Jan 5, 2023
dardick revolver
seen from Germany
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seen from Netherlands
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
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seen from United States
dardick revolver
Aah shit lowkey forgot about this blog srry ;m;
Anyway, the gun for this week'll be a bit more standard and well-known, yet still very whimsical.
Give it up for...
THE DARDICK REVOLVERS!!!!!!!
The Dardick series of revolvers were a bunch of internal-magazine-fed doble-action revolvers loaded with "trounds" of various calibers, using a triangular plastic sleeve grafted onto the casing to facilitate what David Dardick, the gun's designer, founder of the Dardick Corporation, triangle enthusiast and rejected Batman Villain, called an "open-chamber design". This gun was effectively made as a proof-of-concept for the tround-revolver design and its potential in machineguns
The guns were in production from 1954 to 1962. Three distinct models of revolver were made: The small 11-tround Dardick Model 1100, the 15-tround barrel-changing Dardick Model 1500 (which 99% of images on the web are of), and the 20-round Dardick Model 2000 which feeds from two seperate magazine wells.
Oh yeah, trounds, portmanteu of triangle rounds. There seems to be two versions of these, either Dardick-proprietary "telescoped" ammunition which interchangably used aluminum or "celanese fortiflex" plastic, or a simple "reusable" plastic sleeve you stick a conventional round into, although that was only ever for .22 caliber ammunition.
Fortunately for me, there's a lot of images and even old advertisements for these, even some patent-figures and diagrams. Sure it sunk like a rock, but by god it's a pretty and well-documented rock.
And here's an ad for one of these.
This actually gives a lot of insight into how this thing works, the diagram shows it feeds through a double-stack magazine, spring on the bottom, cylinder on top. Also mentions that the Model 1500 can swap between a rimfire and centerfire firing pin via a screw on the side.
And for a moment of your time, I found a really lengthy and high-quality photoscan of a magazine advert for the Model 2000 and the Carbine Conversion Kit. Unfortunately the site wants to scrape my email to download it, so I'll post the link instead.
( https://www.scribd.com/doc/69139200/The-Dardick-Handgun )
Highly recommend you give it a read, has a lot of diagrams on how these things work, and even a fuzzy pic of David Dardick himself. Spoiler alert, he look like Mr. House from Fallout New Vegas to a moderately-concerning degree.
Oh yeah, this thing has a carbine conversion, lovingly called the "Switch Hitter".
How it works: Magazine-fed open-chamber revolver. Unlike a true automatic revolver which rotates its cylinder with a recoil impulse, it instead uses an open cylinder design and funky-shaped rounds to feed ammo. Also a double-action.
A loaded round enters the main chamber and gets shot, the double-action trigger rotates the cylinder and ejects the spent round
How to load: Fed via stripper clips or by hand through a port on its side leading into an internal magazine.
For reception: Not good.
For one, it sold for around $100, in 1950's money. In today's money that's about $1,250, for a pistol. For further context, a Glock 17 Gen 5 usually goes for around $500- $600 (or at least for all the listings I could find for those that weren't $5 toy mockups, fuck you Google).
The non-aluminum casings use a really shitty plastic originally intended for disposable holders for nuclear reactor samples. It's prone to degrading over time and warping, it's just barely capable of not exploding from internal pressure, and no one wants a gun that shoots ammo with a shorter expiration date than a jug of milk. This gun also came about during the early era of 9mm becoming the standard pistol caliber, and near the end of the reign of .38 Super revolvers, so a whole new proprietary cartridge did not look good.
The weight's heavily imbalanced towards the rear of the gun, which can make recoil a pain. Absolutely massive for a pistol and even the semi-compact Model 1100 is as wide as a brick. Dardick walked so George Kellgren could briskly jog.
The revolvers themselves were canned in 1962 as Dardick Corp. went bankrupt and was forced to sell all the remaining revolver parts and rights to the highest bidder. But Dardick still wanted trounds, and trounds he shall have.
In 1972, the Salvo Tround was born (and later died soon after)
It was the ammunition used for Harrington & Richardon Arms Company's entry for Project SPIW (then called Project SALVO). (picture below)
It was canned due to being utterly fucking massive and overly complicated, two things that USAF hates with a burning passion. I'm surpised this behemoth wasn't featured in some obscure early-2000's Doom clone, looks badass.
In 1977 came Dardick's lucky break, with the Tround Terra-Drill.
It was a drillhead designed to shoot frangible ceramic darts into dense rock to break it up enough for the drillbit to get a proper foothold, theoretically extending the drillbit's life tenfold and allowing it to easily drill through dense rock. It also uses trounds, of course it uses trounds it's a patent by David Dardick.
Only issue is that there's only like one pic of this on the internet and it looks nothing like the patent, so I have no idea if the drill design was successful or not. I like to think it was successful, whether out of blind optimism or getting irrationally obsessive and passionate over a dumb revolver I'm not sure.
Overall, a gun ahead of its time, limited by crappy plastics, poor market understanding, and general overambition. Looks sick as hell though, and if it was made nowadays it would have a killer aftermarket scene.
Dardick Model 1500 - .38 Tround
Dardick Model 1500 - .38 Tround
Dardick Model 1500 Automatic Revolver