Hondo44 said:
How many Vaqueros are you sending back and are they all for canted front sights?
Ho were your action jobs done; lighter springs? If so, the trigger pulls may still still meet specifications once Ruger installs standard trigger and/or hammer springs. And you'll get the custom springs back.
The super blackhawk hammers shouldn't be a problem, they're original factory parts, just not to the Vaqueros. And if they do change them out, they'll be returned to you...
I haven't yet decided if (or how many) Vaqueros I'd like to send to Ruger. Basically, my story goes like this.... Several years ago, I bought an original Vaquero with 7.5" barrel and love it and shoots really close to point of aim with Ruger-only 45 Colt loads. I thought this was great, so I got the bug and bought a couple more but with 3.75" barrels. I never benched them, but just shot them off-hand and noticed my shots were a little to the left and low. So I shoot some different loads and elevation difference was gone but still hitting to the left. I thought it was me, so I just got used to aligning the front blade to the inside-right of the rear gutter sight. (I never had this issue with semi-auto fixed sight pistols.) Fast-forward a year or so and I picked up more Vaqueros. One had the front sight that was not parallel to the bore axis (and it was also canted to the right at the 12:30 position, too, but I didn't notice it right off). So I shot it and noticed it shot way-left. I got to looking at it and noticed then that the front sight was canted to the right like the barrel wasn't screwed in all the way. It got me thinking about all my other Vaqueros and sure enough, some were canted to the right and some to the left. I noticed that all the New Vaquero models were all canted to the right (about 12:30 position) and the original Vaqueros were canted to the left (about 11:30 position), and I think I had a couple that were pretty close to straight up at 12 o'clock position. Then it dawned on me that I spent all this money on acquiring Vaqueros, getting action jobs (stone work on hammer and trigger and springs), custom grips, super blackhawk hammers, that Ruger seems to be producing fixed sight guns that are clearly not done in a jig of some sort, but apparently just assembled by eyeballing it by the fastest worker on the assembly line and there's nothing I can do to remedy it. It just seems that if you're going to make a fixed-sight gun, then you make it perfectly aligned and then the shooter just learns to shoot straight. So now I'm systematically taking each one to the range and firing it from a rest to see how it compares to what I perceive is a mis-clocked front sight, and if it's off, if I can live with it. I'm still in the process of getting four or five cylinder throats reamed, and when they come back, I'll get back to the range and see where I'm at. I was able to remedy one of the New Vaqueros, but I'm told I was lucky with the outcome and to be cautious about doing it again. So I'm tempted to do it again and if I fail, then I'll have had to send to Ruger anyway. The problem with Ruger service is that I called them three times and the lady that answers the phone doesn't know anything about handguns, they (always a different person) won't transfer me to a repair tech saying they don't accept calls. So I respectfully and politely (always being nice) request she ask the repair tech for me and then call me back. I called three times and talked to three different persons and never got any calls back in a week. I spoke to one very well-known gunsmith and he said to NOT send anything back to Ruger. I do know that, according to the lady that did take my call, they will only warranty the work if it was recently purchased as new by me within the last year or so, so that knocks out half of them (if I wanted to send back) since some were bought as "new old stock" and "never been fired" stuff from GunBroker sellers selling off their prized collections while the sellin' is good during the pandemic.
Sorry to be long-winded, but you can see that my thoughts have been all over the place. I think what I'm going to do is wrap up my customizing jobs with them since some are still half-way through the process, and get them back to the range and fire them from a rest. (So far the ones with obvious canted front sights do shoot to the left from a rest.) Then I'll see how far off and then try to correct them myself. The way I did it for the one was I used a hockey puck, big rubber hammer, and some sheets of paper to put between the metal and the rubber. I laid the front sight blade against the hockey puck and hit the barrel with the hammer. I'm not sure if it had the effect of rotating the barrel or if it bent the front sight blade since I didn't measure the barrel-to-cylinder gap ahead of time. It went from shooting 2.5" to the left to about 0.5" to the right of point-of-aim. I can live with that. The next one is firing 3" to the left from a rest and front sight is obviously canted to the right.