The First New Revolver In 50 Years

HIGH STANDARD'S NEW SENTINEL WITH CLASSICAL STYLING AND UNIQUE ENGINEERING TRICKS IS THE CREATION OF YOUTHFUL DESIGNER HARRY SEFRIED

By William B. Edwards

They Talk about John Browning as having been the foremost designer of guns in the modern era, but there is a young man working in New Haven now who may equal and even surpass the accomplishments of the great J.M.B. His name is Harry Sefried, and he works for the High Standard Manufacturing Company in charge of handgun designing. The latest of his important developments, turned out in a space of six months from front office requisition to final approval of the model, is a .22 nine-shot “tackle box” revolver called “The Sentinel.”

It is the first revolver to be made by High Standard, known since 1930 for automatic pistols, and the first really new, different revolver on the American scene in 50 years! I got a sample, No. 46, and immediately realized that this is no “ordinary” post-war gun. It is classical in styling, but the engineering tricks in the design of its guts are really different. The Sentinel with a price tag of $34.95 is no doubt destined to be the hottest thin”e in the market this year. Advance orders for the new gun equalled the total v of the first year’s planned production only a month after High Standard took the wraps off it!

Shooting the Sentinel is a revelation of just how good one can actually shoot. Of importance in double action firing is the “hang” or “point” of the gun and its qualities of being a natural prolongation of the shooter’s arm. The Sentinel grip accomplishes these desirable things: the grip is even more important for accuracy than the barrel length,. a nd the shorter 3″ barrel even seems to enhance the shooter’s skill by reducing the amount of apparent tremor in the sights. Firing double action at the 20 yard Standard American target, I put all nine shots on the paper in a regular spread about 4″ diameter.

The moulded thumb rests, integral with the frame, make the Sentinel absolutely the finest of any factory revolver grip available. Other people who have handled this gun “cold” really get enthusiastic about the grip. It’s natural. The finger behind the guard really supports the gun, without a filler or “grip adaptor.” Sefried owes that to Sam Colt. from whom he has really learned a lot. Harry made some changes to make it a grip for double action as well as single action shooting, but that Civil War “pocket Colt” really makes the back end of the gun a success.

Sefried makes no bones about acknowledging his debt to great gun makers of the past. He has a tremendous knowledge of every firearm ever made: he still keeps up gun trading and dealing, and latches onto every odd or different gun he can find, to study it from the bottom up. “I liked the big Mauser pistol, made without any screws, no screwed-on side plate, or crane lock, so I tried to make the Sentinel like it,” Harry admits. He did and there is only one screw in all Sentinel’s works. That one holds the separate plastic grip onto the guard frame.

But Harry can be plenty original when he has to or there is something to gain. “That drilled-hole ratchet on the Sentinel is mine … that’s going to be the basis for a nice little patent,” he says.

The virtually fool-proof “ratchet” consists of nine holes drilled into the back of the extractor. Ordinary ratchets are little bumps of metal easily jammed if the is loosely fitted, and burrs may actually make the cylinder rotating affair inoperative on other, 22’s with as many as 9
shots in the cylinder. Not so on the Sentinel. The rotating hand or pawl works inside a little hole, but is otherwise similar to ordinary guns. However, it cannot jam or burr anything. Added is the advantage of having the ratchet built inside the cylinder. The cartridges can be entirely enclosed by the cylinder, and backed up by the solid frame, without the need for expensive machine cuts in the frame to take an ordinary ratchet.

The size of the Sentinel leaves little doubt that eventually High Standard will have a complete line of rim and centerfire revolvers, and the recessed head cylinder which Sefried’s ratchet makes possible will permit safe use of high powered shells, in perhaps 9mm or .38 Special, and with a stronger frame, in .357 Magnum.

The designer of the new Sentinel is young to have such unusual responsibility … he’s only 33. But there again is the parallel with Browning’s career-youthfulness. Browning was in his early thirties when he really got going with the old Winchester Single Shot rifle. That brings up another parallel: Sefried worked at Winchester before going to High Standard.

He associated with some of the best men in the business. Marsh Williams, whose inventions have been produced by every major gun company and have achieved the distinction of having been infringed abroad, sort of guided Harry during his five years at Winchester. Harry piled up a record that was really a surprise when he was told about it. He had the highest “score” on patents during those five years, averaging one significant patent every six months. He worked out an autoloading .22 rifle and the latest “C” Model 52 trigger, that the Big Red W boys feel pretty happy about. When Harry came to work at Winchester at the end of the war, he already had something of a gun designing background.

