Elmer Keith's Revolver Number 5
Revolvers
•
8m 52s
Elmer Keith's No.5 Single Action Army is arguably the most famous custom revolver ever made. Keith had it built in 1928 after developing a friendship with Harold Croft, another revolver enthusiast. Croft had shown Keith his own custom revolvers, which he had numbered 1 through 4. Croft had been trying to make an ideal pocket gun, and Keith used several of his ideas along with some of Keith's own to put together a revolver for general-purpose field use. In recognition of Croft's work, Keith called his gun Number 5. It featured an extended flat top with windage-adjustable sights, an improved mainspring, redesigned cylinder pin, custom hammer spur, and modified Bisley grip. It was chambered for the .44 Special/.44 Russian cartridges (the Russian being a slightly shorter version of the Special), and it was Keith's favorite shooting piece until the .44 Magnum cartridge was introduced in the late 1950s. He described this gun in detail in a 1929 American Rifleman article entitled "The Last Word".
Up Next in Revolvers
-
NAA .22 Magnum Mini-Revolver at the B...
I've been taking a lot of big pistols to the (alleged) BackUp Gun Match, and I figured it was time to try out something that actually would quality as a back-up gun. So, I got my hands on one of NAA's .22 Mini-Revolvers. This is the smallest practically shootable "real" gun made, and they are rel...
-
The First S&W .38: The "Baby Russian"
Taking what they had learned in developing their series of large-frame .44 caliber revolvers, Smith & Wesson introduced the “Baby Russian” in 1876 as their first .38 caliber revolver. They actually developed the cartridge first (146 grains at 740 fps), and then designed the revolver around it. Th...
-
Webley-Kaufman: The Improved Governme...
Michael Kaufman was a talented gunsmith who worked for the Webley company from 1878 until 1881. While there, he patented a substantially improved clockwork for the gun, removing 5 parts from the system and improving the trigger press. He was paid a royalty for this system, which was tracked by th...
