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.
Finally a vid about them! I always loved how strange those pistols looked.
1950's SciFi pulp meets Borderlands
If you still don't have enough Dardick here is an Anvil video Ian mentions, and here is a video from LifeSizePotato.
I love the unusual lots of parts and ammo but few guns situation that's interesting!
I saw one of these at a tiny club show in central Massachusetts. Guy had the box and something like 120 rounds for it too, didn't even have it out on the table but he let me handle it after he overheard me geeking out to my buddy about the Liberator he had displayed. He wanted about 6 grand for the whole package, and it was gone when I went back the next day.
It's that gun from the Simpson's
The tround has got to be much heavier than a conventional cylindrical case of the same strength. The material on the apex of the cases, the points of the triangle, probably isn't contributing to the strength of the case. Its just filler.