Since the age of 6, when he got his first rifle, he’s been interested in guns. In East St. Louis High School, where he grew up, he used to fix the rifles of the other school kids. Sometimes the police were not exactly happy, and took the rifles and pistols away from the boys, because they used them for cracking telephone insulators or shooting cats. But other times Harry was on good terms with the boys in blue, and he even recovered some of the guns, which he promptly resold to other schoolmates.

The Air Corps took him in 1942. While there, he found himself in shooter’s seventh heaven: they made him gunnery instructor, and told him about the cartridge company up in East Alton, Illinois. “Now those folks are making a billion rounds of shotshells a month, and we ,just want you to burn them up teaching beginning gunners how to knock out Zeros!”

Harry unfortunately picked up a spinal injury which sometimes troubles him. and the Air Force invalided him out in 1944. He went up to East Alton to get a job, for back in the days just out of high school, he had worked as a machine operator in a shell-making plant in St. Louis. Winchester’s chief of research Edwin Pugsley saw him, and was pretty impressed, told him to go right up to New Haven and go to work. He stayed at Winchester, and learned how the slipstick crowd works.

Five years of night school engineering courses at Yale really put on the polish. He never tried for a degree … what Sefried wanted and what he got were courses that would help him be a better gun designer. If Yale wanted to give a degree in firearms engineering, they could take the courses Harry selected and have a curriculum all picked out.

When he realized that he could not get into pistol making with Winchester, Harry was faced with a problem. He solved it simply by resigning. On April 1, 1951, he went to work with High Standard.

Here was a company started in 1928 by one of the best brains in the gun business, C. G. Swebelius. “Gus” began with a couple of friends and three employees making deephole gunbarrel drills, over in a garage on East Street. But there was something he apparently never forgot, his years with Marlin-Rockwell during World War I when he designed the Marlin aircraft machine gun. He liked things that go “bang.” When the chance came to pick up a Hartford pistol business, he bought it. The Hartford Arms and Equipment Company, making a “Woodsman” type auto pistol, was making a big bang in bankruptcy court, and Gus bought it cheap.

The great depression was no time to go into business, but deep hole drills paid the freight, and quality work in the medium-priced field sold guns. The “B” and “C” Hi-Standards sold for $15 to $18 before the war. In 1939, things picked up. Orders for gun barrels from Britain poured in, and barrels rolled out in an increasing production flow. High Standard Browning Heavy Fifties, wing mounted in “Hurricanes,” to spread a blanket of fire over England and helped win the Battle of Britain. Production of Enfield M1917, Springfield 1903, .30 and .50-caliber BMG barrels was material aid to the U. S. forces fighting from pole to pole.

After the war ended, the High Standard HD-Military .22 training pistol was sold commercially in tremendous numbers. Serial numbers on actual guns indicated a production approaching 100,000 pistols per year. Meanwhile, other models were prepared. The “G” series, with removable barrels and quick take down, has proved to be unusually successful in 22, although the experimental Special .38 “G” and the commercial G-380
flopped.

When Harry walked into High Standard in 1950, the company was trying to compete with a more deadly foe than any to be found among the other gun makers. That enemy was inflation. Harry’s job was to design guns which could beat the high cost of living. His first real challenge was a .22 plinking pistol which eventually was called the “Dura-Matic.”

It was a design bought from outside the company, and he had to work it over until High Standard could manufacture the gun and make money selling competitively. When the Dura-Matic was announced last year at only$37.50, Harry’s success was obvious.Nicely balanced, made predominantly of forged and machined parts giving a “$50 pistol” look, the Dura-Matic has been a good seller. It hangs in the hand like a target gun, and its grouping ability will tax the experts: if you can hold them, it will do the job.

The front office tossed the idea of a revolver at Harry less than a year ago. It had to be nine shots, maybe capable of being loaded with .22 shot shells and used for blasting snakes at ten feet. Other than that, and a “low price” limit, he had carte blanche. From the first mark on paper, to the completion of the model gun ready for approval, took him three months! Into that incredibly short space of time he jammed a thousand other duties as well, since he is now chief of pistol development. It took added time before the design was finally given the green
light, and more time for tools to be made by an outside contractor.

Die casting seemed to Harry a good way to make a precision part with a minimum of fuss and machining. Dies cost a fabulous amount. but in production, costs on each part can be reduced to little more than the value of the raw material. Thus the frame t arts of the Sentinel are of precision-cast aluminum, anodized to a pleasing dull-gray matte finish. For a “service” gun, to be tossed into the fishing kit or dropped
in the mud accidentally, rustless aluminum has plenty on its side as a gun material. About the only parts likely to get rusty on Harry’s latest wonder are the easily-cleaned barrel and cylinder. It is light in weight, too, only 21 ounces for a man-sized gun.

