The Border Patrolman Who Warned America About the .357 Magnum

The man who replaced America’s favorite police revolver held 12 United States patents and the public was never told why his gun existed. He had drawn the Colt Mark III. He had invented a 40 caliber pistol cartridge more than a decade before the 40 Smith and Wesson. When Smith and Wesson introduced his revolver in 1980, the reason offered involved competition shooting on duty belts across the country.

Barrels were splitting. On one side, a 6’6 border patrolman who could draw and hit in about a quarter of a second, whose word carried from magazine pages into gun counters everywhere. On the other, an engineer in Springfield holding a revolver whose cylinder would not open, cracked where steel had been cut away on purpose.

Why build a new gun instead of putting the steel back? The answer was printed in 1965. The men who admired its author most never read that page. Springfield, Massachusetts. Sometime around 1979, inside the Smith and Wesson plant, a technician is running an endurance test on a model 66, the stainless version of the most popular police revolver in America, feeding it magnum ammunition the way a department would.

Two of the test guns start fighting him. The cylinders bind. They won’t swing out clean. The engineer who comes to look is Dick Baker, senior product engineer. Three years into the job, he finds the same thing on both. A crack in the barrel extension at the bottom at 6:00. At the one place on that barrel where somebody had removed steel on purpose.

25 years earlier at the national matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, the president of Smith and Wesson had asked a border patrolman what the perfect police revolver would look like. Carl Helstrom did the asking. Bill Jordan did the answering. Put the 357 Magnum into the medium K-frame, the size cops already wore all day, and give it a heavy barrel, a shrouded ejector rod, adjustable sights.

He called it a peace officer’s dream. On November 15th, 1955, the first one came off the line, serial number K26000, and the company handed it to him. Hellstrom’s side of that conversation doesn’t survive in his own words. What survives is Jordan’s account of it and the gun. The flat at 6:00 was already in the drawing.

It had been in K-frame drawing since the 1890s. By the time Baker went looking, the company’s outside repair department had already seen it. Blued Model 19 revolvers coming back with barrels split in exactly the same place. The explanation on file was hot hand loads, something done to the guns, in other words, not something built into them.

Baker didn’t buy it, not entirely. So, there were two stories about one crack, and everything depended on which was true. If the shooters had ruined the guns, Smith and Wesson owed nobody anything. If the factory had, it owed everybody. Who would you believe? The men who built it or the men who carried it. To understand what Baker was looking at, you have to understand what that little flat was for and how old it was.

The K-frame was born in 1899 as a 38. When the cylinder swings closed on a revolver that size, the yolk carrying it has to clear the back end of the barrel where it pokes through the frame, and there isn’t room. So, somebody generations earlier, milled a flat across the bottom of it, a shaved place, maybe the width of a fingernail, so the parts could meet.

At 38 special pressure, it didn’t matter. Under the industry standard, that cartridge tops out near 18,000 pounds per square inch. And even the hotter version introduced in the 70s sits around 21. The frame had a century of margin. The 357 Magnum runs at roughly 38,000, more than double the pressure through a barrel with a slice taken out of the underside.

Smith and Wesson spent about a year on alloys and heat treatment before they would build Jordan’s gun. And the engineering worked, but it worked on an assumption. The assumption was that nobody would actually shoot the thing that way. Jordan said so himself from the start. Carry the magnums. Practice with the 38s. That wasn’t modesty. That was a budget.

Picture a man firing the first full power round through a revolver that light and the small silence afterward while he decides what he thinks about it. Budgets get spent. Nobody in that plant in 1955 had any way of knowing who would be doing the spending or how fast. There’s a reason a border patrolman’s opinion could move a factory in Massachusetts.

In 1965, Jordan published a book called No Second Place Winner through Charles Scribbner’s sons. Stories from the Rio Grand wrapped around hard advice about guns, leather, and staying alive. It has never gone out of print, somewhere past 200,000 copies by most accounts. He wrote a column that ran for years in guns and ammo. He designed the holster half the country’s officers wore and a set of grips still made under his name.

In 1963, he’d helped Elmer Keith and Sker Skelton bring the 41 Magnum into the world. He stood 6’6. On camera, he could draw and hit before most men got a hand on the gun. Understand what a bline meant then. No forums, no comment sections, no way to check a claim against 10,000 strangers by dinnertime. There was a magazine on the kitchen table next to the coffee.

There was whatever the man in it said. And by Saturday, that sentence was being repeated at a gun counter three states away by somebody who’d never met him. None of that is a criticism of Jordan. Everything he told them about that revolver was true. Which leaves the harder question. What happens when the most trusted man in the country is right and the one line that matters most is the one nobody repeats.

[music] The change that broke those guns did not come from Smith and Wesson. And it did not come from Jordan. It came from a wave of police reform that was by any honest measure correct. Through the 60s and into the 70s, American policing went through a reckoning about officer survival.

