I’ve gravitated towards moon-clip-fed revolvers because I’ve yet to find a speedloader I could reliably and quickly index against the cylinder without fumbling a bit. This design looks like it might fix my problem:
I presume it’s cut so that your fingers should be able to index the scalloped parts with your cylinder’s scalloped parts.
h/t Linoge, from his comment on this thread.
You shouldn’t be indexing by feel. I use moonclips, and I don’t even try to do it that way.
Clear the cylinder and point the revolver at the target. Look through the cylinder. Look through the holes. With a finger on the top round, put that round through the hole while looking through the hole. Concentrate on the hole the round is going into.
Target fixation will make you put the rounds in on the first try.
A moonclip’s advantage is to eliminate the extra step of releasing the clip, is all.
Much though I appreciate the shoutout (and thanks for that 🙂 ), JayG originally discovered this particular find.
As for their proper implementation, the only revolver I own is an open-top that is loaded by its little gate, so I surely have no clue :).
That said, I am somewhat confused by their locking mechanism – the company advertises “right-release, left-lock”, which is a great mnemonic… unless you are like me and you were raised/trained with “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey”.
Ah, well. Still, billeted anything gets my engineer’s heart all aflutter.
Are there half-moon clips for the Judge? Otherwise that speed loader does look nice for my Judge.
As a 25-year retired cop, I carried revolvers for the first 8 years or so. I carried Speedloaders for the reloads, and spend many an hour just learning to do it by feel.
No offense to Kristopher, he’s one hell of a gunner, but in tactical shooting, you are ALWAYS scanning your target, or scanning for additional threats. You DO NOT look at your revolver while reloading it for the obvious reason that you can’t do both tasks with the same eyes.
Watch the vids of the FBI demonstration teams of yore, where the old master could shoot 18 rounds from a 6-shooter in about 6 seconds, or watch Jerry Miculek do the same thing in about the same time. Neither of these great pistoleros looks at the gun while reloading.
Of more concern to me in the photos above is the way those shotgun rounds for a Judge are not aligned well in the speedloader. THAT will cause far more issues than whether you peek at your gun or not.
A trick for training is to use wadcutters to practice with. They are much more difficult to index with the cylinder, and when you can get wadcutters in quickly, you will have NO trouble with round-shouldered rounds.
You also have to learn not to handle the Speedloader by it’s lock-knob. Doing so will introduce a chance of it releasing prematurely and dumping the rounds out. I handle mine by the rear edge, from where it is very easy to transition to the release knob.
Hm, thanks for the advice in the last paragraph there Rivrdog, I hadn’t even considered that and I’ve been holding mine incorrectly.
You don’t look at the revolver, Rivrdog … you look through it and through the cylinder, and at your current target.
You keep both eyes open during this.
Crisp target, blurry cylinder, if that makes any sense.
This takes advantage of the tendency to go where you are looking ( if you are ever on an off-road motorcycle, you know what I am talking about. If you look at the damned rock instead of the path around it, you will hat that damned rock ).