The 1892 revolver from Lamure and Girdol

When the French army received its new service revolvers at the end of 1892, civilian manufacturers were seriously hit. Indeed, the civilian versions of the 1887 model revolver that they had been broadcasting for two years were suddenly outdated.

The new revolver produced at the “Manufacture nationale d’Armes de Saint-Étienne” (MAS) retained the 8 mm caliber of the test weapons, but the model had changed a lot.

The technical changes made to the production model mainly affected the cylinder opening system, which now swung out for loading and unloading operations. The independent firing pin, mounted in series on the frames of the tested 1887 and some 1892 with the “pump” cylinder locking system (TN: in french “à pompe”), was definitively abandoned in favor of an oscillating firing pin mounted on the hammer. The pump of the pre-service models was also abandoned, replaced by a side gate, which is in fact only a big lock holding the cylinder within the frame. Open, it acts as safety, blocking the hammer out of reach of the cartridge head and authorizes the swinging of a cylinder out of its housing, a cylinder that swings out to the right, contrary to the service weapons of this time. The weapon is splendid and civilian manufacturers stopped the production of the commercial versions of the 1887 model to switch to that of the civilian production of the 1892 model.