I realize that this is an older thread, but I stumbled across it and couldn't resist adding my $0.02 worth.
In 1993 I walked into the Wal-Mart in Kenai, Alaska, and walked out a little while later with a Ruger SP 101 in .357 Mag after surrendering the Princely sum of $299.00 (no sales tax in AK in those days) for the gun and a few dollars more for a box of Federal 125 gr. JHP's, which according to Evan Marshall were the #1 man-stoppers bar none.
I took the little gun out to Nikiski, where we were running a fab shop and putting together spool pieces to rebuild the Granite Point platform out in the Gulf, which had suffered a fire the year before. When I got there I went to the back of the yard, loaded it up, and fired five rounds, which resulted in temporary deafness, a bleeding hole from hammer bite, and a marked reluctance to fire another round out of the kicking little pig until it had been modified in some fashion or other.
In those days Mr. Jack Weigand was running little ads in the backs of most of the gun rags that I subscribed to touting his "Tame the Beast" conversions on S&W J-frames and Ruger SP-101's, which included the Hybra-porting, bobbing the hammer and rendering the revolver DAO (if desired), polishing and smoothing all internal parts, bead-blasting the exterior, mirror-polishing the trigger and hammer, regulating the sights for the Federal 125 gr. JHP, removing cylinder end-shake (if necessary), and swapping the little old hard-rubber boot grips that the factory installed for a set of Hogues that a man could actually wrap four fingers around.
I called Mr. Jack, who had his shop in PA at the time, to try to figure out whether the work was worthwhile, and a few minutes into the conversation I asked him something like,
"This little gun only has an 2-1/4" barrel; is the porting going to work well enough to be worth doing?'
Five minutes later he paused for breath, which was fine, because he lost me somewhere around the second minute, when he was deep into an explanation of why the holes in the top were differently-sized conics, emulating the nozzles on a rocket (and necessitating the EDM machining as opposed to simply using a drill bit) and how those were tuned to the expansion ratio of the propellent gasses, and how the dwell time of the bullet in the barrel created a seal that ensured that the porting had maximum effect, as well as a lot of other stuff that I either understood poorly or not at all, but by the time that he stopped I understood that it would work, at least according to him, and I was intrigued enough to ask him if I could send him the revolver.
He gave me the shipping address, I packaged up the pistol, surrendered it to the guy who drove the Little Brown Truck, and forgot about it, figuring that, like most pistolsmiths, he'd have it for the next six or nine months, and I was astonished when UPS handed it back to me two weeks later with all of the work completed.
I took it out back, stuffed five rounds into the cylinder (and plugs into my ears) and fired it at a stump, and I was absolutely astonished at the result; there was no appreciable muzzle rise as far as I could tell, and while it wasn't as slick as my Model 19, it wasn't very far off, which I would never have believed possible (no offense to Ruger, but at that time I thought that nothing could come close to the double-action on a tuned K-frame).
When that job ended I took the little gun back home to Arizona and showed it off to one of my buddies who was hell on high red wheels with a revolver (or any other firearm for that matter) and I filmed him running a plate rack with it to confirm my suspicion that the muzzle didn't rise; Victor would run that plate rack in a second or so, and it looked as though he was shooting .22 shorts instead of full-house .357's.
I carried that little pistol in Galco leather behind my right hip for 9 years, and if I had pants on that gun was normally there, balancing out my Leatherman tool on the left side, and I used to to pot cottontails, as a trapline kill gun, to shoot the occasional cow or horse that needed to be put down, and for anything else that I needed a medium-bore handgun for, and I never got tired of handing it to someone to try out who wasn't shy about telling me that they wouldn't own a .357 snubby if someone gave them one because they were so unpleasant to shoot.
And then one night while I was parked at the local honky-tonk someone or other decided to inventory the contents of my truck and remove my high-lift jack, my tool box, and my SP-101, which hurt my feelings; they probably had to scoot one of my Airedales out of the way in order to reach under the seat and find the gun, which led me to believe that it was someone who knew both me and my dogs, although I had to leave go of that idea pretty quickly, because it caused me to lose sleep and think bad thoughts, and not even that revolver was worth that kind of aggravation.
I knew that I needed to replace it, though, so I began to rummage around through the gun rags, looking for Mr. Jack, and I was horrified to discover that he had given up converting revolvers, and that I couldn't replace it unless I could find one used, and no one in their right minds would offer to sell one if they were fortunate enough to have one, so I was confronted with the reality that I would have to find some substitute or other, which was a little bit like phantom limb syndrome for quite a while, although a 2" Model 19 tried to fill the hole, among other handguns.
So years went by, and my SP-101 joined that list that everyone has, and adds to as they get older, alongside of good dogs and horses and girlfriends and guns and other things that got lost along the way, and even though you never really make peace with the idea that they won't come around again time heals all wounds, or at least blurs the memories to some degree, although as Websites like Guns America and GunBroker became larger and more popular I'd still run a search for "Weigand" or "Tame the Beast" now and then, just in case someone was crazy enough or desperate enough to put one up for sale.
And then one day I happened to glance at a magazine rack and see a full-color cover with "Gemini Customs" emblazoned across the top of a picture of something that looked remarkably like a Weigand-modified and ported revolver, and when I bought it and dug inside I discovered that Marc Morganti had licensed the Hybra-port process from Mr. Jack and was producing SP-101's just like the old "Tame the Beast" packages, with the added attraction of machining the cylinder to accept moon clips.
And you can bet that I didn't waste much time calling up Marc and arranging to ship him an SP-101, and when it was returned (and quickly) it was a carbon copy of my old Weigand-modified revolver; just as slick an action, and just as effective in eliminating muzzle rise, and just as good at converting doubters once they fired a cylinder or two.
I have several handguns that have some sort of muzzle brake or Magna-porting or compensator attached or installed or machined, but none of them come come anywhere close to the Hybra-porting process, at least in my subjective opinion. And my Gemini Customs SP-101 is riding once more in the Galco Speed Master holster that carried my first one.
I recently picked up an Alaskan in .454 to keep my Freedom Arms company, and as soon as I can find a few spare minutes I'll box that up and ship it to Marc to be Hybridized as well; I'm not particularly recoil-shy, but those full-house 300 gr. flatnoses out of my 4-3/4" Freedom Arms (which came Magna-ported from the factory) recoil pretty sharply, and I'm eaten up with curiousness to see what will happen when I shoot them in a Hybra-ported gun.
Not to mention that the two of them ought to make an interesting pair; sort of a Big Brother/Little Brother combo, and even though I can't really convince myself that there is any really legitimate reason to to have a .454 that is capable of rapid double-action fire with full-house loads it ought to make a heck of a conversation piece if nothing else, and if a bear ever takes it into his head to try to run down my throat I would think that I might be able to persuade him to cease and desist with a revolver like that, although every bear that I've ever shot with those loads in that single-action fell down so fast that I would have missed them with a quick second shot anyhow.
But I guess that's why someone coined the term gun "nut," huh?
Airedale
