Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at a gun that I've been wanting to do some video on for
quite some time. This is a Dardick Model 1500 magazine-fed revolver.
Now there's a lot of weird stuff about this gun,
but I want to start with the mechanical core of the system
which is the fact that it uses a cylinder that is open sided.
So where a traditional revolver cylinder is a solid cylinder of metal
with 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 chambers bored in it to hold cartridges,
the Dardick holds 3 rounds in a cylinder and the walls of the cylinder are actually open.
So the rationale for this actually doesn't really focus on the pistol,
the pistol is kind of a way to turn this into a commercial system that could make some money to fund the project.
The real core potential of this system was in a high rate of fire machine gun.
And the reason for that is if you have an open sided cylinder you can feed cartridges in one side,
rotate them up, fire them, and as the cylinder rotates to the opposite side the cartridge can just be ejected out.
You don't have to deal with pulling cartridges forward and backward. For example to take them off of belts,
or to, you know, like a regular revolver cylinder you have to put the cartridges in the back
and then pull them out the back when they're empty.
This allows you to have a really high rate of fire because you don't have to deal with any of those mechanical steps.
Now, that doesn't apply to a manually fired revolver like this, but Dardick was interested in military contracts.
Now while military contracts were not immediately pending, he decided to build
a handgun based on this system, and there was some interesting rationale behind building a handgun.
In order to fit this open-sided revolver cylinder, his ammunition was basically triangular and he called them "trounds".
And the concept was that by using a triangular cartridge case you could actually
fit more ammunition in a given space than you could with traditional round cartridges.
And that's because with a round cartridge when they stack up you get a lot of space between them.
If you have triangular cartridges, they can kind of nest together and you end up with a more efficient system.
Now in practice this didn't really work out, because the trounds are made of a polymer material
that has to be a lot thicker than brass. And so, yes, the shape is more efficient,
but the cartridges are also bigger for the same internal capacity.
And it kind of comes out as a wash because in this rather large handgun you get a total of 15 rounds.
There were a couple of other models, which we'll talk about in a minute.
But in the 1950s when this was created (the patent for it was filed in 1954 and was granted in 1958),
there ... were some some good reasons on paper why this might be a good sidearm for, in particular, the police.
If you think about it, 15 rounds of capacity in 1958.
You don't have a lot of other double stack semi-auto pistols around to compete with that.
You've got the Browning Hi Power that can hold 13, but the high capacity guns aren't really a thing yet.
So Dardick offers a lot of ammunition, it offers a fairly conventional mechanism
as far as the shooting is concerned. This handles like a double action revolver.
You know what, I can see the potential for police use. So let's take a look at how it actually works.
Alright, so the gun came in a box like this, open it up.
... They actually made .22 calibre adaptors, which we'll talk about in a moment.
They made spare barrels. This has a 6 inch barrel in it, you also get a 4 inch barrel. So there's the gun.
We also have some ammunition to take a look at, and let's start with this. Comes packaged 20 rounds to the box.
Now contrary to what ... a lot of people think, this is not actually a .38 Special in a plastic case.
The green plastic here (which by the way, they called Celanese Fortiflex, which sure sounds very 1950s cool),
that is the case material. It's strong enough to withstand the charge of the cartridge firing.
Or it was when it was manufactured, and maybe not so much today.
But inside that you have a bullet at the front, there is a little brass insert with a traditional
typical primer in it. And then you have a wad and a powder charge inside here.
So a number of people have made attempts at like retrofitting these things,
or modifying these things to be able to fit .38 Special or in the case of Numrich,
they actually tried making 9mm cartridge adapters. Nobody's really done that successfully.
It just doesn't work. The problem is even if the brass case doesn't rupture,
it ... will expand and it will cause the Fortiflex to rupture. ...
Now moving over to the gun itself. It's a really weird handling gun if you're used to traditional firearms.
Because virtually all the weight is right here. The grip is hollow to hold cartridges,
the barrel is this little dinky skinny thing out there, a little chicken leg barrel, and it's a big gun too.
You can kind of see that here. In fact, let's compare it to a 1911 here, this is a Colt Model of 1927.
And the Dardick is in many dimensions actually bigger than the 1911.
It doesn't necessarily weigh more, but it is definitely bulkier.
So on the barrel we have Dardick Corporation. Note how they have taken the D and the C and made them triangular,
like they're triangular tround cartridges. Manufactured in Hamden, Connecticut.
