Reincarnated Rimfire

Picked up this interesting little piece from a friend at the Indy 1500 gun show this past weekend.

It's a Smith & Wesson .32 Safety Hammerless 1st Model (popularly known as the "Lemon Squeezer" for the grip safety on the backstrap.) This one, however, has been professionally and painstakingly converted from .32 S&W to .22 rimfire.

The most obvious visual clue is the spring-loaded underbarrel ejector rod assembly, à la the Colt Peacemaker.

The pinned half-moon thumbnail of the factory front sight has been replaced with a Marble unit.

The barrel has been bored out and sleeved to .22 caliber.

Here's a detail of the rear of the ejector rod assembly as well as the cylinder face, where you can see the faint traces of the .22 chamber sleeves inset into the bored-out .32 chambers.

The sleeved chambers from the breech end. The cylinder's serial number is much later than the frame's.

I would LOVE to know the history of this gun. The work is immaculate and the re-nickel job is quite nice.The frame dates to 1898, making it an antique, although the cylinder is later, so it's unlikely that the conversion dates to the twenty-year stretch from 1881-1901 where S&W didn't have any .22s in their lineup.
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Harrington & Richardson .25 Self-Loading Pistol

H&R Self-Loading .25 pistol. The safety worked backwards from the usual, in that up was "fire" and down was "safe".

Harrington & Richardson attempted to compete with Colt's in the pocket autopistol segment early in the 20th Century, with offerings in both .32 and .25 caliber. Unfortunately, Colt's held numerous patents from John Moses Browning, a crucial one of which was this:

"In a firearm, the combination with a frame having a forward extension, a reaction spring mounted in said forward extension, and a barrel, of a breech block or bolt carrier having a semitubular, forward extension to inclose the barrel and to engage said frame and to slide thereon..."

In other words, Colt's had the patent to the one-piece slide and breechblock. Remington and Savage dodged this patent with their designs from John Pedersen and Elbert Searle having the breechblock as a piece separate from the slide. H&R went in a different direction by licensing designs from English gunmaker Webley & Scott in which the slide did not "inclose the barrel".

From top to bottom: Webley .455 Auto, H&R .32, H&R .25, Webley .32

While the later H&R .32 auto incorporated numerous differences from its Webley forebears, not least of which was the conversion from hammer- to striker-fired operation, the Harrington & Richardson .25 Self-Loading pistol was a straight-up copy of the internal-hammer British original, down to the complete absence of sights.

No sights, but it has a loaded chamber indicator.

The extractor atop the slide, like most straight blowback pocket guns, is only really needed to extract unfired cartridges. It also does double duty as a loaded chamber indicator, standing slightly proud of the slide when a round is under its hook. The magazine held six rounds of .25ACP and the mag release was a vertical button on the heel of the grip. The grip panels are of hard rubber with the H&R monogram molded in. Replacement magazines and grips are available from Triple K.

Although in the catalog from 1912 until 1920, some sources say that production of the .25s actually stopped in 1916, and remaining sales after that date were out of unsold stock. At any rate, only 16,000 were produced, making it one of the rarer early American pocket autos.