#M1895Nagant

Welcome back to  Wheelgun Wednesday, our weekly article series where we cover everything related to revolvers. Today’s topic is the technical challenge of effective sound suppression of revolvers. While we all know that the cylinder gap prevents proper suppression, we will look at different workarounds, developed by designers across the world. There’s no universally accepted categorization of solutions to this problem, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll arbitrarily divide the approaches into three groups:

For some of the Wheelgun Wednesday loyalists in the TFB audience, you might remember when we began detailing the journey of acquiring an M1895 Nagant revolver (some 2 years ago), and the process of getting it threaded and finding a silencer for it. That long story comes to a close today because the silencer I chose to mate to my personal M1895 Nagant revolver was the Dead Air Odessa 9mm silencer, and it is finally out of NFA Jail and came home where it belongs.

For those of us who love a good wheelgun, especially the old ones (I am talking about the really old dogs out there around 100 years old) one element about those revolvers you likely wish was better or more 21st century are the triggers. Most have horrendously heavy double-action trigger pulls, and although the travel is shorter in single-action, even the single-action pull is heavy. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the leaps and bounds in technology, revolver design, and the firearm market’s vigor for improved triggers that we have today that did not exist back then. If you happen to own an M1895 Nagant (3 TFB Staff Writers now own one – we’re bringing them back and making them cool again), there is an incredibly easy hack or trick you can do to improve the trigger. The M1895 Nagant trigger job we are going to show you today was suggested to me by Mike Stannard, Manufacturing and Export Manager of Tornado Technologies, after I received my revolver back from being threaded for a silencer.

On this week’s Wheelgun Wednesday, we revisit the M1895 Nagant as it has returned from its trip to Tornado Technologies to have the barrel threaded. It was roughly 5 months ago that I sent in my revolver to be threaded for a little suppressed fun in the future. While that seems like a long time for a barrel to get threaded, we will look at what contributed to that and see what is next in the saga surrounding the purchase of an old Nagant and getting it to the point of a fully suppressed wheelgun. Let’s dive in!