Dead end handgun designs.

[SIGSHR]

Designs such as the Mauser Broomhandle, the Luger, the Mauser M1910/1914/1934 that were state of the art in their day, had long production runs but that manufacturers and later designers found to be over complicated to manufacture and to disassemble and reassemble and while desired by collectors have resulted in no modern recreations. Interarms sort of revived the Luger-the Parabellum, there were the Astra lookalikes and Chinese copies of the Broomhandle, but no revivals like the cap and ball revolvers, the new versions of the S&Ws. I have a M1914 Mauser, a CZ-27, both are well made, good shooters, but have poor ergonomics, somewhat tricky takedown, features such the removal of an empty magazine allowing a locked back slide to go forward and hard to engage and release safeties.
The rotating barrel doesn't seem to have caught on, the H&K P7 is long out of production, the blow forward action-the Schwarzlose, e.g., loading from stripper clips-the Broomhandle, the M1912 Steyr Hahn, etc. The Dardick was a good example of what Jeff Cooper called "an ingenious solution to a non-existent problem", the Gyrojet-?

 

[ballardw]

The Grendel P10 revived loading with stripper clips in a handgun in the late 1980's. I don't remember if part of that was to get around places with "removable magazines with greater than xxx rounds" or not as the magazine was fixed. It was loadable with easy to find M-16 stripper clips.

 

[44 AMP]

Webley-Fosbery ...

The "automatic revolver"

Kimball .30 Carbine pistol...
Very few made, design and materials not up to the task. Generally considered unsafe to shoot today.

Ruger Hawkeye pistol .256 Win Mag...
single shot pistol using the Blackhawk SA revolver frame...

to name a few more...

The list is large, some guns were evolutionary dead ends but had large production and service lives. Others were made and sold only in relatively small numbers before production ended.

 

[bamaranger]

Bren Ten

The Bren Ten fell flat on its face, more likely due to corporate mistakes than bad design.....magazines were a problem.

The art-deco designed Rem 51 (??} had lots of problems too.

 

[44 AMP]

The Bren Ten fell flat on its face, more likely due to corporate mistakes than bad design.....magazines were a problem.

From what I remember, magazines were not the problem. Magazine SUPPLY was the problem. This would fall under the "coporate problem" and not a gun problem or magazine problem.

The people they contracted with to supply magazines did not (could not?) supply the needed number in a timely manner.

Doesn't matter how good your pistol is (and the Bren 10 was a proven CZ design, adapted to the 10mm round) you won't sell many without magazines!

And I don't mean just no spare magazines, I mean they had shortages to the point of having new pistols ready, without any magazines. Not many people will buy a pistol now, and wait for you to send them A magazine "when some come in", which could be weeks or even months later.

 

[SIGSHR]

Dornaus & Dixon was a business failure, AMT vanished apparently because Harry Sanford's gifts as a designer did not carry over into management.
Again, I am thinking more in terms of designs rather than marketing and business failures.
The JMB/Dieudonne Saive designs succeeded in large part due to what I call "modular" design, easy to disassemble and reassemble, parts subject to wear and breakage-barrels, spring, e.g., easy to replace.

 

[44 AMP]

I think things like disassembly/reassembly, "modular" design and parts being easy to replace matter more to the people who are purchasing guns for groups of users (police or military/govt agencies) than they do to the individual purchaser, who tends to look more at "does it work, does it feel good in my hand, and of course, price point, and then looks at other features of the design, if they do go that far.

Many people buy a caliber pistol, more than a specific design, and anything in the right caliber and within their budget gets the nod. Sometimes these same people change their minds after a bit of use, and choose a different make/model but often stay with the same caliber.

 

[Scorch]

Lots of coolish pistol designs that failed for one reason or another.

My favorite is the NAACO Brigadier, a pistol that could be converted to a subgun/machine pistol with a detachable buttstock and longer barrel. Chambered in 45 NAACO, a proprietary cartridge that was almost a 45 WinMag.

Yeah, the Bren Ten was a flop because the mags were impossible to get. If it had gone into full production we might have found out a few more issues with it.

The AutoMag pistols were an excellent example of a design that failed. Failed for a couple of reasons, really. The problems came from too many cast parts and the bolt actuating spring wasn't really sturdy enough to play with the big boys. Cool gun though! The new AutoMags have taken the original design and successfully de-bugged it.

Astra 300 and 400. Spanish designers getting into the military pistol game. BIG, heavy, but not strong enough in the right places for a military pistol.

And lest we forget it, the Glisenti, an Italian pistol designed around the 9X19mm cartridge but not up to operating at 9mm Parabellum pressures. They had to downgrade the ammo until it was basically like a 380 pressure-wise. It was essentially the same design as the Ruger Standard Auto pistols, so maybe it wasn't a failed design.

