Beautiful???? You're kidding ..... right?
That particular revolver is a .476 Enfield, the official British military service revolver from 1879 to 1887 - following the .450 Adams and preceding the .455 Webley. (As I indicated above, despite the nomenclature, both the Adams and Enfield cartridges use .455/.456 bullets, just like the Webley ...)
There were two Enfield models, the Mark I and Mark II (mine is the latter) designed and produced by the Royal Manufactory, Enfield Lock, when the War Department wanted a "self extracting" cartridge revolver to replace the solid-frame Adams, which had to be loaded and unloaded through a loading gate, one round at a time, like a Colt Model 1873 .....
The end result was a rather awkward and inconvenient system, to say the least. The odd protrusion of the lower front frame is shaped like that because of the extraction system they came up with .... in which the extractor star remains at the back of the cylinder axis pin, near the recoil shield when the revolver is broken open, while the entire cylinder is drawn forward .....
The idea apparently was that the distinctively long-nosed bullets of unfired cartridges would remain in the chambers, so that only empty cases would drop free, while unfired rounds would be re-chambered when the revolver was closed up again .... a good thing in theory, because the design still required cartridges to be chambered one at a time through a loading gate, so it would be great to be able to take advantage of any convenient lull in the action to "top up"!
In practice, however, the rims of any such unfired cartridges are prone to slip clear of the extractor star and weight of the bullets will then cause them to drop back into the chamber. Now you've got a real problem, because the rims of any such cartridges are now
ahead of the extractor star .... preventing the revolver from being closed fully .... yet such loaded cartridges are too long to be easily cleared ..... not a very desirable situation when you really need to reload!
This impractical design proved to be extremely unpopular, and steps were soon taken to replace it with something better - which happened with acceptance of the Mark I Webley in 1887. In the meantime, however, the Enfield was adopted in 1883 as the official sidearm of the North West Mounted Police, who kept it in service until 1904, when the Colt New Service revolver was chosen to replace it.
My revolver is an 1884-dated Mark II, and was NWMP issue ....
The cylinder is one-piece, and is machined that way to reduce weight - as it is, the unloaded revolver weighs over 2 1/2 pounds!
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