S&W 3566: An IPSC Game-Changer that Didn’t

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Murphy auction company taking a look at one of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming April of 2019 premiere auction this is a Smith & Wesson model 35 66 which is actually kind of one of the less confusingly named of their guns because it is chambered for the 356 TSW cartridge and really the story that I want to go over today is one of the cartridge and the political infighting between US PSA which is the u.s. formal governing body for IPSC International practical shooting Confederation and the Smith & Wesson company so US PSA or IPSC is basically an action pistol style of competition where you shoot stuff really fast on the move it's pretty cool it has attracted today and even 20 years ago had attracted a lot of very good competitive shooters a lot of sponsors there was getting to be significant money for people in these matches in terms of maybe not prizes so much but sponsorship and there was a big drive to get better to develop better gear and one of the things one of the interesting elements of IPSC is that it had two different divisions for power factor they figured if you're shooting a heavy cartridge that's obviously going to have more recoil and less capacity and so you should be compensated for that by getting more points for your hits than people who are shooting smaller cartridges which would be minor category and so what they did is they came up with a system where you had a power factor which is a bullet weight times velocity and that you had to have a certain power factor to be in major category and everything less than that was in minor and basically the way this was envisioned was nine millimetre parabellum is minor 45 acp is major those are the two main calibers and what people discovered is if we take 38 super and we load it a little hot we can actually get enough velocity out of it to qualify as major category and about this time optics and muzzle brakes started showing up on on these pistols and the muzzle brake will work better with high-pressure ammunition because there's more gas coming out at higher velocity at the barrel to actually make the muzzle break do its job you know if you have if you're venting gas upward to counteract muzzle climb the more gas you're venting up where the more force you're putting downward on the muzzle so it turned out that if you took 38 super and you loaded it hotter and hotter your muzzle brake was actually working better and better as you did that making the gun more controllable and you could get a couple extra rounds of 38 super in a typical pistol compared to 45 Auto a lot of these being like 1911 or 1900s and not surprisingly people took this idea and expanded on it and the goal for a lot of people was to take nine by nineteen nine millimetre parabellum and load it hot enough that it would make major power factor because you could put a brake on the gun and you could you could get a lot more capacity over anything else in major without sacrificing all that much in terms of controllability because of your really good muzzle brake and USPSA saw this and part of the problem was this disarms race of gear and cartridge it was having to - problematic effects the first is it was driving some people away from the sport because all of a sudden if you want to be competitive now you've got to invest in you know all sorts of fancier more expensive gear and there are a lot of people who just wanted to shoot you know the kind of standard stock guns that they already had and in addition some of this hand loaded ammo was getting to the point of maybe being dangerous like maybe in your zeal to get to major power factor you're creating cartridges that may may do serious damage to a gun and sooner or later one of these guns may blow up on someone and actually cause injuries and that would be really bad for the sport so they int they did a couple things they introduced primarily they introduced a limited division which was basically not fancy guns so with the introduction of a limited division now guns with optics and muzzle brakes were relegated to an open category unless you could segregate your shooters between the people who wanted to have a gear race and the people who just wanted to have a competition race with limited literally and figuratively equipment there were a couple other requirements you are not allowed to use ammunition that was loaded hotter than Sammy Speck Sammy being the European organization that dictates ammunition manufacturing standards so you couldn't take a nine millimetre parabellum and load it up SuperDuper hot and shoot that you also had to have to be a production class gun or to be a limited class gun it had to have a production of at least a thousand units so you couldn't just make up your own thing and and use it in limited division in open that's fine do whatever you want for limited it has to be a production gun and if you're gonna shoot a limited gun and it's going to be a major power factor you had to have for that combination to be or for that caliber to be accepted you had to be able to show that there were three different ammunition companies commercially producing major power factor loadings of that ammunition on the commercial market so the idea here was basically to try and push this back to the original if it's nine millimeter it's minor if it's 45 it's major stop trying to game the system guys that kind of thing Smith & Wesson took this opportunity to create what really could have been an excellent competition pistol well it is an excellent competition pistol it could have really dominated this market there were really there was nothing else out there that could have been that would qualify for major caliber in the limited vision this would have been it so what they did is they took their standard third-generation semi-auto pistol design double stack they they built it up capable of handling the pressure of their new cartridge which was it'll fit in a standard 9 millimeter magazine the cartridge was the 356 t SW that standing fort team Smith & Wesson because this was going to be the gun that the formal official Smith & Wesson competition team was going to use they got federal to start making ammunition for it as well as Corbin and there was at least one other company they needed three different manufacturers to market ammo that all met the major power factor to make the actual cartridge they started with the nine by 21 am i case they lengthened it by half a millimeter so that it wouldn't interchange with the old with standard 9 by 21 and and they renamed it 356 TS WM so it's