 

[44 AMP]

The AutoMag pistols were an excellent example of a design that failed. Failed for a couple of reasons, really. The problems came from too many cast parts and the bolt actuating spring wasn't really sturdy enough to play with the big boys. Cool gun though! The new AutoMags have taken the original design and successfully de-bugged it.

I have some experience with the original Auto Mags (note, two words) and have not noticed the problems you describe.

There are a number of bugs in the design, but I never found cast parts or the bolt rotation springs (or the recoil springs) to be a problem.

SO what really is a dead end design, other than being out of production??

How do you determine your criteria? A gun that never had any further production development? One that never spawned a "next generation"?

Do you look at specifics or at gerneral operating principle? Both??

Top Break revolvers are a dead end design. Most are long out of production but in production or not, the principle is a dead end. Because of both physical and economic reasons.

Within their limitations, however, they DO work.

The Luger is a dead end, after a bit over 40 years of production.

Some designs became dead ends simply because they never caught on, others served for decades or longer, until replaced by something more efficient in either cost or operation, or both.

The Auto Mag, the Desert Eagle, the Wildey, all use a multiple lug rotating bolt lock up system. SO does the AR, since some of those are out of production and others are not, is that a dead end design? I'd say no...

 

[Carmady]

Here's one.

 

[CDW4ME]

Revolvers - with few centerfire exceptions, maximum capacity of 7 rounds. Dead end.

 

[Erno86]

Trailslide semi auto 22lr pistol

Trailslide PL22 Hammerli Sig Arms 22lr. 6" semi auto pistol - 1999-2006

I own one -- Good luck trying to find 10 round plastic magazines for it -- Because they wear out so fast.

I broke my mechanical thumb safety on it. A gunsmith glued it back together... but it broke again after shooting 10 rounds thru it.

I may try to buy safety parts from Numrich Gun Parts, but the magazine issue is my paramount concern.

 

[SIGSHR]

Designs such as the Glisenti, the Tokarev, the Glisenti M1889, the French Model 1892 were "national designs" never intended for the commercial market, as with so many military designs, adopted because they were the work of a "native son."
The NAACO Brigadier is a curiosity. A round with twice the power of the 45 ACP-which many people complain is too much for them, even with an aluminum frame it weighed 4 pounds, unloaded. Almost a modern version of a Colt Walker.

 

[RickB]

I wish DA/SA with a hammer-drop safety had been a dead end.
I think it retarded handgun design for decades.

 

[totaldla]

The S&W329PD.
Why? Because very few people nowadays will suffer the recoil to become proficient. The "carry a lot, shoot a little" mindset has fallen out of favor.

 

[JohnKSa]

The original Remington Model 51 with its hesitation lockup never went anywhere. Remington tried to revive it decades later and failed.

The CZ-52 roller-locked pistol was an interesting design that provided a slim & powerful, but heavy pistol. But it was produced for only a couple of years and apparently no other manufacturers/designers thought enough of the design to use it in other handguns.

 

[Mike Irwin]

The Colt AA2000.

 

[JohnKSa]

I hadn't thought about that thing in years. I remember handling one and thinking that I had never touched a gun with a trigger that felt more like a squirt gun than that one.

I can't imagine what Colt was thinking...

 

[Mike Irwin]

I've described here a number of times my experience with the AA2000 when I was with American Rifleman in the early 1990s.

In short, I almost got fired because the AA2000 was such a piece of crap and I took great exception to NRA's plans to feature the damned thing on the cover of the magazine to bolster a once again heading towards bankruptcy Colt.

It was, as I feared, something of a PR disaster for Rifleman because the AA2000 was such an unmitigated disaster.

 

[Limnophile]

The "carry a lot, shoot a little" mindset has fallen out of favor.

I've been carrying for a decade, and have regarded the typical carrying citizen as steeped in the mindset that ease of carry trumps effectiveness of shooting. How else could Ruger rack up 1.5 million sales in just nine years of the pistol people love to carry but hate to shoot, the LCP? I realize the .44 Magnum to which you refer is in an entirely different recoil category, but today's armed citizen is buying more polymer-framed carry sidearms to save 5 to 8 ounces relative to their softer-shooting, more accurate and precise, metal-framed (aluminum and steel, respectively) counterparts.

In a short-sighted way it makes sense to prioritize ease of carry over shooting effectiveness. The average armed citizen will spend vast amounts of time carrying, but will never deploy his sidearm in a defensive scenario let alone shoot. However, if one is carrying seriously, one prioritizes for the unlikely, albeit very high stakes, event, as is appropriate for all emergency planning. And, if one is complaining that an extra 8 ounces is just too much to lug around all day, one likely has a poor gun belt and poor holster. The average American male is toting around more than 30 excess pounds of body fat, and can easily find a way to lose a half pound of which to compensate for a good shooting carry sidearm.

Here's hoping the metal-framed compact sidearm isn't dead ended by the modern armed citizen's preferences.