If I recall correctly, that Italian .22 single-action that I used to own was an 8-shooter. To be honest, I didn’t like that. Sure, you get more shots before you have to reload, but loading 8 holes in the single-action cylinder with those tiny little bullets is not a lot of fun. Even worse is cleaning 8 little holes in the cylinder at the end of the shooting day. I am just fine with a 6-shot .22 single-action revolver.

That afternoon when I arrived home with my booty, I did go onto ShopRuger.com, found wooden grips that would fit, and placed my order – just short of $50 with tax and shipping.

But wait – I then remembered that I had a pair of wood Ruger Blackhawk grips in my stash of stuff. Would those fit? I dug those out and tried them on. Yes! They fit! I rushed back to the computer to see if I could cancel my order. No luck there. Here’s the Customer Service number – I call and get . . . call back during business hours?! (east coast) So then I found the web message form for Customer Service. I typed in my cancellation request and waited for a day. I got no confirmation of cancellation over the course of the next day. Finally I called them the first thing in the morning on the third day and successfully canceled. Whew!

Before presenting Tony with his Wrangler, I wanted to make a holster for it. But I would have to make two, wouldn’t I? Every time I embark on a leather project, I learn something new, get a little better at the art. I really like the way these turned out. Perfect they are not, but they are still just what I was hoping to achieve.

I started making a pattern by tracing a holster that I had for my 6” S&W M686. That’s a bigger, double-action revolver, so I had to refine the pattern for the slightly smaller, and differently-shaped Ruger Wranglers. The model holster is also closed-bottomed, so besides shortening it for the shorter barrel length, I shortened it again for making open-bottom holsters. In the end, I got a perfect fit.

California is further west than Arizona, but despite that geographical fact, I think that most people would agree that Arizona is a more “Western” state than California. To welcome Tony to our state, I wanted these cowboy-gun holsters to exude that Western flavor. I gave the leather a bit of Western-style decoration and a rustic brown stain.

Tony considers himself to be a trout fisherman as his primary outdoor pursuit, so that is why I chose to put a jumping trout on the holsters. Yeah, the trout could have been better positioned on both holsters, and I double-struck the trout on mine – I told you that they’re not perfect.

I did make the holster for my gun first so that I could make most of the mistakes on the holster that I was going to keep, so that Tony’s might be the better one. Most of those mistakes turned out to be in the order of the steps taken to make them. Tony’s went together more smoothly, but in the end, they came out pretty close in overall quality.

My sons and I just learned that we were drawn for HAM season in the upcoming February javelina hunts. We were drawn for Unit 19A, to the east of Chino Valley. Since I had never hunted that unit, I needed to head out there for my first scouting trip. Where could I park the big trailer for our hunting camp? What did the country look like in person? There is only so much you can learn from Google Earth.

So I called Tony up and asked him if he would like to join me on this scouting trip. Of course I had another motive in mind. Without my prompting, he asked if we could do some shooting. “Bring some of your guns.” He’s really not much of a shooter. He has an air rifle, but doesn’t own a single firearm – yet. “Sure, yeah. Sounds good.” (tee hee).

On the drive out to the national forest land, he mentioned that he had been watching the Ruger Wranglers on the J&G Sales website, and he saw that the Wranglers had sold out after our visit there. “Oh no! Really? That sucks.” (tee hee).

We did find a good spot where I could bring the trailer, and which happened to be a good spot to pull out the shootin’ irons and set up some targets. We started with my Savage combo gun, .223 over 12 ga. I wanted to demonstrate the difference between a full power .223 varmint round (50 gr. Nosler Ballistic Tip) versus a “.223 Hornet” round on plastic prairie dogs – 12 oz. water-filled soda bottles. My “.223 Hornet” rounds are .223 cases downloaded to .22 Hornet velocity using 45 gr. Hornet bullets. As expected, the Hornet rounds went in and out, with maybe a crack in the plastic. The full-power .223 varmint rounds practically turn the bottles inside out as they cause the bottles to jump high in the air with an exciting explosion of water mist.

Next, I thought I’d impress him by pulling out my Savage B22 Precision and knocking off empty shotgun shells at 50 yards. Following that I moved to handguns. First up was my S&W .327 Fed Mag Model 632 – my favorite trail gun. I worked him up from .32 S&W Long, to .32 H&R Magnum, to .327 Federal Magnum rounds to demonstrate how you can go from .22 LR equivalent power level to .357 Magnum power in a single handgun.