.38 calibre, there were allegedly plans for a .32 calibre version but those never actually got off the ground.
And then of course there was also a .22 calibre conversion.
So that would have a separate barrel. These barrels are quick detach, we'll look at that in a moment,
but basically that's your barrel locking screw.
We have another marking on the side of the gun.
It originally said "Dardick Corp" up here, but that has been later milled out to give you a loaded chamber indicator.
Hamden, Connecticut, patent number, and a Model 1500. And that model number is based on the capacity, this holds 15 rounds.
There was also a Model 1100 with a shorter grip and a 3 inch barrel. That as you might suspect held 11 rounds.
And one of the prototypes was a Dardick 2000 that held 20 rounds.
We've got a DC, Dardick Corporation, little logo in the grip panel there.
And no markings on the other side, just the ejection port.
So this is a magazine-fed revolver, but it doesn't have a traditional magazine, it has a fixed
internal magazine in the grip. And to load it you're going to pull this tab down, which pops open this little door.
This is our magazine follower, which appears to be a 3D printed one that someone has used to replace
a missing or damaged metal one. Normally it would be a piece of black sheet metal.
And this pushes all the way down into the grip and you can stack up your trounds
inside here, like
so. And as you push these in they are going to, being triangular,
well, they're gonna stack up rather like they have in the box here. So you don't have a whole lot of wasted space in there.
So there's a little finger right there that holds the follower down. When I close the loading gate,
that trips the follower, pushes the first round up. And it's going to push it into this open section of the cylinder here.
I can then manually cock the gun, (it does also work in double action), but when I cock this
that cylinder is gonna rotate up, (by the way, right there
it swings past our loaded chamber indicator, so you can see the green that indicates there's a shell),
it then locks in place at the very top of the action where it is now lined up with the barrel.
When I then pull the trigger and drop the hammer it is going to fire,
and on the next stroke that cylinder rotates again, the cartridge, the now empty plastic Fortiflex case,
gets to here, gets popped out of the side and ejects.
Clear as mud? Well, let me go ahead and take this apart.
We'll take the panels off and you can see how that actually works on the inside.
This is held together on the outside by five little socket screws.
So we'll pull those off and check back with you in a moment.
With the five screws on this side removed, I can now slide this side of the casing off.
That lets you see our magazine. So when the gun is fully loaded, you've got 15 cartridges stacked all the way up inside here.
It is a double stack magazine that then compresses down to a single stack at the top.
These shells, by the way are aluminium, they were made for Dardick by Alcoa.
And now you can see the real heart of the system, we have this steel frame inside.
So there are two more screws that hold the opposite side, the right side grip in place.
I'm going to go ahead and take those off as well.
And now I can take the other side off gently, there we go.
So there's our other grip panel, again solid aluminium from Alcoa.
Alcoa is a good 1950s sort of thing.
Now we've got this thing which is actually the mechanical heart of the Dardick.
So what I'm going to do first is half cock the hammer so we can get the cylinder a little loose there.
That gives you a really good feel for the three-sided nature of this cylinder, the three chamber nature, and the open chambers.
So when this actually fires you've got three sides to the cartridge,
two of them are supported by the walls of the chamber, (all of this is steel by the way),
and then the third side, because this is in this position,
the top of ... the cartridge is supported by the top strap of the gun.
You'll notice that this has a lot more material in it than a typical revolver top strap,
and that's because it's actually the pressure bearing support for the top of the cartridge.
We have a cylinder lock right here. On a traditional revolver you would have a little pawl in the bottom of the frame down here.
We don't have anything like that, and in fact you can't really have anything like traditional cylinder stops on the outside of the cylinder
because you've got cartridges that are exposed, and you don't want to have your cylinder stop
dragging across your cartridges and maybe getting hung up there.
So instead our cylinder stop is this little plunger right there.
So it is going to lock in place like that,
and we have this cool little piece that deactivates it when you pull the trigger.
When I pull the trigger this linkage come back to this part, and it's going to
push on this little rocker. That rocker pulls the cylinder stop pin back like so,
that allows the ... cylinder to rotate, and then as soon as it's gone a little ways, it clicks over.
So that releases the cylinder stop, you can see the plunger has come back out.
When I release the trigger
... this rocker can slide up and down, and that allows it to slip back over in front of that pawl again.
