I have a blued 7.5” bbl Redhawk .44mag with grooves for Ruger rings. I used it for deer hunting a few years and took two does with it. Never did use the scope rings. I found I could hand load (safely) my old style Vaqueros (.45colt) as hot or hotter than .44mag, plus the single action vaquero with 5.5” bbl was about a pound lighter than the redhawk. I have 2 vaqueros. One with a standard grip one with a bisley grip. I carry the one with the bisley grip. It handles it better.
An old (and older) friend and I got hooked up a couple years ago after not being in contact for almost 30 years.
He was always a serious firearms guy and still is.
I have always had weapons for hunting and plinking, grew up that way, and only in recent years began to look into self-defense, CCWs and so on.
My friend has many, many firearms, mostly older stuff, and likes to sell a couple and buy a couple pretty regularly. When he came to visit he brought his S & W 629 .44 mag along.
I have owned a few revolvers but never really knew much about any of them, and never had any extra money, ever. But he and I talked and shot all week and of course I started thinking.
I gotta say that instinctively I was/maybe am a Ruger kind of guy. Stout, solid, reliable and in some ways, in some calibers, magnificent, if you don’t mind my saying.
I would say to my friend: Why would I want to buy a snazzbo expensive early S & W, with all their modes and dashes, if I can buy a failsafe Ruger and be done with it?
He is a smart guy and he quoted Wm Ruger to that same effect: “When I make a firearm I do it right the first time.”
But that S & W stuff is infectious. Like a virus. All the names and lore and the variations on the models-—once you look into it it’s hard to turn away. Or it was for me anyhow.
So I still have Rugers which I prize and, on a daily basis, entrust with my life. But I’ve gone a long way into the S & W research too, probably longer and farther than I should have.
Getting to know your way around Smith & Wessons is a little like going to college. You gradually learn the a few lessons but you have to keep writing checks to do it lol.
Pleased to hear your stories, glad to make your acquaintance. Good shooting to you!
p.s. Oh I was going to tell you, my good buddy who got me into the Smith & Wesson maze wrote just a couple weeks ago that he had just picked up a Ruger Bisley single-action (right now I can’t remember if it’s a .44 or the long colt).
“Back to the fundamentals,” he wrote me.