Bad Habits

Food, coffee, fountain pens, clocks, watches, and obsolescent guns.

Here's one that's really obsolescent:




Mine has a shorter barrel, but it's the same thing.

The 1875 Schofield was one of the many Smith and Wesson No. 3 revolvers that shared the Wild West with the Colt Single Action Army. Major Schofield designed and patented the backward-acting barrel latch on this model, instead of the upward-acting latch the rest of the No. 3s had. He then got his brother General Schofield to see to it that the Army ordered a few thousand. But they never caught on. A few years later the whole lot got sold as surplus, got refinished (some in nickel like mine) and sold on the civilian market.

What you have here is a modern Italian-made replica.

It is massively impractical. Though a lot faster to unload and reload than the Colt (you just unlatch the barrel, tip it down, and all six cartridges get ejected at once) the hinged frame does make it a bit weak. I load special cartridges for it, to a very low power level, just to be safe. And it was more complex and delicate than the Colt.

But it's good for two things. First, to illustrate (as if you didn't know) that there were, in fact, many brands of revolver on the frontier than the Westerns show. (And a lot fewer of them too. Very few people actually owned sixguns. A cheap farm-grade shotgun was a lot more common.)

But secondly, you show up on the range with something like this, it shows you have no pride at all. Goodness, that Victorian Pimp look does earn you many, many of the elusive Style Points. :D