Club Obi Wan

Mountaineer wrote:Thanks micsteam. You're correct, the Heavy Duty was an N-framed revolver (sized to take the 44, and technically 45) barreled and bored for a 38.

Chenricy, I'd not cut it. I'd consider buying one already cut, but would NOT ever do it to a revolver under my care.

As for "buy another barrel and have it cut", I've considered what you're suggesting and once you find a period-correct, pinned barrel, you need to find a suitable ramp blank to have shaped, fitted, and silver soldered to the barrel. You should add the cost of rebluing the piece because the two parts probably will not match. THEN you should consider the gunsmith costs (usually $25-50 per hour) to have all this done. In my attempt I figured I'd be about 1/2 way to the cost of a whole other revolver. So I gave up on this quest. Additionally, the gunsmith is correct, you've now decreased the value of the original to the point where you'd never get back what you've spent on it, even around here. Eventually I bought one which had been cut and had all the work done by someone else. It turned my stomach when I got it because it was a U.S. Property and not a Brazilian revolver.

If you're dead-set on cutting one down, buy a modern S&W 1917 from their released "Classic" line and use it. The parts are much more available than the old ones.

Ah yes, parts. The additional piece no one considers, until you have a part break. If an internal part breaks on the 100-year old piece, good luck finding replacements. I broke the hand on one of mine and it required a new one, fitted by a gunsmith, otherwise the revolver is a paperweight. I was lucky, because the hand is one of the few modern aftermarket parts you can buy for these old guns and have fitted. (The springs being the other parts that will work.) You can occasionally find old-stock stuff, but you pay for it.

Again, modern stuff is cheaper and more readily available in the long run. It's your revolver, so do as you will, but for me the decision is easy.

Cajunkraut wrote:Beautiful pistol, chenricy.

You're gonna hafta getcha some SA grips too then.

Mountaineer wrote:Very nice revolver! At that price, you practically stole it!

Having seen this, I'd be even less apt to cut it. It's nice.

If you want some aftermarket wood grips that look correct, I know will fit because I've put them on my pistols, and won't break the bank (I'm talking less than $45 and to your door in about a week) I can let you know of a place I've bought from on eBay. It's a Taiwanese seller who has a permanent store, and his work is pretty fantastic.

• Firstly, because if you watch British films and television from post-WWII through the seventies, you’ll see that adding a Baughman-type front sight to revolvers was not an uncommon modification. You also see that all or nearly all firearms used are from the Second World War. This is likely because British gun laws during this period made the commercial acquisition of new guns effectively impossible, so there was a lot more customization occurring in Great Britain than you see in the States, where you could simply go out and buy a gun with whatever sights you wanted. It’s even possible that Bapty did not make this modification, but rather it was done by a competent gunsmith for a private British citizen before Bapty even acquired the gun.

• Secondly, the Stembridge gun’s shortening and sighting appeared to be much simpler, which you would expect if you were just trying to duplicate another gun’s look. While it has been suggested that the Stembridge gun has a barrel-banded front sight, I very much doubt this is the case. A barrel-banded front sight would almost certainly result in the band being greater in diameter than the rest of the barrel, as there would have been no point in turning it down to perfectly match the diameter of the barrel (not to mention difficult to accomplish, with the front sight in the way), especially if you had no plans on even finishing the barrel band to match the rest of the barrel. If you look at the front sight, it’s quite clear to me that it is simply the original front sight recontoured and with the first quarter of an inch or so cut off. This would be by far the simplest thing to do. As for the fact that the last bit of the barrel missing its finish, that’s anyone’s guess, but I’m inclined to think they polished the end of the barrel to have a clean spot to resolder on the front sight, and rather than polish only the portion of the barrel that was necessary, they polished it all the way around. Anyway, if the Stembridge gun had been selected first, I very much doubt Bapty would have custom built a Baughman-type front sight for their interpretation of what was supposed to be the same weapon. Instead, they would have done the same thing - solder on the original front sight.

• If the Stembridge gun wasn’t attempting to emulate the Bapty gun, then I have no explanation as for why at any point of time its sight would have been given a roughly 30 degree forward slope. Why wouldn’t they have just reattatched the original front sight unaltered? If on the other hand it was designed to be a stand in for the Bapty gun, then this makes some sense. In fact, it’s even possible Stembridge was going off of a description of the Bapty, rather than a photograph, or the weapon itself.

skipcress wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 6:17 pm This is pure speculation, but I personally think it likely that the Bapty gun came first, and that Stembridge took a commercial Model 1917 they had in inventory and shortened its barrel, and even gave the front sight a slight ramp.

Indiana Bond wrote: ↑Tue Jun 12, 2012 11:15 pm I just had the oportunity to discuss with my gunsmith the Stembridge modification I want to do on a spare S&W 1917 barrel that I have. I brought him the picture below to examine. I told him that it looks like the barrel was cut down to 4 inches and that the bluing was sanded away from the nose of the barrel leaving the bare metal area. The new sight was then soldered on and then never reblued. This has been pretty much the consenus here on COW on how the Stembridge was made.

However, my gunsmith does not think that that is what was done and he points out some very interesting observations that I point out below:




1) At point "1" we can see that the sight has been "pinned" on to the barrel. It may have also been soldered but we can't really tell.

2) This is the most revealing point. The unfinished part of the barrel is NOT part of the rest of the barrel. IT IS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT PIECE!! We can see in the photo that at point "2" the "W" in Wesson is cut in half. We see the back half of the "W" on the main part of the barrel but we don't see the front half of the "W" on the nose! If the bluing was simply sanded away or otherwise removed it still would have left the front half of the stamped "W". These are 2 different parts connected together!

3) At point "3" we can see a bit of a gap and uneveness between the two parts.

4) We can see the horizontal serrations in the nose of the barrel that should also be seen in the main part of the barrel even through the bluing. Also if the nose was sanded or filed to remove the bluing the serations should run vertical around the barrel and not horizontal as we see here. The two parts just look too different to be the same barrel.

My gunsmith thinks that this is either the barrel nose of some other gun attached to the front of the S&W with a sleeve or dowel. Or it could be some sort of "band" that slips over a machined off front section of the S&W. He feels stronger about the "band" idea as we do know the gun was fired so some type of internal sleeve or dowel would make it difficult or impossible to fire. We also see that pin at the base of the front sight which could be actually holding the band onto the machined S&W nose.

I bring this up so that we can start a discussion on these newly discovered facts. I know that the "band" idea has been out there but was discarded for the sanded nose theory. With this new perspective we may need to bring back the "band" theory once again!

Let the analysis begin!

LNBright wrote: ↑Thu Jul 20, 2023 10:48 pm Good research.


Something I’d like to see changed, regarding the Indygear site about Bapty:
https://www.indygear.com/igguns.html

If you read the description when it gets to discussing the barrel, it puts forward a hypothesis that it had a later barrel swapped onto it.

However, that’s not correct: when the hi-rez auction photos were posted, you could look at the serial numbers, and see that the barrel’s serial number matched the frame’s number. Bapty is a matching-numbers gun.

• All the guns are from WWII or before. This stands to reason, as the gun laws in the UK has become so restrictive that acquiring new guns was practically impossible

• Suppressors (“silencers”) were frequently used as plot devices (true of U.S. T.V. as well), and were ultimately added to EVERYTHING you can imagine, from 1911s and Browning M1910s (as used in “Dr. No”) to various insundry suppressed revolvers in pretty much every T.V. show you can list