Sunday Smith #69: .38/.32 Terrier, 1948

Smith & Wesson's small "I-frame" revolvers had their genesis in the first swing-out cylinder revolver the manufacturer offered, the .32 Hand Ejector Model of 1896. These were supplanted in the catalog by the .32 Hand Ejector Model of 1903, which incorporated advancements from Smith's original 1899-vintage .38 Hand Ejectors, such as moving the cylinder stop to the bottom of the window, adding a second lockup point for the cylinder assembly on the front of the ejector rod, and relocating the cylinder release to a thumb-operated latch on the side of the frame. All these changes are still in use on S&W revolvers nearly one and a quarter centuries later.

While the .32 S&W Long was seen as an adequate round for self-protection, the little .32 Hand Ejectors soon faced competition in the compact handgun market from Colt's Detective Special, which was launched in 1927. While slightly bulkier than the little I-frame Smith & Wesson, the Detective Special came with a factory 2" barrel and was chambered for the more powerful .38 Special cartridge.

Smith & Wesson didn't have anything in the catalog that could compare, and so in 1936 they began selling a factory short-barreled version of their .38 Regulation Police, called the .38/.32 Terrier.

The upper sideplate screw, strain screw on the frontstrap, and straight ejector rod all transmit a secret code in Smith nerdspeak.

The .38 Regulation Police and the .38/.32 Terrier were basically the standard .32 Hand Ejector with a cylinder holding five rounds of .38 S&W instead of six of .32 S&W Long.

Although the .38 S&W cartridge was already something like a half-century old by the 1930s, the cylinder window in the I-frame was too short to accommodate a cylinder that would hold .38 Special cartridges. Besides, at the time the .38 S&W was still one of the most popular cartridges in the world, being chambered throughout the British Empire and even domestically by Smith's arch rival Colt's Manufacturing Company (who called it ".38 Colt New Police" in order to avoid having to rollmark their guns with the hated 'S&W' initials).

During WWII, Smith shelved production of the Terrier as well as pretty much everything else in order to concentrate on .38 Military & Police "Victory Models" for the war effort. After the war, the production of Terriers resumed in 1948 and the pictured revolver is a very early postwar gun, with a serial number only about four thousand guns higher than the first one off the line in '48.

In addition to the serial number, the other giveaways to its postwar status are the sliding hammer block, which all Smith & Wesson revolvers incorporated as a wartime safety improvement, and the ejector rod with a simple bit of knurling on the end rather than a separate threaded-on ejector rod knob. This latter was a manufacturing shortcut adopted when Springfield was churning out Victory Models and remained after the war.

In 1953, production of the .38/.32 Terrier was moved to the Improved I-frame, with its coil mainspring, and in 1957 the nomenclature was changed to "Model 32", with the replacement of romantic model names by sterile model numbers.

The pictured revolver, a decent shooter with only moderate wear, was purchased at my neighborhood firearms store in January of 2021 for two hundred dollars.

.