Cimarron Thunderball Stainless

[OD#3]

I posted a more extensive review of this revolver on another forum.  What began as some detailed photographing of a new purchase evolved into a critique of its faults, of which there were way too many to have justified its leaving the factory.  First, it was a handsome piece....



But what first appeared to be evidence of showroom abuse in the peening of the cylinder stop notches, was soon revealed to be evidence of extremely poor fitting and timing.  Here are the notches..



This was its as-received condition, and I should have just sent it back.  However, I thought I could correct this with a little tinkering.  The bolt was too fat for the peened up notches, but when I cleaned the notches up with needle files, I found that the bolt was fine---snug, but fine.  The problem was that the hand was not protruding far enough forward through the hand slot window.  As it was, the top leg of the hand was catching the ratchet but just barely.  This caused cylinder rotation to be uncontrolled and unchecked by the bottom of the top leg, resulting in frequent and severe throwby with a subsequent turn line and peened notches whenever the operator then pushed the cylinder counterclockwise to line it back up with the bolt.  How it ever left the factory in this condition, I do not know, but someone obviously cocked the hell out of this thing fiddling with it. 

It appeared that the hand window slot had either been mislocated or just too shallowly machined on the forward edge.  Here is the slot as received....



Here is the protrusion at half-cock of the hand...



That is just enough to rotate the cylinder but not enough to brake the rotation.  At half-cock, there was freewheeling movement of at least a chamber's width forward and backwards.  It was this freewheeling effect that caused the throwby.

First I tried shortening the lower leg of the hand from front to rear.  The amount of metal needing to be removed to accomplish sufficient top leg protrusion threatened to leave the lower leg nothing more than a tiny nub, and I abandoned this effort and ordered two more hands.  Next, I went to work on the forward edge of the hand slot with needle files.  About 8 hours of work deepened it this far.  I was dangerously encroaching upon the trigger screw hole at the bottom, so I began concentrating more on the top half.



I was able to get the hand protrusion to where it needed to be with this technique, though I suspect that I may have had success with less hand slot work and more lower hand leg work.  Regardless, this worked very well, and the new hand I installed was perfectly timed for parking the chamber in the exact center of the loading gate at half-cock.  Shame, because it now tried to rotate the cylinder before the bolt finished dropping.  There was actually quite a bit of hammer movement before the bolt tail started to move, so I spent a good deal of time on the stop ledge and nose of the bolt until much of this play was gone, and the bolt retracted in time for cylinder rotation.  I used a range rod to ensure a centered engagement of the bolt to the stop.

Unfortunately, the cylinder was stopped by the bolt before the hammer reached full cock.  However, before I started shortening that lower leg, I thought it prudent to work on the sear and hammer notch a little.  This has got to be the absolute worst sear I've ever seen, and it had been giving me a white knuckle trigger pull...



So out came the universal stoning fixture and some fine stones....



I don't have a picture of the sear notch on the hammer, but it was equally rough.  As luck would have it, smoothing these two had the desired effect of timing the full cock position perfectly; the hammer now reaches full cock precisely when the bolt engages the cylinder stop notch.  The trigger pull is a little harder than I'd like, because the resultant engagement is perhaps a bit more positive than it could be, but I'm leaving it as is for now to see how it wears in; I don't really know how hard these parts are.

Check out the lousy grip frame alignment.  I "fixed" this by filing the edges of both to match, though a better fix would probably have been to align them properly and then drill and tap a larger screw hole. But I'm not set up for that sort of work...





This revolver is now perfectly timed with almost zero rotational movement at lockup (felt but not seen).  I like its handsome lines, heavy cylinder bevels, and some of its authentic parts (firing pin bushing/recoil plate, ejector rod stud on barrel, pressed-in hammer cam, authentically-shaped small parts, etc.)  And my endshake is nonexistent.  However, my example was so poorly fitted and timed otherwise, that I would not recommend buying any of these sight unseen like I did (ordered from Grabagun).  I'm very happy with the way it turned out, and the experience working on it was valuable.  But there were many times during the work when I wished I had just sent this disaster back.  And I still don't know how this will stand up in the long run--the hardness of these stainless parts is unknown to me.  For Pietta's sake, I'm hoping that I got the worst they've ever made.