Indians For Guns

A friend of mine was concerned when his daughter came of an age where the young men in her high school were becoming "interested". She was not permitted to "date" but was allowed to attend "mixers" which were well supervised. Her Mom took the situation well in hand and while getting her ready for the dance would not permit perfume, but instead applied a few drops of Hoppes on her hair band and scarf (it was a square dance).

Mom & Dad explained that if she met a young man whom she liked, who recognized the Hoppe's, that she could invite him to Sunday dinner. This indeed occurred, and the couple kept in touch. The young man enlisted after 9/11 and she wrote him during his deployment, sprinkling his letters with a couple drops of Hoppe's. Upon his safe return they were later married. Today their son is a cadet at Virginia Tech hoping to find a young lady who recognizes the smell of Hoppe's. As his Mom would say, "I don't want you bringing home a girl who smells like a brothel."

Vikram wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 13, 2021 12:28 am

I would love to know more about the .38 Colt you were shooting.

Ed Harris posted this 06 June 2011

You are correct that Colt is one turn in 14,” because that's what their old tooling was and it's always been that way... The Colts give the best accuracy with wadcutters and 158-gr. lead.

Ruger single-action .357s are 16” and button rifled, because that is what the standard twist is on .35 cal. rifle bores from the people who grind the button rifling heads, and they bought the buttoned blanks from various makers and that's what was available.

Ruger double-action .38 / .357s, Security Six, Police Service Six, Speed Six, GP100 and SP101 are 18-3/4” twist, as are S&W. Reason Ruger went with 18-3/4 inch twist on the DAs is because this is the pitch on the rifling broach cutters and there is only one company that makes them. The 18-3/4 twist gives better accuracy with the lighter +P jacketed loads, 110-125 grain. which most people shoot. For good 50-yard grouping with wadcutters you may need to drive bullets a bit faster than factory to maintain stability.

I was told by the late Joe Wallace, a Colt armourer who built the Official Police, Officer's Model and Python, that Colt had engineering students at the University of Connecticut conduct yaw card and spark shadowgraph studies of the .38 Special revolver firing 158-gr. lead RN bullet using the most advanced technology then available, about 1900, to determine the best possible rate of twist for the “new” smokeless powder ammunition. UConn recommended the 14 inch twist of rifling and Colt had their tooling made that way.

I cannot validate the veracity of this story, as when at Ruger I attempted to locate the original reports in the UConn museum archives and it could not be found. If it exists at Colt, it is kept as a trade secret and not talked about, but it is known that when Colt was financially solvent in pre-war days, they were a big contributor to the engineering school, so the account makes sense.

Jim Clark used 14 inch twist Douglas barrels in building his .38 Special PPC revolvers and every one I ever saw was a nail driver.

timmy wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:11 am

Vikram: Once I got into these revolvers for varmint shooting and began to research them to find out what gave them their qualities, I learned some very interesting things:

1. Samuel Colt wasn't particularly interested in double action revolvers. He didn't see double action to give any desirable advantage over single action. So, the man who introduced the concept of practical revolvers to the world then stifled the development of the evolution of improvements.

2. Meanwhile, Continental and British gun makers took Colt's idea and did pursue the double action concept. So, while the idea of a practical revolver was an American one, it was the Europeans who began to successfully perfect it. (Here, there's a parallel situation with the invention and development of the airplane!)

3. Charles-François Galand of Liège, Belgium developed a successful double action revolver in the late 1860s, and improved upon it. This preceded the famous 1873 Colt Single Action Army ("Peacemaker") and its cartridge-firing predecessors based on converted percussion Colt revolvers. This demonstrates how quickly European gun makers had seized on Colt's basic idea and developed it. Many other Liège gunmakers were making single and double action revolvers, including famously the Nagant brothers, Émile and Léon (responsible for the Swedish revolver and Russian 1895 Nagant gas check revolver). Remember that, at this time, heat treatment of steel was much more of an art rather than a science, and springs were variable in quality and expensive to successfully make. Galand's mechanism minimumised the number of springs in the design by using both sides of the V-shaped mainspring, one side powering the hammer and the other working on a lever that retracted the hand and trigger. Galand connected the hand of his revolver to the trigger, not the hammer.

4. Colonel Rudolf Schmidt of the Swiss Army, in the early 1880s, built upon Galand's action by using the lever acting upon the trigger and hand to provide an additional function: it became the "rebound lever" and, in addition to tensioning the trigger and hand, it acted upon the hammer to retract it slightly from the fired position when the trigger was released. This made carrying all chambers loaded a more practical practice, because the hammer's firing pin no longer rested on the primer of a round in the chamber. This became the Swiss Army's revolver of 1882.

5. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Colt finally came out with a double action revolver in 1877. These were called "The Lightning" and "The Thunderer" in 38 and 41 calibers, respectively, although Colt never called them that. The notorious New Mexico outlaw "Billy the Kid" is said to have preferred them. A year later, Colt came out with a large frame 45 caliber revolver based on the same principles. All of these revolvers were noted for not being particularly durable and having a lot of small, easily broken parts. When I was young, there were still Lighnings and Thunderers in the gun shops, although very few were not broken, that could be purchased for reasonable amounts. They weren't reliable, but I wish that I'd picked up a few, as they were still made with traditional Colt quality, fit, and finish. Often, they were nickel plated.

6. Colt stumbled and bumbled on with their own double action designs, often with double cylinder locking bolts. These guns look like later double action revolvers, but a quick clue to indentifying them was that their cylinders rotated backward -- counter clockwise. Famously, the last ones of this type were used in the Spanish American War. Teddy Roosevelt, future president and famous sportsman used one on his famous charge up San Juan Hill, for instance. They were also used in the Philippine rebellion after the Spanish American War and have a very interesting history that's still with us today.

7. These Model 1892 New Army double action Colts were chambered in 38 Long Colt. Have you ever wondered why you cannot use 380 or 38/200 British Webley revolver ammunition in your 38 Special revolver? Here is the story: the 38 Long Colt New Army revolvers were found to sadly lack "stopping power" during the Philippine revolts. Especially, Moro tribesmen from Mindanao would charge American Army troops with long bolo knives, and the 38 Long Colt did not have enough power to stop them. (The Moro tribesmen often bound their arms and legs with tourniquets and sometimes used drugs to power their charges: they might die of wounds obtained in their fearless charges, but not before slicing a number of US Army troops with gruesome wounds. These actions also led to American massacre atrocities, but that is another story.)

The Army began to pull 45 Colt Single Action Army revolvers out of stock and issue them to troops serving in the Philippines. This led to the Army conducting the Thompson-LaGarde tests to determine what cartridge would be effective in combat. The result of their work was the development of the 45 Automatic cartridge, which was essentially a 45 Colt adapted to a semi-automatic pistol using modern smokeless powders, rather than black powder. Here, you should note that the 45 Colt essentially duplicated the Civil War era Army percussion revolver, which used 28 grains of black powder. The answer to the Army's research reinforced the same answer that was identified as being effective before the Civil War!

Knowing that the Army was not satisfied with the Colt New Army or the 38 Long Colt cartridge, Smith & Wesson hoped to jump into the lucrative military contract market by developing a more potent revolver, which was the "Military & Police" -- the basis for Smith & Wesson medium K frame revolvers up to the Model 19 357 Magnum -- and using the newly developed 38 Smith & Wesson Special cartridge. This cartridge depended on smokeless powder to develop a more potent load than the 38 Long Colt cartridge that it was based upon. This is the "rub": Smith & Wesson, looking to grab military contracts, based their new cartridge on the 38 Long Colt case, not the slightly fatter 38 Smith & Wesson cartridge. Because the British 380 or 38/200 used in the Webley Mk II service revolver is based on the Smith & Wesson case, the 38/200 and the 38 Special are NOT interchangable.

(Recall here that the later 357 Magnum cartridge is based on the 38 Special, so it too has its ancestry in the 38 Long Colt.)

The end to point 7 is that the Army went on to discard revolvers and select the Colt 1911, designed by John M Browning.

8. Colt gave up on their own designs and in 1896, brought out its small frame New Police 32 revolver based on the designs of Galand and Schmidt in Europe. Thus, they are said to use the Schmidt-Galand action. Later, in 1905, Colt improved this action by introducing a positive blocking lock of steel between the frame and hammer when the trigger was not pulled, making the revolver very safe, even when dropped. This revolver evolved into the snub-nosed Detective Special and the deluxe Diamondback. The improved Schmidt Galand action was used in Colt's medium (38/41 caliber) and large (45 caliber) frames also, and made Colt's Schmidt-Galand revolvers unsurpassed for safety until after WW2. Colt brought out a medium frame "Army Special" in 1907, hoping to gain military contracts, but the US Army was set on a semi-automatic pistol for its next service side arm. Colt changed the name of this model to "Official Police" in the 1920s, and it became quite widely used as a police arm, and famous in its deluxe iteration, the Colt Python.

There are newer developments of revolvers. Smith & Wesson borrowed less of the Schmidt-Galand design, and other makers used other designs, such as Iver Johnson. Later, Bill Ruger of Sturm, Ruger brought out the Security Six double action, which used a solid frame (without side plate) and featured a large degree of investment casting in its construction. Then, other companies, like Manhurin in France and the Chiappa and Mateba revolvers, along with the Korth, came out. Colt even offered a completely different lockwork in its Trooper Mark V and other revolvers, which required less hand finishing than their Schmidt-Galand action models, and which could be made more cheaply.

Myself, I'm sort of an old school guy. I prefer old school movies (like Andha Naal and Pyaasa), old school machinery (like old farm tractors, motorcycles, and cars), old school music (like classical, opera, and "Classic Rock") and old school guns (like Martini-Henrys, Mosin Nagants, and old Colts). I view the primary reason to own firearms is to have fun and shoot what you like, how you like -- legally, of course.