Ruger Speed Six Range Report

I shot the Ruger today for the first time. Both groups below were fired double action at 10 yards.

The Pachmayr Compac grips I installed are great, BTW. They are very comfortable for my small hands and do a good job of absorbing recoil. I'm half tempted to modify the grip frame of my Service Six to Speed Six dimensions and install a set of these.

The lower group is 40 rounds of .38 handloads with a Speer 158 grain .358 LSWC on top of 4.9 grains of Winchester Autocomp in mixed brass with CCI primers. This is a full .38 Special service load equivalent.

The headshots were .38s with a 178 grain .359 Keith LSWC on top of 5.3 grains of Unique in mixed brass and CCI primers. This is +P and approaching a .38/44 load.

The load with the Keiths has been very accurate in my 4" S&W Model 15-3, Ruger Service Six, and S&W Model 28-2 but between the Carnauba Red bullet lube and Unique, it's very smoky. As a black powder shooter that doesn't bother me, however. The fouling wipes right off.

One of the nice things about Autocomp, though, is how nicely and consistently it meters in a powder measure, in contrast to Unique. A couple years ago I made my own load chart for my RCBS Little Dandy. I took a variety of powders and did an average of 10 throws in the different rotors and Autocomp was by far the most consistent, even better than other ball powders like HP-38 and Universal.