View Single Post
Old June 18, 2010, 06:34 AM   #11
Jim March
Senior Member
 
Join Date: February 14, 1999
Location: Pittsburg, CA, USA
Posts: 7,417
The SASS Special NewVaqs are simply standard 4.68" barrel NewVaqs with Montado hammers grafted on, now that Montado/SuperBlackhawk-type hammers (or roughly equivalent from other vendors) are legal.

Early Montados are still not legal for SASS unmounted shooting as they have grooves in the grip frame. They could be sanded down I guess or filled in with epoxy as a temporary remedy. Later Montados have standard grip frames and are legal in all classes.

NewVaqs and Montados tend to shoot very well. The NewVaq was the first Ruger SA made with the new cylinder boring process where all six chambers are done with the same bit/reamer set in sequence instead of all-at-once. The rest of Ruger's SA wheelguns and I think the DAs too have now migrated to the new process, which means better uniformity between bores. When they came out, the NewVaqs were able to outshoot all other Ruger wheelguns on average, out of the box. The rest have caught up .

In 357, a NewVaq cylinder is beefier in all directions than a GP100's cylinder. You can run some very hot loads through a NewVaq or Montado 357, and in large quantities. It's not as unGodly-strong as the large-frame 357s built on a 44Magnum-class platform, but they're not "weak" either.

I've had my NewVaq357 since 2005, and very quickly installed a SuperBlackHawk hammer, which I prefer over the Montado pattern. The SBH hammer thumbpad's horizontal grooves let me slip my strong-side thumb slip sideways off the pad at the end of the cocking stroke. I'm sure the Montado wouldn't be bad, but the SBH hammer really feels right.

I had a chance to compare the "hammer reach" between my gun and some real Colts. Turns out Ruger must have been immitating the hammer reach of the post-WW2 Colts as that has a longer reach than my gun. Mine (with SBH hammer) matched almost perfectly the reach of a pre-WW2 1st gen Colt SAA; I was able to compare with three of those and they all matched up to mine within a millimeter or two tops. I was more than pleased with that discovery.

So: while the SASS special or Montado don't look quite "period correct", it turns out that on a purely functional level, they'll feel damn near exactly like something Wyatt Earp and them guys would have carried and shot back in the day...and it's the post-WW2 Colt SAAs that are actually more "fake" in terms of feel and shooting skills needed. I think it's these abnormally high-rise hammers that led to the rise of off-hand-cocking in SASS/CAS which in terms of both period-correct skills and gunfight survival is an abomination. This is yet more evidence (if any was needed) that SASS's rulebook has for years put "period correct looks" over actual effective use of SA wheelguns and leverguns.
__________________
Jim March
Jim March is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.02535 seconds with 8 queries