DARDICK
D ANUVIA / Hungary The Danuvia Company
weapon performed of Budapest
was set up
in the early 1930s to manufacture military weapons, and employed Paul Kiraly (qv) as their principal designer. Their activities appear to have been largely confined to contract manufacture of other people’s inventions, but in 1938 they developed a submachine gun to Kiraly’s design. This was a delayed blowback weapon using a two-piece bolt; the front sec-
tion of the bolt carried a lever
the bolt the
arm which, when
was closed, was engaged
gun body.
On firing,
in a recess in
the rearward thrust of
the cartridge case forced the bolt
head back but
had to overcome the mechanical disadvantage of this lever as it was revolved against the mass of the heavier bolt body, and this gave sufficient delay to allow the bullet to leave the
The gun was stocked like a rifle, fired Mauser Export cartridge, and had a magazine. It was also provided with a
barrel.
the
9mm
fixed
complexias a ‘watchmaker’s
rate-of-fire controller of surpassing
described by one dream’. ty,
In
critic
May 1939 this weapon was offered
to the
Army, the Birmingham Small Arms company having acquired a license to manuBritish
produce gun for not more than £5 provided they left
facture; they claimed that they could
the
out the rate-reducing device, but although the
well
on trials, no action was
taken by the authorities and the project got no further.
Kiraly modified his design in accordance with criticisms voiced in England, removing the rate reducer and also arranging the magazine so that it could be folded forward into a slot in the stock, and it was accepted for
by the Hungarian Army as their M39. Some 8000 were made, and in 1943 the design was changed to incorporate a folding metal butt, upon which change the designation became the M43. This is believed to have remained in production until 1945. Danuvia were also responsible for the Gebauer machine gun, designed by the scientist of that name (qv) and Kiraly. It was extremely complicated, fired at an astronomical rate and was totally unreliable. During the war the company were active on service
German Army from
contracts, but they vanished
sight in 1945.
DARDICK USA /
The Dardick
pistol represented the first major innovation in pistol design since the advent of the automatic pistol; unfortunately, it failed to survive on the commercial market. Mr. David Dardick conceived the idea in 1949, and spent
some years perfecting his ‘open chamber’ gun before putting it on the market in 1954. The weapon is in the form of a revolver but instead of the conventional cylinder there is a ‘star wheel’ with three triangular cut-outs in place of chambers. The magazine is in the pistol butt, and spring power forced the top round from the magazine into one of the star wheel cut-outs. Pressure on the trigger revolved the star wheel through 120° to align the cartridge with the pistol barrel and then dropped the hammer to fire it in the usual manner. The novelty of this design lay in the fact that the was not contained in a conventional chamber but in an ‘open chamber’, two sides of which were formed by the cut-out in the star wheel and the third side by the top strap of the revolver frame. The next pull on the trigger revolved the star wheel again, bringing up the next cartridge from the magazine and also carrying the spent case around and ejecting it through a port on the right side of the pistol. Due to the triangular shape of the cut-out, and also due to the open chamber construction, the cartridge case had to be triangular and had to be capable of withstanding much more pressure than normal. These ends were achieved in the first models by forming the cases of extruded triangular aluminium section, but later cartridges were made of polycarbonate plastic. cartridge
The Hungarian M39 submachine gun, chambered for the 9mm Mauser cartridge, and one of the more successful designs to come from the Danuvia company.
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