Quote Originally Posted by ccdjg View Post
Strangely Brian, I found the twist grip to be one of the nicest pistols to cock of any, from the point of view of convenience of muscle actkion, but not of power of course.

Unlike any other action, it does not involve any pulling or pushing and one quick turn of the wrist is all it takes. Using the more retangular profile grip shown in the patent, instead of the round profile in the above illustrated version, one can get a good purchase and one's grip does not have to be particularly strong. There were two main problems however, why this system would never have been commercially viable as it stood. Firstly, for anatomical reasons the rotation can only be about three quarter of a turn, which means that the piston can only be drawn back a relatively small amount, so limiting the design to low power. In practice it was not so bad though, and using a spring that did not place too many demands on wrist strength, it was possible to get a consistent 200 fps with 7.5 grain waisted pellets (pre-sized). The power situation could have been significantly improved by introducing a ratchet system, so that you could give it two or three twists to cock. The second drawback was the tedious loading system, using a breech scew. If an automatic repeat loading magazine could have been introduced, the result would have been an excellent quick fire plinking pistol.

Cheers
John
Hello John,
Thanks for explaining the idiosyncrasies of the twist grip cocking solution which would make sense if it had as you say been developed to include a ratchet mechanism to increase efficiency. One pistol I would love to own had it gone into production would be the Whiting pistol particularly for its close resemblance to the small Webley semi-auto pistols of the period. Even fitted with a long barrel, the muzzle velocity of that design must have been quite low making it quite low on power.

Brian