Smith & Wesson Model 52

Welcome back to Firearm Friday! This week we’ve pulled something from the museum cabinet that proves you don’t need a huge calibre, enormous magazine or a pile of fancy accessories to make an interesting pistol. Sometimes all you need is a beautifully made old Smith & Wesson, five rounds of .38 Special and a target that’s about to have a very tidy hole punched through it.

The Model 52 is one of those firearms that makes considerably more sense once you understand exactly what it was built to do. Introduced in 1961, the Model 52 was a highly specialised American target pistol developed specifically for precision bullseye competition. Rather than being designed as a military, police or general-purpose handgun, virtually everything about the Model 52 was focused on one thing: accuracy. Smith & Wesson itself describes the Model 52 as the most accurate target pistol of its day and notes its innovative ball-bushing barrel arrangement.

The story actually began with the Smith & Wesson Model 39, the company's 9mm semi-automatic pistol. In 1960, the U.S. Army Marksmanship Training Unit requested that Smith & Wesson develop a pistol along similar lines that could fire the experimental rimless .38 AMU cartridge. That work eventually evolved into the Model 52, adapted to use the conventional rimmed .38 Special Midrange Target cartridge.

And this is where the Model 52 gets particularly interesting. The pistol wasn't designed to digest ordinary .38 Special ammunition. It was intended for flush-seated .38 Special wadcutter ammunition, typically associated with precision target shooting. A wadcutter has a flat-fronted projectile designed to cut a clean, easily scored hole through a paper target. Making a semi-automatic pistol reliably feed these short, flat-fronted cartridges with the added complication of the .38 Special's protruding rim was quite an engineering achievement. The resulting magazine held just five rounds.

Externally, the Model 52 retained some of the handsome lines and grip shape of the Model 39, but underneath it was very much a dedicated competition firearm. It used a steel frame, a 5-inch barrel, adjustable target sights and carefully fitted components. At around 40 ounces, or roughly 1.13 kilograms, it was a substantial pistol by modern standards, but that weight was quite at home on the target range.

For competitors shooting the traditional American three-gun bullseye format, the Model 52 became a natural choice for the centre-fire portion of competition.

Production finally ended in 1993. By then, the specialised machinery used to manufacture the Model 52 was ageing and becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Rather than invest in replacing the tooling for what had become a relatively specialised pistol, Smith & Wesson brought production to an end.

Today, the Model 52 is an interesting reminder of an era when manufacturers were willing to build remarkably specialised firearms for a particular branch of competitive shooting. It's elegant, mechanically unusual and unapologetically purpose-built. In a world where most semi-automatic pistols are expected to do a little bit of everything, the Model 52 was quite happy doing one job extremely well.

And that's our Firearm Friday museum piece for this week. The Model 52 might look like an ordinary old Smith & Wesson at first glance, but as usual, the interesting part starts when you look a little closer. If you're passing through Owen Guns, come in, have a wander through the museum and see what else is hiding in the cabinets. There’s usually a story behind just about everything in there and we’re always happy to share a few of them.

Until next Friday, have a great weekend from all of us at Owen Guns and remember, the old ones don't have to be loud to be interesting!.