Now there is a neat gear ratcheting sort of system in here that translates this motion into actually cocking the hammer.
If you're interested in seeing all the details of that, all the guts of this thing pulled apart including the cylinder taken out,
I would direct you to the Anvil Gunsmithing video on the Dardick.
Mark Novak over there has the guts to pull all the little screws out of this, and all the little springs,
and by the way, the two tiny little ball bearing detent bits on the mainspring here.
And he'll show you all that in great detail, so check him out.
The one other thing that I am going to show you while we're inside here is the barrel removal.
Because we have this screw which allows you to very easily remove the barrel.
All I have to do is rotate this so that that little half-circle is pointing right up at the barrel like that,
and then I can just pull the barrel right out. The barrel is held in place only by these two little locking notches.
Those have matching lugs in this screw. So this allows the barrel to come out.
All I have to do is tighten it down and the barrel's locked in place and headspaced.
Now if I manually cock this, which you can do, you can see the firing pin inside here.
And the firing pin is on ... a pivot so it can slide up and down and there's a little hole,
right in there, that the firing pin is funnelled into to actually fire.
Now I mentioned that there was a .22 calibre conversion, or adapter system, used with the Dardick.
That has a single firing pin, but that firing pin has to move to be slightly differently positioned to hit a rimfire like a .22.
So there's a screw here that allows me to rotate between centrefire and "RF", or rimfire.
Now this gun is not unique in that it doesn't actually have the correct parts to make this conversion.
If you look at that hole that the firing pin gets funneled through,
you can see that piece is cammed up and down when I rotate this screw.
And there's supposed to be a second hole in it, on the top, that would line up with the rim of a .22 rimfire
cartridge in a plastic tround case adapter.
But this, like many of the other Dardicks, doesn't actually have that second hole drilled.
I've gone ahead and put it back together. So, you can see the actual firing mechanism in double action.
It's going to be spitting empty cases right out there.
You're going to be able to see them as they cycle up through here. It can be fired single action or double action.
Dardick actually did make a conversion adapter for this where you could
take out the barrel and put on a carbine style upper that had a buttstock and a much longer barrel.
Those are actually available, although they are quite scarce.
And then I guess the last thing to look at here are the sights.
You'll find a couple different versions of these sights out there. These aren't too bad,
although this one's a little loose if you start messing with the windage screw.
There are some that are just like a flip sight, that doesn't work very well.
This one's better, it does have adjustable windage and elevation with these little screw wheels.
There's one there, that's the elevation, and that's the windage.
And that is the Dardick 1500.
Ultimately, of course, the Dardick was a colossal failure.
I've seen estimates of as many as maybe 100 of the guns made,
I think a more realistic estimate is somewhere in the 40 to 50 range. They're extremely rare guns today.
The ammunition is actually a lot more accessible than the guns are because, wisely,
as part of the promotional set up campaign for the gun they got a bunch of the ammunition into production.
Because of course one of the problems is going to be if someone finds the gun
but the shop doesn't have any ammunition, you know, even today that's a big deal.
It's a proprietary cartridge, people go, "Mmm, no, I want something I can always get ammo for."
So they wanted to make sure that ammo was always available wherever the guns were being sold.
And well of course, because there were so few guns sold, the ammo virtually never gets shot up.
So the ammo is actually out there, which is kind of cool.
But ultimately ... the guns tend to be very malfunction prone. While the ammunition is available today,
the ... polymer case material has generally gotten a bit brittle, the ammunition doesn't tend to be particularly reliable.
The guns have a lot of parts breakage problems, as well as malfunctioning problems.
There are a couple people out there on the YouTube who have tried shooting them
and I've yet to see one that was actually really successful at doing so.
Now the one good part is when Dardick went out of business in 1960
the remnants of the company were purchased by the Numrich Gun Parts Corporation.
And so Numrich has like all of the parts that you could possibly need for the Dardick because, well,
they never really sold a whole lot of them because there just aren't very many guns out there to support.
So if you have one of them and you need some spare parts
Numrich ... almost certainly has what you need, and that's nice for the people who do own them.
If you would like to become an owner of one of them, of course this one is coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
You can check it out on their auction catalogue page.
And if you'd like to know more about Rock Island in general, check out the description text below.
You'll find there a link to their Instagram page and a link to their YouTube channel,
both of which have all sorts of cool stuff for you to check out.
Thanks for watching.