Gun Digest's Speed Reloading the Revolver Concealed Carry eShort by Grant Cunningham

Author:Grant Cunningham [Cunningham, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4402-3397-5
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Moonclips

Moonclips were originally conceived to be able to shoot non-rimmed .45 ACP ammunition in the M1917 service revolver. During World War I the War Department ran short of their then-new sidearm, the M1911, and needed pistols in a hurry to equip their troops. The interim solution was to chamber a large-framed revolver to take the standard service cartridge, the .45ACP, which had been adopted with the M1911. The cartridge, being designed for the stacked magazine of any autoloader, lacked the rim that revolvers use to headspace and eject.

The solution was to take a thin piece of steel in the shape of the letter C, sized to fit over three chambers of the six-round cylinder, with round notches around the inner edge. The groove in the .45ACP cartridge would snap into these notches and be securely held. The metal was in effect a temporary rim that would hold the cartridge in the proper place and provide a surface on which the ejector could operate to clear fired brass.

The result was a compact package of three rounds, which would be combined with another clip of three to fully load the revolver. Since they looked a bit like a crescent moon, they were quickly dubbed ‘moonclips.’ After the end of the war, many of those revolvers – made by both Colt and Smith & Wesson, and both referred to as the “Model 1917” – were sold on the surplus market.

It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that two moonclips could be combined into one circular clip to make reloading twice as easy. The original clips came to be called half moons, with the circular types being called full moonclips. Over time the ‘full’ was dropped, and today the term moonclip is generally assumed to refer to the circular type.

The .45ACP was not the only rimless cartridge to be so adapted to use in a revolver. The 9mm cartridge has been chambered in several models from Ruger and S&W, and there is a S&W revolver that chambers the powerful 10mm Auto cartridge. The moonclip has even been adapted to hold traditional revolver rounds, and today S&W makes several models that hold eight rounds of .38/.357 in moonclips.

The moonclip gives the revolver some of the advantages of a magazine-fed autopistol, in that there is only one thing to do on a reload: eject the empty clip and insert a full one. An ejected moonclip carries the empty casings with it, so the entire package is ejected at once. Since they all go out at once, there is no chance for an errant case to be caught under the extractor and cause a jam. The extra step of releasing rounds from a speedloader and tossing the loader away is eliminated as well, making a moonclip-equipped revolver the fastest wheelgun to reload.

Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch, and moonclips have a significant downside: they’re fragile. A slight bend in a moonclip renders it unusable, because it causes the case heads to bind the cylinder rotation.

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