McCarty's Peculiar Revolver
Revolvers
•
8m 40s
William McCarty patented this turret revolver design in 1909 (submitted in 1908, approved in 1909), with the idea of making a high capacity revolver. His gun held 18 rounds of .22 rimfire ammunition - double the typical .22 revolver capacity. He did that by making a vertical turret system with a large ring to hold the 18 rounds, which in turn made the gun pretty bulky. I had a reader send me a copy of his patent back in 2013, and at the time I didn’t know that one had ever been actually made. Well, there was one - it’s here and also documented in Louis Winant’s book “Firearms Curiosa”. Not surprisingly, the design never made it into mass production…
Up Next in Revolvers
-
Competition with an SAA: The Colt Bis...
Named for the famous British shooting competition range, the Colt Bisley was the target version of the 1873 Single Action Army revolver. Colt first offered a flat-top model of the SAA from 1890 until 1895, and dropped it to introduce a specialized Bisley model in 1894. The Bisley had a redesigned...
-
Colt Prototype Self-Ejecting Revolver
Robert Roy was a career Colt employee, who began his work as an engineer in 1963 (including work on the 1971/SSP pistols and the CMG machine gun series) and retired in 1993 as Director of International Sales. One of his side projects appears to have been experimentation into auto-ejecting revolve...
-
Enfield MkI Revolver: Merwin Meets We...
Adopted in 1880 to replace the Adams revolver, the Enfield MkI was based on an extraction system patented in the 1870s by Owen Jones of Philadelphia. This was similar in practice to the Merwin & Hulbert, with the barrel and cylinder hinging forward while the cartridge cases were held to the back ...
