Wasn’t P&R the company who was doing ‘cheap’ dove shot conversions on River Blackhawks back in the day? I wanted one so bad but couldn’t really afford it at the time. But then again, my factory Ruger Bisley handled loads that were borderline painful to shoot anyways, so the dove shot would have been wasted on me!

It still shoots good.

Since the chambers were set up to work with a bunch of different cartridges it did not work as well as a normal revolver with any particular cartridge.

Phillips & Rodgers Inc. of Huntsville, Texas produced a little over 200 of them. A friend of mine ended up with the tooling and made a few guns but was never able to get them reliable and gave it up.

I remembered another ‘multi caliber’ revolver and had to look it up, it was the Medusa, and apparently it used a similar extractor setup with spring loaded bars. One has to wonder how durable that kind of setup would be over the long term and also how reliable it would be when it started to get dirty. I’d think it would take some soaking and compressed air or better yet, an ultrasonic bath to clear all the gunk from the springs and sliding mechanism. Seems a bad idea for police or military issue!

Best I recall the deal was it would chamber and fire in many .38 S&W chambered revolvers. Lets say you find a Forehand and Wadsworth latchtop .38 S&W in Grandad's attic. And you load it with 35,000psi ammo. Not good, and a fair chance the old relic would let go on the first cylinder full, heck maybe on the first round.

Potential liability was great. I've never seen the Charter chambered for this, and seen little indeed of the ammo. I was in Raton NM in the summer of 1998, and was right surprised to see a box for sale in a local gun shop. Needless to say, 25 years later, it doesn't exist, pretty much.

Anyway, it was dropped like a bad habit.

My thought is to slightly diddle the chambers and create a modem revolver for a fun little round, the .38 S&W. I have tons of brass, and three dedicated molds, plus the ability to “beagle” ten other .38/.357 molds.

Why? In this day and age of expensive reloading components, there is no good reason, so I will run with “because”.

Otony

When you mention a 9mm revolver (I even have a .380) to the current tactitard crowd, they look at you funny and ask why, what with a plastic self-loader holding 3+ times the ammo.

from the shooter's viewpoint

A fired cartridge showing the unique marks

Extractor

Extractor

It had an automatic block driven by the hammer, to limit the amount of rearward travel the aggressively tapered 9mm case could take, apparently preventing the lockup some other 9mm revolvers have experienced. Looked like a round solid flat tipped pin just above the firing pin hole.

It also had a complex extractor, with lugs which entered the extractor groove on the case under spring pressure. This both extracted and headspaced the cartridges w/o the use of clips.

Online source claims around 6000 produced.

I've seen one in my whole life, at the range in early 90s. The user claimed it ran perfectly. I got to look at the marvelously made extractor, which reminds me of nothing so much as a Ruger No 1 extractor for a rimless case, but miniaturized and repeated 6 times. I did not think, best I recall, to look at the limiter block.

I've read 2 stories as to how the revolver came to be. One was a request-for-proposal from the French government, which ultimately fell through. The other is that the Israelis wanted a revolver using the standard Israeli 9mm service round, but for issue to Palestinian police of questionable loyalty-if they boogied, it was with a revolver, rather than a "more lethal" semiauto. Neither story seems altogether likely to me, but I for sure don't know.