The 1970 shootout at New Hall, California, where four highway patrolmen died in minutes. The Onion Field case, the violent years in between. Departments started asking a question they had not seriously asked before. Are we training these men the way they will actually have to fight? One answer came back fast. Stop qualifying with light target ammunition and then loading something else for the street.

Train with what you carry. It was the right call. It is still the right call, but it meant a revolver designed around a budget, a handful of magnums on duty, everything else soft, was suddenly getting magnums by the box, on a range several times a year from every officer on the roster, and on academy guns class after class after class.

The instructors who wrote those new courses were doing the best work of their careers. Nobody told them what it cost. If you would rather have the documented version of a story than the one repeated at gun counters, subscribe. What is coming in a few minutes is the sentence that would have prevented every cracked barrel in this story printed in 1965 in plain English by the man who asked for the gun.

There was a second force pushing the same direction and it wore a lab coat. In 1975, the federal government published a study on police ammunition through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Its centerpiece was a model built out of anatomical cross-sections. A human being reduced to volume elements, each one scored by physicians for how much it mattered.

Then they shot him statistically [music] thousands of times, and produced a number. They called it the relative incapacitation index. Picture that. A paperman, sectioned like a butcher’s chart, shot inside a computer to settle an argument that had been running in gun shops for 80 years. The index had a quirk almost nobody outside the study noticed.

The model only assessed frontal shots, which meant it rewarded bullets that opened [music] fast and spent themselves early and penalized bullets that drove deep. The traditional heavy 158 grain load, the one the 357 Magnum had been designed around back in the 30s, scored poorly. The lightweight bullets that had appeared around 1965, [music] the 110s and 125s, scored well.

Departments read the federal study and did what responsible departments do. They followed it. So now officers were required to train [music] with duty ammunition. And the duty ammunition the government’s own science recommended was the lightest, fastest thing on the shelf. Two reasonable decisions made by two institutions, neither of which had ever looked at the underside of a barrel.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, inside the plant, Smith and [music] Wesson changed the gun. Every revolver has a gas ring, a small shield that keeps the residue thrown off by firing from packing into the axle the cylinder turns on. Sometime around 1974 to 1976, the company moved it onto the yolk instead.

The reason given inside the building was that the rings had been working loose and binding things up. There may have been a second [music] reason. The stainless guns introduced at the start of the decade ran hotter and expanded differently, and stainless was still a new problem for everybody in the industry.

The change was never assigned an engineering number. Collectors have spent decades trying to date it precisely and still can’t because there’s no dash, no marking, no line in a catalog. Guns left the door one way in the spring and another way in the fall, and nothing on the outside said so. Here’s what it required. The redesigned yolk needed more room to swing home.

To give it that room, the flat at 6:00 had to be cut deeper. More steel came off the bottom of the barrel, the material an engineer would call hoop strength, the ring of metal that keeps a pressurized tube from opening up. A small fix [music] for a small annoyance paid for out of a reserve nobody was tracking. That was the fix.

Nobody wrote down what it cost. Dick Baker walked into that building in August of 1976, [music] and the first thing he did was ask why. He’d come from Ruger. [music] Before Ruger, 6 years at Colt, where he designed the Mark III revolver and worked on the series 70 and the singleaction army. Before that, high standard.

12 patents eventually and a 40 caliber pistol cartridge he worked out with a model maker named Norm Spencer over lunch hours more than 10 years before the 40s and W made that idea famous. So when he saw a gas ring sitting on a yolk he recognized it. Ruger had tried that arrangement and moved away from it because it fouled faster than the old way.

[music] Baker asked why Smith and Wesson had done it. He was told what people in factories are usually told because that’s what was decided. He fixed it. He cut an undercut into the cylinder recess and swaged in a redesigned ring with an internal belt so it locked in and stayed. And the fouling problem went with it.

That one got an engineering number. 1977, the model 19-4 and the model 66-1. The deeper cut on the barrel stayed exactly where it was. There was no longer any reason for it. The yolk it had been made for was gone. But the fixtures were set, the tooling ran, and nobody walked it back. He had solved the wrong problem.

How long before anybody noticed? Two years later, the endurance test found the cracks, and the argument over blame started in earnest. Hot hand loads, bad lots of ammunition, careless [music] owners. But the limit of that revolver had already been published in 1965 by Bill Jordan. In no second place winner, the same book on the same shelves in the same houses, the book those officers had grown up on.

Jordan told his readers plainly that the K-frame was on the light side to hold up under, in his words, a steady diet of full charge 357 loads. A man who intended to do all his shooting with maximum loads, he wrote, would be better served by the heavier frame the cartridge had been born on. He wrote that a decade before departments began requiring exactly that.

sit with the shape of it. The man whose reputation made the gun exist, the man quoted in nearly every article written about it since put the ceiling in print under his own name in a book that has sold past 200,000 copies and never gone out of print. And the profession that revered him, that repeated his advice on holsters, on grips, on how to draw, on where to stand, overrode the one paragraph that would have saved the barrels.

