i.e. totally worthless.

So, I said "I want my money back!" in bold and underlined. She's out until Monday so we'll see what transpires then. I did preface my remarks by thanking her for working with me and doing what she could and that the body of the email was nothing personal but it was painfully obvious that management - at last for this product line - just doesn't give a damn about their products.

Revolver manufacturing is a lost art. I've got several revolvers. One is a Colt Police Positive from 1920,...made with 1920 technology machinery.

It would be interesting to see what someone would come up with if they tried to duplicate it today. I bet they would have a difficult time duplicating the fit even with 21st century machining technology.

but Ruger quality control really is in the toilet, at least for their SP-101 revolvers.

Just took possession of my third one this year and it has some of the same problems as the other two.

In June I bought a NIB SP-101 4" with adjustable sights, serial number indicated a DOM of 2017. The barrel was pointed visibly to the right so I had to adjust the rear sight way way left - hanging out of the slide left - to get windage centered, plus the cylinder would slide off of the crane which it's not supposed to do.

Called Ruger and sent it back. They said it was beyond repair and would be scrapped so they sent me another new one which was made in 2020. Same thing - the barrel pointed visibly to the right. I immediately sent it back without firing it and they "fixed' it by twisting the barrel to move the front sight to the left. Sold that unfired with full disclosure to a fellow locally.

Hope springs eternal (or I'm a glutton for punishment) so just this morning I received one of the new Lipsey's 3" adjustable half lug versions. The barrel points to the right - third one in a row. It's not quite as bad as the first two but still noticeable, and the cylinder also slides off of the crane.

That's three in a row across four years of production with barrels not straight with the frame and 2 out of 3 with the cylinder not attached properly.


So I give up. I'm not going to bother sending it back. I bought one in June, it's now October and I just want to shoot it, not wait 2 weeks for a non-fix or 6 weeks for another one with the same problems. If it shoots and hits POA without having to move the rear sight out of its housing then I'll call it good. The chamber throats are very undersized, a .3565" jacketed bullet won't pass through any of them but I can fix that myself.

As the title says, it really pains me to say this since I've been a loyal fan of Ruger revolvers since 1969, but like Smith & Wessons, it looks like any future purchases are going to be older ones from the used market.



P.S. They quit adding the little disassembly pin in the grip although the manual still references it and the slot holder in the grip is still there. They do still have some available and one is on its way so that's a pinpoint of brightness.

We had a couple of SP-101 2005 or so, a 2 1/4" and 3". Both those barrels were on straight. Both shot POA/POI at 25 yards and that short one was dead on the money. The biggest aggravation with those revolvers was sharp edges on the trigger guards and/or trigger, as well as that damn plastic insert that goes in the grip. Once those things were corrected, they were great little revolvers.

I have to wonder if Ruger figured perfect barrel index wasn't quite so important with the adjustable sight model.

As it turns out it was just crud to clean off. It came off fairly easily with some bore cleaner and a toothbrush or pipe cleaner and I don't see any after effects of it.

However....

While cleaning the whole thing I noticed a peculiar sound running a bore brush through the barrel, kind of a zippy noise. Never heard anything like that before. I looked into the breech end with a flashlight and thought, "hmm, that's quite a lot of metal fouling from only 5 test rounds of jacketed bullets." I thought some other things but they don't bear repeating here.

So, I ran the ol' Teslong borescope into it and, well, y'all can see for yourselves. I have never, ever seen a bore like this.

This is right at the breech just after the forcing cone which you can see at the very right of the picture.




This is that same land at the muzzle.



Three more pics of different lands at various points along the bore. The grooves are okay, not the greatest but fairly normal longitudinal striations. But every land, from the forcing cone right up to the crown looks like this. The last of these really shows just how corrugated the entire bore is.









Just for comparison I checked out a 20 year old S&W .38 and an eight year old Ruger Blackhawk .357. They have some fine finishing marks on the lands but are mirror surfaces compared to this SP101.

This is a deal breaker. I don't even want to think about what those little files would do to a cast bullet.