You still may want to check the registration of the timing and the uniformity of the chamber sizes. For the former, you are checking to see if the chambers are coaxial withe the bore when the hammer is cocked. When I bought a Ruger Redhawk in the 1980s, I was lucky that the shop had three of them in stock. One failed the thumb drag test. With the other two, I put a strip of white paper between the cylinder and recoil shield, and got enough light on it that I could see from the muzzle that one of the two remaining guns had its chambers center in the bore perfectly, while the other gun's chambers overshot the bore a little. I bought the former, put a Burris pistol scope on it, and proceeded to put six rounds of cheap American Eagle 240 grain SPs into under an inch at 50 yards off bags. However five holes overlapped and just one at five o'clock opened the group to that final size. I repeated the shooting with close to the same result, especially the one hole away from the rest at about five o''clock. Later, with a small hole gauge, I found a spread of chamber mouth sizes of about 0.002". The tightest of these was the one throwing the fliers. I've never bought a reamer to fix it. I just don't use that chamber.
Anyway, the point is that good bore and chamber registration is helpful. Uniform chamber mouths are helpful. Both seem to matter more with lead bullets. And while I have no clue how much difference these factors might make in the Judge, at least it gives you something to look for, and maybe ideas for how to participate in one of my favorite pastimes, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
The other comments have me curious about the Judge's rifling and bore dimensions. I remember Elmer Keith commenting in one of his books that a lot of nineteenth century 45 Colts had rifling that was just a couple of thousandths deep, like a 22. He said some of the old time gunfighters liked the fact the bullets would often tumble coming out of them (think: gun with shallow rifling never fully cleaned of accumulated lead fouling), as a sideways bullet would stop a man faster than a straight-through hole did. Of course, they were talking short ranges, such as across a card table. Longer ranges typically involved a lot of misses back then, and tumbling would exacerbate that.
Anyway, the point is that good bore and chamber registration is helpful. Uniform chamber mouths are helpful. Both seem to matter more with lead bullets. And while I have no clue how much difference these factors might make in the Judge, at least it gives you something to look for, and maybe ideas for how to participate in one of my favorite pastimes, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
The other comments have me curious about the Judge's rifling and bore dimensions. I remember Elmer Keith commenting in one of his books that a lot of nineteenth century 45 Colts had rifling that was just a couple of thousandths deep, like a 22. He said some of the old time gunfighters liked the fact the bullets would often tumble coming out of them (think: gun with shallow rifling never fully cleaned of accumulated lead fouling), as a sideways bullet would stop a man faster than a straight-through hole did. Of course, they were talking short ranges, such as across a card table. Longer ranges typically involved a lot of misses back then, and tumbling would exacerbate that.