It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t a memo. It was on a page in a hard cover in half the squadrooms in America. Nobody was looking for it, which is what makes this hard to tell as a scandal. There isn’t a villain anywhere in it. The departments were following a federal study. The ammunition companies were building what their largest customers had just been instructed to buy.

The training officers were carrying out a reform that genuinely kept men alive. Jordan had told the truth in public for free and been ignored on the one page that mattered while being quoted on all the others. Nobody lied. Nobody cut a corner on purpose to save a dollar. And there’s one more thing which nobody in that chain could have known.

The revolver splitting on those ranges was not the revolver Jordan had warned about. His warning was written in 1965 about the gun as it was built in 1955. The shallow original cut, the gun handed to him with K260,000 stamped on the frame. By 1978, the same model number on the same catalog page at roughly the same price was leaving the factory with measurably less steel in the one place that mattered.

Imagine an armorer holding two Model 19 revolvers across his palms 10 years apart in age, unable to name a single difference between them. There wasn’t one he could see. The men who eventually worked it out weren’t writers and weren’t police chiefs. They were men on a factory floor in Massachusetts and their names are not on the gun.

But that was still only the public argument. Here’s the finding stated plainly because it doesn’t need help. The deeper cut existed for exactly one reason, to clear a yolk mounted gas ring. In 1977, that gas ring went back onto the cylinder. The reason for the deeper cut ended that year. The deeper cut did not.

What kept it there wasn’t malice, and it wasn’t a decision anybody had to sign. It was the ordinary weight of a large factory. Fixtures set, methods written, machines running, and nobody whose job it was to ask whether an old accommodation was still buying anything. Institutional inertia is a bloodless phrase for a very human thing.

Somebody would have had to walk in and argue for putting steel back into a part nobody had complained about. So, the Model 19 and Model 66 revolvers splitting their barrels in the late ‘7s had less material at 6:00 than the revolver Smith and Wesson put into Bill Jordan’s hands in 1955. The gun had been made [music] weaker, quietly without announcement, as a side effect of fixing something else.

And no officer in America could have seen it. The cut sits on the underside of the barrel where it enters the frame. Close the cylinder and it disappears. Two revolvers, same stamp, same finish, same box, same warranty. One of them holding a little more against the same pressure than the other. Same model number, different gun.

Baker’s answer was not to put the steel back. It was to build a frame where the cut had never been necessary in the first place. He started with a layout of the brereech end of the barrel with no flat at all, full hoop all the way around. That meant the cylinder had to sit higher and the frame window had to grow with it, which meant a larger cylinder, which meant a larger gun. Not much larger, just enough.

Still a revolver a man could wear on a belt through a double shift, which was the entire point of the K-frame to begin with. And then he did something that tells you more about him than the patent list does. He walked downstairs and asked the assemblers what gave them trouble. They told him on the model 19s and 66s, the cylinder sat so close to the bottom of the frame window that fitting the cylinder stop and getting the timing right was a fight every single time.

So Baker went back to his layout and opened that area up by 3 or 4 thous0 of an inch. It cost nothing. It was invisible. It later made the new gun easier to build than the one it replaced. That’s what the men on the floor knew, had known for years, and had never once been asked. He called the prototype the Super K. How many other problems in that building were already solved by people nobody thought to ask? The prototypes were built upstairs in the model shop by Norm Spencer and nine other model makers.

They ran the frames on the production fixtures downstairs. Every operation a normal K-frame shared, then carried the unfinished frames up the stairs by hand to do the rest. >> [music] >> By Spencer’s account, they opened the top strap by 118,000, raised the center pin hole by 59, built a special hammer and hammer nose and yolk, and relocated the ejector rod cut on the barrel.

About 20 guns, under a month, they were marked with an X in front of the serial number. As far as anyone knows, not one of them survives. And there’s a detail in the middle of it that ought to be on a plaque somewhere. They needed a tap to cut the barrel threads in the new frame and didn’t have one the right size.

So Baker called a friend at Colt and borrowed it, which means the frame that would go head-to-head with the Colt Python in the same shops for the same police contracts for the same money was threaded with a python’s tap. Out at the gun counters, Smith against Colt was very nearly a religion. On the shop floor, it was two tool rooms lending each other hardware.

John Contro fitted the actions. Every man in that room could have told you exactly what the new gun was for. Not one of them would ever be named in a catalog, an advertisement, or a press release about it. Then the guns went to marketing. Roy Jinx took the prototypes to a big match and handed them to competition shooters. They liked them.