a longer case which gives you more powder capacity and it also means that the cartridge can be loaded to a higher pressure without danger that it could be accidentally fired in a gun chambered for something lower pressure like nine millimetre parabellum your standard magazine here would fit 15 of these cartridges which was more than you could get with any other major power factor cartridge in a in the equivalent length of magazine and then the gun they designed for it was tricked out from the factory for competition has a big mag well funnel here has an excellent single action trigger yes that's a really really nice trigger factory adjustable sights it's an in a very smooth action these were actually produced by the Smith & Wesson Performance Center which did Smith's custom and semi-custom work and they are really nice guns so why didn't this go on to just dominate limited division USPSA well in the summer of 1994 the USPSA Board of Directors had a vote they had a meeting and part of that meeting was a vote on whether or not to recognize this pistol with its ammunition as being legal in as major caliber limited division legal Smith & Wesson was at this point starting to ship guns they were starting to advertise them because they met all the requirements they had a Sammy speck on this ammunition that was perfectly within reason for the you know the the loadings that they were making they had multiple manufacturers producing the ammo they had made well more than a thousand of the guns by all rights this was a shoo-in however in the summer of 94 the the USPSA Board of Directors decided against authorizing this pistol and then a few months later in February of 1995 they came back and made an addendum to the rules stating that now if you wanted to be major caliber limited you also had a minimum bullet diameter of 0.4 0 0 inches basically flat out lying anything that was a 9-millimeter based cartridge and that just clobbered this pistol that was really the death knell for the the cartridge the 350 60 SW and these guns really I think a lot of people will think unfair to Smith & Wesson although in to play devil's advocate here the purpose of this pistol was was basically to exploit a loophole in the rules the purpose of the rules was to segregate 9-millimeter guns from 45 caliber guns and and to to only be awarding extra points for hits from major caliber hits to guns that had a balancing down side namely the you know heavier muzzle flip and less capacity so trying to come up with a gun that would meet that there wouldn't be the best of both worlds really was not the spirit of USP essays intended rules so that's kind of what comes when winning competition becomes more important than say self-improvement through competition but it certainly leaves us with a very interesting relic of a pistol as a result of all these various shenanigans and this political infighting between Smith & Wesson and u.s. BSA the the real loser here was the 356 t SW cartridge it had the potential to be something really quite appealing it had the potential to have a real impact on the market for example this is very similar in concept to the 357 sig which is a cartridge designed to push a 9-millimeter bullet at a much higher velocity than standard nine millimetre parabellum cam 357 sig does this by having a a necked down case so that it has more powder volume behind the bullet it's basically a 40 Smith & Wesson sized case necked down to a nine millimeter a 38 caliber bullet the downside to 357 sig is that because it is that larger diameter case it has less magazine capacity than than 9-millimeter based cartridges so in theory 350 60 SW and 357 sig accomplished the same thing except the 356 does it with the additional full magazine capacity of a 9-millimeter type cartridge it should have been the winner in the market now today 357 sig has more or less just gone away and maybe 356 would have as well but having this gun primarily marketed as an IPSec competition gun that you could shoot major power factor in limited division with that's what Smith & Wesson really staked this gun on and when that rug got pulled out from under them it kind of left the pistol high and dry these have they weren't in production very long they've ended up being quite quite rare and unusual guns the ammunition of course is no longer produced and now the ammunition is rare the one saving grace for a lot of the people with these guns is that Smith & Wesson did actually have a they were able to make barrels for these in nine millimetre parabellum nine by 19 so a lot of the owners of these guns have gotten new barrels for them from Smith & Wesson and they can shoot standard 9-millimeter ammunition which means that you're not dependent on making or finding that 357 or 350 60 SW amo anymore anyway I thought this is a pretty interesting little just a little side story about some of the the weird hijinks that go on kind of behind the scenes in in the shooting industry the gun industry the shooting sports arena so this by the way is a magnificent example of a 357 of a 3 5 6 6 Smith & Wesson's naming conventions are always a bit of a hassle anyway it's a gorgeous example of the gun it's actually being sold here with I believe 600 rounds of the original ammo so if you're interested in a both a gun that's a cool piece of modern firearms history and also a fantastic gun just on its own merits well this might be your chance to get one if you click the link in the description text below you will find yourself at forgotten weapons comm and from there you can click over to Murphy's catalog page for this pistol' can take a look at their pictures their description their price estimate all that sort of stuff you can place a bid for it right there on their website or just browse through the other guns they have in the auction thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 310,515

Rating: 4.9703035 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, limited, production, open, division, ipsc, uspsa, major caliber, competition, s&w, smith, wesson, model 3566, 356 tsw, team smith & wesson, idpa, run and gun, modern competition, race gun, optic, compensator, 9mm, supercomp, 38 super, 9x21, imi, cartridge, pressure, saami, screwed, caliber, federal, corbon, power factor

Id: P2jU5cp4WCg

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

beautiful gun.

[u/paulwhite959]

If they cared that much about 45 why didn’t they just make that the rule from the start?

[u/Panzerkampfpony]

This power factor stuff seems custom made to complicate and gate off the sport just to cater to .45 fanboys and muscle out people who can't afford custom ammunition.