The first ten Sentinel revolvers run through the tools to check dimensions will one day be collector’s items. They were supposed to be “experimental,” but someone decided to give them serial numbers. The numbering machine was set up to put serials on their auto pistols … so the very first Sentinel revolvers have numbers in the 350,000 series. Harry is a gun collector, too, and he yelped when he saw those. The
next Sentinel bore the number “1” and they are being numbered all the way up in their own series.

Handguns have always fascinated Harry. One or two features of the Borchardt experimental revolver of 70 years ago have turned up in the Sentinel! Sam Colt’s little pistols always took his fancy, too. For a long time the only gun that really “fitted” him was the New Model 36 Pocket Pistol … a gun first made in 1862! “I designed the Sentinel grip from the old Colt shape … just made a few changes,” he admits. It really shocked me when he said that, for only the evening before, I had, shown the new Sentinel to a fellow gun-crank who remarked: “That’s the first decent grip on a revolver since the Civil War.”

Being a Rube Goldberg has never appealed to Sefried. If it’s good, and not patented, and accomplishes the job, he will take it. Harry says, “The cylinder lock on the Sentinel, it gets away from having a lot of machinery on the back end of the deal. Just pull the pin forward a little, and the cylinder swings out to the left just like any other — that is straight off of that Borchardt revolver. Guess I must have studied those revolvers closer than anybody else at Winchester.”

Now that I’ve shot the Sentinel I know that in terms of accuracy that gun will do anything demanded of it. But what Harry told me in confidence really floored me.

He has a Potter machine rest available to hold his test guns. I can’t say how small the groups were that he was consistently getting: he asked me not to reveal this information. This sounded strange, and I asked why: “No accuracy standards have yet been set up,” he said. “I can shoot that gun into an inch and a quarter at 75 feet, using a hand rest, but I don’t want figures loose on machine rest groups, not yet. If some writer says that test guns shot, say, into a space one half the broadside of a barn, some guy with a gun that only shoots into the space the size of the whole side of the barn will squawk. That gun will shoot groups plenty tight enough at 50 yards in a machine rest.”

Maybe I’d better leave accuracy at that, and wait till some fellow shows up on the firing line with a Sentinel on which he has put a Micro sight, and watch the scores.

Harry has pulled a neat trick by making a real bullet lead at the back end of the barrel. This is the place where the bullet jumps in from the chamber, and in .22’s especially a lot of lead shaving occurs. Shaved bullets means unbalanced bullets and poor accuracy. But Harry, after fooling around with the tiny bullet lead cones in other guns, has put a hog waller at the end of his barrel that ought to catch a .30 caliber if necessary! It measures about .W in diameter and tapers to .22 bore diameter in a quarter of an inch. After firing, the Sentinel cylinder front shows remarkably little lead splash, unlike many revolvers costing more than twice as much.

Disassembling the Sentinel is something Harry does not recommend: there are some springs inside which usually make their appearance in the palm of your hand after that first sudden jump which happens when the hammer pin is pushed out. Worst offender is the hand spring, a small torsion spring sometimes called a “grasshopper” spring. This, if not found in your hand, may have been what caused that little noise in
the far corner of the room the instant after you pushed out the hammer pin. Present production Sentinels have this spring really nailed down, and it will not accidentally get lost.

The various parts in the Sentinel are simply designed and obvious in function. The hammer rebound safety bar works much like that in Colt and Smith & Wesson guns. But the entire absence of leaf springs, using instead long-lived, practically indestructible wire coil springs, insures great durability. One thing necessary to reassemble the Sentinel is a small work pin to hold the hammer in the guard assembly. This pin must stick out far enough to serve as a temporary holder for the hand spring, but still permit the guard assembly to be put into the frame. Then driving the hammer pin through quickly secures the entire assembly. These extra pins may soon be supplied with each gun, taped inside the handle in a small cavity.

Be sure that the little trigger return spring plug bears against its notch cut on the frame shoulder inside, and that the large plunger, which fits into a hole on the front edge of the guard assembly, is in place with its spring. This plunger positions the guard into the frame at the front, and also serves to lock the cylinder crane in place.

Throughout the gun, where one part can do the work of two-or three if possible — is so designed. Harry must have had a capital stock holder standing over him, at his drawing board, whipping him on with dividend certificates. The whole gun shows brilliant designing, cutting costs, combining functions of parts, producing a revolver of target accuracy and all-around use that is at once functional, attractive, and cheap. For my money, an American-built, solid frame, swing out ejector revolver of good quality for 35 bucks is like a dream come true.

This article was reproduced from GUNS Magazine June 1955.

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