Dardick in American Riflemen Sept 2023 issue

[Ed Johnson 0]

As some of you are starting to notice, there is an article by Evan Brune in the American Rifleman concerning the Dardick pistol and related products. This article is basically accurate as to the particular product, but as a short article, it fails to engage on some of the major developments that came out later.

Some of us, notably Steven Dardick (David's son) and myself (Maynard's son) still feel that the "Open Chamber" concept has great potential in military applications. If you combine the speed of a modern multi-barrel Gatling gun with the speed of a motorized Dardick open chamber system, you can imagine the volume of ammunition you can dump on a fast moving target, such as a missile or enemy aircraft.

Steve and I both worked at the Dardick plant in Hamden during summers in the late 1950's while we were in college. At one point, I recall being  assigned to making barrels on a Barnes deep-hole driller. It was an exciting time for both of us. The concept of the Dardick pistol was coming at a time when police departments were trying to upgrade to semi-auto pistols that could carry more ammunition than the standard police revolvers. There were some problems with semi-auto pistols jamming occasionally.

The Dardick was intended to marry the reliability of a revolver with the magazine capacity of a semi-auto. I had an opportunity to shoot an early model 1500 (15 shot) .38 cal pistol. I recall at the time (these were still in development) that the double-action trigger pull required more  pressure than a standard Colt or Smith & Wesson revolver, which affected my aim. Manually cocking the hammer also required effort, but the gun shot smoothly on single action.

Essentially, the "Tround" application worked far better in a heavier military weapon, but capitol investment wasn't possible at Dardick at that point, so the plant had to shut down, sadly. There was later research involving the US Navy.and more development might occur in the future.

And I could have easily done without the Rifleman article referring to the Dardick as "A Famous Firearms  Flop."

We don't see it that way.. not at all....  ej

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Edited August 26, 2023 by Ed Johnson
error in wording

[tinsoldier 0]

Unfortunately, the folks at the NRA don't often do the 'deep dive' into their subject matter.... I recall watching one of their videos from "The National Firearms Museum" regarding the JSAR.  The example on hand was what appeared to be a Winfield (surprisingly, I guess they couldn't come up with an original example), and they referred to the design as "a delayed blow-back", rather than short recoil.