| Bill Ruger: A Man on a Mission - Page Four | |
Page Four
ST: The Bearcat.
WBR: Always admired Remington’s percussion revolvers. They felt better to me than the Colts. The Bearcat was obviously developed after the Remington design. It was a smaller version than the Remington Army. More like the Police revolver. We used some radical ideas, having an aluminum frame for example, to produce it more efficiently.
ST: The No. 1.
WBR:
It began as our effort to design the ultimate single-shot rifle. That required
a lot of redesigning. There was a battle in the drafting room. Draftsmen hate
to do the same things over, but it’s what you have to accept if you want
to get things done right. If a gun is not as good as it should be, change it,
do it over. It can be a very laborious job...and our (Sturm, Ruger’s) standards
make it tougher too.
ST: The Red Label.
WBR: Well, it was a considerable achievement, not only for me, but for the whole group here. There was considerable group input on that. We worked for a long time on it, and there were a great many distinctions built into that mechanism, so that we could feel like we had really developed an outstanding shotgun by the methods used. We used high temperature silver solder for the rib and monobloc, which is so much stronger than soft solder. Every other shotgun I know of made throughout the world was put together with soft solder, but not ours. The ribs, spacers, monobloc, all silver soldered together, and the metallurgy of the tubes themselves, all that combines to make those barrels super-strong, and then on top of that, the mechanism itself is loaded with features that are valuable to everybody, from the shooter’s point of view. The safety is far beyond the average shotgun. You can’t fire the gun if it doesn’t lock, and features that just really don’t occur all together in any one gun because other guns will have one or the other, in many cases, but we’ve got ’em all, and then the strength of the gun generally; a really ideal lockup system is there. The gun was built around that concept. It’s got the best lockup of any over/under gun in the world. There are two lugs that project from the rear of the barrel, the barrel faces, between the barrel on either side, and engaged by this double-bit bolt, a little one piece that is integral; the bolt engages the barrel in those two places; the position to take the stress is perfect, and the stresses are very light, but beautifully met by that geometry, and then, in addition to that, we have that third lug on the bottom.
ST: The Super Blackhawk.
WBR: I think that’s when we incorporated all the experience we had on previous single-action revolvers and tried to make it the best single-action .44 Magnum of its day.
ST: The Redhawk.
WBR: The Redhawk initially had a novel mainspring setup that we could reduce DA trigger pull weight. It worked beautifully, as did its novel super-strong crane locking system.
ST: The Old Army.
WBR:
That’s a revolver I really like, the finest percussion revolver ever made,
and we’ll never discontinue that revolver—not if I can help it.
ST: The Security-Six.
WBR: Well, that was our first double-action revolver. It’s given great service, but my recollections of it are of the difficulty we had in learning how to make the inherently more intricate double-action revolvers. I don’t think we made a penny out of any Security-Six, but many shooters still like them.
Page One - Intro,
Birth of the Company, First Steps
Page Two - Thoughts
on Colt & Browning, Competitors
Page Three -
Why
Buy Ruger, 50 Years, Failed Designs, Single-Six, Flattop
Page Four - Bearcat,
No. 1, Red Label, Super Blackhawk, Redhawk, Old Army, Security-Six
Page Five - .44
Deerstalker, GP100, SP101, Super Redhawk, Mini-14, 77, 77 MK II, 77/22
Page Six - 10/22,
Model 96, P-Series, Looking Ahead
This article was originally published in Shooting Times magazine in March, 1999.