But Jinx came back with a problem that had nothing to do with steel. The gun looked too much like a Model 19. If Smith and Wesson was introducing a new frame, it needed to look like something a man would want, not like a familiar revolver with an inch of extra shoulder, consider what that meeting must have felt like.

A man spends 2 years working out why a revolver splits under pressure. And the next conversation is about whether it’s handsome enough to sell. [music] So Baker gave it a barrel. a full-length underlug running to the muzzle drawn with a Dan Wesson and a Colt Python barrel sitting on the bench in front of him for reference with a slight spherical curve turned at the top and bottom of the muzzle so it would guide into a holster instead of catching on the leather.

It became one of the most recognizable barrel profiles ever put on a revolver. Baker said later he couldn’t believe it turned into a classic [music] that is often imitated. Then it was named the adjustable sight version became the distinguished combat magnum. The fixed sight version the distinguished service magnum. [music] Distinguished is a shooting classification.

The rank above expert in police competition. The name was aimed at competitors. [music] The problem it was built to solve was not competition. The gun now had a story. It was not the true one. Production started in 1980 with the blue guns, the model 586 with adjustable sights, and the 581 with [music] fixed. The stainless versions, the 686 and the 681 [music] followed.

Demand was strong enough that by Baker’s own reckoning, the new line kept people employed through the recession that hit the industry in the early 80s, and the public was told a story about competition. Contemporary and reference accounts describe the L frame as having grown out of lessons learned in police combat shooting with a frame sized between the K and the N to handle modern magnum ammunition. That isn’t a lie.

Every word of it is defensible. It simply isn’t the reason the gun exists. [music] No factory statement identifying cracked K-frame barrels as the reason for the new frame has been found. That’s the honest way to put it. Not that Smith and Wesson denied anything, but that the acknowledgement isn’t in the record where you’d expect to find it.

Then in 1987, the company issued a warning of its own. Lframes built before that August could bind up with certain magnum ammunition, a firing pin bushing and hammer-nose problem, and had to come back for [music] a fix. Picture the department armorer opening that notice at his bench. A rack of nearly new revolvers behind him.

Bought specifically so this would stop happening. 7 years. The replacement needed a repair of its own. If the fix was that good, why did the reason for it never get said out loud? Somebody paid for all of this. And it wasn’t the people making the decisions. It was the officer who had done exactly what his department, his instructors, and the federal government told him to do and whose revolver came back from the factory with a bill attached.

Some of those men assumed it was their own fault. Some paid the invoice and never questioned it because the only explanation available at the counter was that they’d been shooting the wrong thing. How common was it really? That’s still argued. And honestly, experienced writers and collectors will tell you the failures were rare, measured against the enormous number of K-frame magnums built, and they have a point.

Others saw them cross the bench again and again. The record supports both, which is its own kind of answer. And then the science moved. After the FBI shootout in Miami in 1986, the profession threw out the model that had produced those recommendations in the first place. fast, shallow expansion stopped being the standard.

Penetration became the standard. The federal science that had put the lightest bullets into those cylinders was abandoned by the same institutions that issued it roughly a decade after the barrels started splitting. The doctrine was gone. The barrels didn’t come back. By then, the argument had moved on. So had the gun. Smith and Wesson dropped the Model 19 from the line in November 1999 and the Model 66 in 2005 quietly once the L-frame had become the thing everyone assumed was better [music] and semi-automatics had started taking the

belts anyway. Baker counted the Lframe among the biggest successes in the company’s history. 40 odd years on, the 686 is still one of the bestselling revolvers it makes. And in 2018, the Model 19 came back. Two-piece barrel, no flat at 6:00. Jordan was right about what an officer needed to carry. Baker was right about what the steel would take.

The trainers were right about qualification. The ammunition makers were right about the market. Every one of them was doing careful work. The barrel split anyway. The argument itself never ended. Walk into a shop today, say K-frame and Magnum in the same sentence, and one man will tell you those guns are fragile, while another tells you that’s internet folklore, and both of them will have seen things that support what they’re saying. Jordan died in 1997.

His book is still on the shelf, still in print, still being quoted. Baker died in December 2019, and his account of how the L-frame came to exist survives mainly because one writer kept notes from phone calls in the last months of his life. One man’s opinion outlived him in hard cover. The others nearly didn’t survive at all.

Picture a reissued Model 19 in a case somewhere tonight. Cylinder swung open under the lights, the underside of the barrel smooth and full. The missing steel finally put back. 63 years after a border patrolman asked for the gun and 40 after an engineer worked out why it was breaking. Two men are arguing about it across the counter.

One is quoting a book. One is quoting a dimension. Neither knows the other’s name, and neither of them has ever heard the engineers. If this one held you, a like genuinely helps. Subscribe if you want more of them and tell me down in the comments which one you’d carry, [music] the Kframe or the L. And be honest about