Tony is ex-Army and wears some sort of an “Army Retired” baseball cap wherever he goes. So the next impressive item I pulled out was my engraved Class of 2017 West Point officers pistol from Sam – a stainless Colt M1911. I pointed out the meaning behind all of the various engravings on the pistol. Then I said, “Oh, I have ammo for it in that blue bag on the tailgate. Can you grab that bag, bring it over and hand me some ammo?” (tee hee.)

Yes, there actually was some .45 ammo in there, along with his Ruger Wrangler. He dutifully grabs the box of ammo and hands it to me, not registering that he had to push aside a holstered Stone Gray Ruger Wrangler to grab the box. “Is there anything else in there?”

Tony loading his Ruger Wrangler for the first time.

Yeah, he got a bit misty-eyed as the realization came over him. “You bought the Ruger Wrangler!” I wandered back to the tailgate to my other range bag and pulled out mine. He now saw that we owned matching Ruger Wranglers, housed in matching hand-made holsters. I explained that they had two in-stock, but one had cracked grips, and that was why mine had wooden grips now.

We never got around to shooting the 1911. We put that aside, as it was time to see how these Rugers shot. We had set up an 8” square steel plate at 15 yards when we shot the S&W M632. Tony’s first shots at the plate were frustrating. He wasn’t getting many hits. We decided to shoot at paper from a rest to see what was going on.

I shot mine at paper with the barrel stabilized on a soft rest. Shots were hitting low and quite a bit left. I raised the sight in the rear notch and aimed to the right of where I wanted the bullets to go. Shots were better for elevation, but still left. Concerningly, a couple of the holes in the target looked like the bullets were hitting sideways – keyholing.

We were shooting a mixed batch of bulk ammo. So this is the worst possible collection of ammo for accuracy testing. Just keep that in mind.

After several more grouping attempts, I decided to change my rested hold. Instead of resting the barrel on the rest, I turned the soft rest sideways and rested my hands on the pillow, holding the grip. That was better. The groups seemed to show much better consistency, but also, I no longer had to hold the front sight high in the rear notch. I could hold the front sight level in the notch as it should be. This change also seemed to have solved the keyholing problem that we saw earlier.

Another change we made was to move the target 5 yards closer, to 10 yards. I still had to hold to the right though.

We shot both Wranglers for comparison, and they both gave us about the same results – hitting left of where we aimed. Finally, the thought occurred to me, that if we could not adjust the fixed sights, then we had to adjust the sight picture. When I tried to compensate for the low hits by raising the front sight in the notch, that was an example of adjusting the sight picture.

To compensate for windage, you can either point the gun to the right of where you want to hit, or you can change the placement of the front sight in the notch of the rear sight. This is sort of like adjusting the rear sight. It’s an angular displacement, unlike pointing the gun off to the side of where you want to hit, which is a linear displacement. The problem with linear displacement is that the distance off to the side that you need to point, changes with distance to the target. An angular displacement is valid for all distances. Here is the sight picture that I’m trying to explain:

Instead of holding the front sight centered in the rear notch, I moved the front sight to right edge of the notch. I still use the front sight as the aiming reference – the front sight is placed on the target where you want to hit, it’s just not in the center of the rear sight notch. And here is the result of that, still at 10 yards:

With that figured out, we pulled out a swinging pig target to try to replicate a Gerhard test, but at 30 yards, not at 60+ yards. How many hits could we make per cylinder?

The swinging pig target we had, measured 7” x 11” x .40”, which is kind of a thick pig. With .22 LR, reaction was minimal. We could not be sure when we made a hit and when we didn’t. Out of frustration, I pulled the S&W .327 from the holster on my hip (hold my beer, uh, Ruger) and made several easily verifiable hits on the pig, until the pig frame fell down. Oh well. So much for that test.

At that point we figured that we had figured out all that needed to be figured out about these Wranglers, and that it was time to pack up and hit the road. But there was one more thing that needed to be documented. With a cylinder full of empties, I pulled out my Lyman digital trigger pull gauge and tried five trigger pulls. The average pull weight came out to 4 pounds, 12.8 ounces.

OK, so I won’t be using this gun in any .22 pistol silhouette matches any time soon. It may be fun to wear this .22 cowboy pistol on the hip on back country trail excursions for “snakes and such.” When boondock camping, it will be a fun camp plinking gun.

Tony remains totally smitten with the gun, now that we have learned how to shoot it, and understand its capabilities and limitations. I told him, “Take a look at what it says on the bottom-side of the barrel.” Besides saying to read the instruction manual, it also says:

———— RUGER, PRESCOTT, AZ USA ————

I’m pretty sure that because it was an unexpected gift from his brother; and that his brother hand-made a custom western-style holster for it, with a jumping trout on it no less; and because his brother also has a matching pistol; these reasons must all be big parts of why he loves it.