In the movie Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s eponymous police inspector utters what is perhaps the most famous revolver-related snippet of dialog in cinema history: “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots, or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself.” A cylinder with a capacity of six rounds is so firmly identified with the revolver that it’s become a nickname for the type of firearm as a whole.
However, the non-six-shot sixgun has been with us since the beginning. Even if we confine ourselves to the modern era of smokeless cartridges, differing cylinder capacities are not rare.
The most common divergence from the sixgun is the five-shot cylinder, usually a result of shoehorning a larger cartridge into a revolver originally intended for a smaller diameter round. Perhaps most famously, Smith & Wesson, in trying to compete with Colt’s compact D-frame revolvers as epitomized by the Detective Special, took the small Smith I-frame and rechambered it for the .38 S&W cartridge.
The I-frame was a tiny revolver, originally intended for .32 S&W Long, and so the cylinder could only accommodate five of the larger charge holes. This is still with us in the modern era as the five-shot .38 Spl. and .357 Mag. J-frames, descendants of that long ago .38/.32 Hand Ejector. Later in the 20th century, this same trick was repeated by cramming five .44 Spl. cartridges into a medium frame revolver originally intended to hold six .38 rounds.
Medium frame revolvers in .357 Mag. had been around since the Fifties, but in the early 1980s Smith & Wesson launched a slightly beefier medium frame intended to better hold up to extended use of Magnum ammo. The L-frame Model 686 had been around for more than a decade when, in 1996, S&W surprised the industry by wedging another charge hole into the cylinder, thereby creating the seven-shot 686 Plus, which was quickly copied by Taurus in their Model 608.
At the same time, the large N-frame Model 627, a descendent of the original .357 Mag. of the 1930s, received a capacity bump, too. The N-frame cylinder was originally intended to accommodate six rounds of .44 Spl, so there was ample meat there to bore a couple more charge holes and create an eight-shot .357 Mag.
This is a significant boost in effectiveness for a couple reasons. Most obviously, an eight-shot .357 Mag. revolver equals the ammunition capacity of many single-stack semi-automatic pistols.
Less apparent to the casual observer are the second-order effects of those two additional chambers. For one thing, the cylinder has to turn a much shorter distance to bring the next chamber into line with the bore. For another, there’s a lot less steel that needs to be set in motion by the hand (for revolver novices, the “hand” is the part in a revolver’s lockwork that pushes upward against the cylinder to rotate it.) Thanks to these two factors, an eight-shot Performance Center PC727 that’s received the attentions of a qualified revolver smith has a trigger that’s a joy to pull.
Perhaps no chambering has benefitted so much from stepping away from the six-shot dogma than the humble .22 rimfire.
For many years, revolvers from mainstream wheelgun purveyors like Ruger and Smith & Wesson stuck to six-shot rimfire revolvers no matter the frame size, purely out of tradition. You had to venture off the beaten path with a High Standard Sentinel or Harrington & Richardson 999 if you wanted the experience of a nine-shooter in .22LR.
Smith & Wesson’s small-frame .22/.32 Kit Gun had been around in one form or another since the early 20th century, but is wasn’t until the late 1990s that the cylinder received an extra two charge holes, bumping the capacity by 33 percent to eight rounds.
The current J-frame offerings, in 8-shot .22LR or 7-shot .22WMR form, combined with newer rimfire loads designed with personal defense in mind like the Federal .22LR Punch or Speer’s .22 Magnum Gold Dot Short Barrel, offer a viable alternative to the recoil sensitive or folks with infirmities that interfere with using a heavier caliber.
Meanwhile, in larger revolvers like Ruger’s Single Six and the medium frame Smith & Wesson 617, the larger cylinder can swallow as many as 10 shots of .22LR. This is a capacity equivalent to most rimfire semi-auto pistols, as well as delivering the same potential benefits to the double action trigger pull as the eight shot N-frame.
Lastly, although it’s not technically a capacity bump, there are the various newer .32 caliber magnum chamberings like .32 H&R Magnum and .327 Federal Magnum. Even though the I/J-frame Smith & Wesson was originally intended as a six-shot .32, the disappearance of .32 S&W Long models from the catalog some forty-ish years ago means that folks have become accustomed to thinking of the little snubbies as five-shot guns.
One of the reasons that I, personally, switched from a .38 Spl. Model 442 Centennial Airweight to a 432PD in .32 H&R Mag. back some 20 years ago was the fact that I got that extra round in the cylinder.
If some is good, more must be better, right?
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