The H&R "The American" revolver.

Hello, people of steemit, welcome to my page.

For today's post, I'd like to tell you about my antique revolver, the H&R "The American" double action revolver, chanbered for the .38 Smith and Wesson cartridge.

This revolver was manufactured by the Harrington and Richardson company in the late 1890s. It's hard to know the exact date that these revolvers were manufactured, the records aren't that good for these little revolvers.

There are very few markings on these revolvers. The only obvious marking are the words, "The American" and "Double Action" stamped into the top of the frame.

There is no cartridge designation stamped into the revolver anywhere, you just have to know what cartridge it uses. This wasn't a problem for the person who bought the revolver when it was new, they would obviously know what they were buying. These revolvers were manufactured before smokeless powder cartridges were widely available and were designed for black powder cartridges. This particular revolver was among the last group of revolvers made for black powder, the next run of manufacturing after these was designed to use smokeless powder cartridges and had extra markings on the barrel. The manufacture of the smokeless powder version of this style of revolver continued into the 1930s.

There's not much to taking these revolvers apart for cleaning. There's a cylinder pin latch on the front of the frame that holds the cylinder pin in place. Pressing on the latch allows you to pull the pin out of the frame, and the cylinder drops out of the frame. The cylinder pin is also used for pushing fired cases out of the cylinder after firing. You can also leave the cylinder in the frame and use a separate rod to push the empties out through the loading slot if you want to do it that way.

This revolver is in good mechanical condition, it functions the way it should, and the action is still fairly tight. As you can see, the nickle plating is not as good as it once was, but that's not unusual for these old firearms. Revolvers were nickle plated back then partly as added corrosion protection from the effects of the black powder. The .38 Smith and Wesson cartridge, used in these revolvers and many others of the period, was fairly short, and slightly larger diameter than the .38 Colt cartridge, they usually would not fit in a cylinder chambered for the .38 Colt. The cartridge was developed in 1877 for their S&W .38 single action revolver. At that point in time, they were quite suitable for self defense.

This is the end of this post, I hope you found it to be worth reading.

If you would like to read my previous post about my reproduction "cowboy gun", here's the link to that post.
https://steemit.com/firearms/@preppin-for-real/the-1871-richards-mason-revolver-reproduction

I'll be continuing this series next week, so stay tuned!

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