The .40 Story

Myth, Mystery — And Hard Work

One of the many quirks of history is the truth is often more complex and nuanced than the commonly-accepted version of events. If history is truly written by the victors, then there’s a strong possibility what you “know” as true may not be true at all — or only part of the full story.

Such thoughts readily come to mind when we consider the development of the .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge, which emerged from the womb as a runaway champion in an industry where overnight successes are rare. The meteoric rise of the .40 S&W in 1990 was a phenomena catching the shooting industry off guard. It was a fresh face threatening to instantly end the reign of the two most popular auto-pistol service cartridges in the world. It also left little time for charting genealogy in the rush to celebrate its arrival and press it into service. As a result, elements of the creation story were overlooked, and important contributions were ignored.

In an attempt to partially remedy this situation, we need to set our clocks back several decades, and return to the halcyon days predating the Internet, when readers patiently camped out by the mailbox to await the next issue of American Handgunner, and discover “the latest” in industry news and developments, even though the blush might have worn off a bit by the time it made it into print.

This test target shows the first three rounds of .40 B&S ever fired from a
rifled barrel. The testing took place at Smith & Wesson on Jun 26, 1978.

The first six rounds of .40 B&S were handloaded by Baker — half with 5.0 grains, and
half with 7.0 grains of Unique. The first five rounds were fired through the smoothbore
barrel on Apr 28, 1978, and Baker kept the sixth round in this envelope for posterity.

Baker recovered one of the five spent .40 caliber projectiles fired through the
smoothbore barrel during the first test on Apr 28, 1978, and kept it for the record.

That 70s Show

A good place to start would be somewhere around 1972, when an associate editor at Guns & Ammo Magazine by the name of Whit Collins scratched an itch which turned out to be the equivalent of throwing a pebble into a smooth pond.

As a “gun-guy,” Collins was inspired by the work of industry giant George C. Nonte, who had been playing with a wildcat cartridge of his own creation since 1965. Nonte’s experimental auto-pistol cartridge pushed a .41 caliber bullet out of a turned-down and shortened .41 Magnum case with a rebated rim, but he hadn’t taken the design very far.

Collins was intrigued by the idea, and decided to work on his own .40 caliber wildcat. Instead of using .41 Magnum cases, Collins settled on the idea of using .30 Remington rifle cases, modified to accept .38-40 revolver bullets.

Gunsmith John French was consulted to build the gun, but first helped Collins refine the design. The resulting collaboration, named the “.40 G&A” after the masthead Collins wrote for, pushed a 180 grain, true .40 caliber lead bullet at 1,110 fps out of the customized Browning Hi-Power French built for Collins.

A two-part article on the .40 G&A was published in 1972 in the magazine of the same name, but the project stalled out and Collins didn’t revive it until after he was approached by another industry giant, Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, who was determined to improve on the design and turn it into the cartridge we now know as the 10mm auto, circa 1983.

This series shows some of the stages in making a .40 B&S cartridge. The projectile
from a .38-40 cartridge is pulled and a .41 Magnum case is procured. The .41 Magnum
case is swaged down into a cylinder and cut to length. The case is sized and the rim is
machined to fit a 9mm breech face. Three loaded cartridges are seen at far right. All
machine work was completed by Norm Spencer, using Dick Baker’s drawings.

A loaded .40 B&S round top, with its pulled .38-40 bullet, and an empty case below.
A .41 Magnum case served as the parent for the experimental .40 B&S case.

Four dummy .40 B&S rounds were carefully crafted by S&W model maker Norm Spencer.

These .40 B&S dies were created by S&W model maker Norm Spencer from Dick Baker’s
drawings, and were used to load the experimental ammunition for their testing.

Lunchbox special

The pebble that Collins had thrown into the pool created ripples though, and they caught the attention of Richard “Dick” Baker, then Senior Product Engineer for Smith & Wesson. Like Nonte and Collins before him, Baker saw the undeniable attraction of a .40 caliber pistol cartridge and decided to try his hand at creating one.

Baker had begun his career as a draftsman in the Research & Development department at High Standard, in January of 1964. While there, he worked on the Model 10A shotgun and the highly-successful M106 and M107 .22 LR auto-pistols, which ruled the small bore pistol games. After a three year stint at High Standard, he went to Colt Industries, where, as a Design Engineer for six years, he worked on the Mk III revolver, Series 70 1911 and Single Action Army, among other projects. Another short stay at High Standard and Ruger followed, before he landed at Smith & Wesson, starting as a Senior Product Engineer (and eventually retiring as the Director of Product Engineering).

In that role, Baker had access to a highly talented pool of gun guys and the full run of the Smith & Wesson facility. As his idea for a .40 caliber auto-pistol cartridge began to mature, he turned to a talented model maker and friend by the name of Norm Spencer to help him out. As a model maker, Spencer was an expert machinist, capable of turning Baker’s ideas into metal chips and reality on the equipment in the Springfield shop.

Baker figured his .40 caliber idea would probably interest the brass at Smith & Wesson someday, but for now it was a personal project, not an official company assignment, so he and Spencer worked on it during their lunch breaks and on their own time, after work. Both men were gun-guys with creative minds, so they worked happily together on the wildcat, not exactly sure where it would lead them, but enjoying the process of discovery.

The headstamp on the .40 B&S case hinted at its .41 Magnum roots. This is what happens
when a .41 Magnum case rim is turned down to fit a 9mm breech face.

This is the original .40 caliber concept barrel from the B&S project. A S&W Model 59
barrel was re-bored to a .40 caliber smoothbore. This barrel fired the five rounds of .40
B&S ammunition in the first-ever test on Apr 28, 1978.

The “.40 CAL” marking on the barrel hood of the first, smoothbore test barrel.

This is the first rifled barrel for the .40 B&S. Its rifling was cut with an altered .41
Magnum rifling broach of Dick Baker’s design, made by S&W model maker Mitch Motyl.

Norm Spencer came up with the idea of marking the hood of the first rifled test
barrel with “.40 B&S” to stake Baker and Spencer’s claim on the project. Baker
approved, and their lunchtime special was rechristened the “.40 B&S.”

From Concept To Cartridge

At the time Baker first considered Collins’ project in Guns & Ammo, Smith & Wesson didn’t have a large-frame auto-pistol in its catalog. The company had experimented with a .45 ACP design in the 1960s, but it never went anywhere. The 39 and 59-series guns were designed around the 9mm Parabellum, and were the only auto-pistols with a Springfield address on the side.

Baker wondered if he could fit a .40 caliber cartridge in the Model 59. Some work at the drafting table convinced him he had enough room in the stock 9mm barrel to make it work, but of course he would have to design the cartridge with a 9mm case head to make it fit the Model 59 breech face and allow the stock extractor to do its work.

Baker envisioned a .40 caliber cartridge generating about 400 ft-lbs of energy, which would require him to push a 180 grain bullet somewhere around 1,000 fps. Soon, his wildcat started to take form on paper. The case would have an overall length of 0.844″ (+.000 / -.010) and an outer diameter of half that amount, at 0.422″. The case head would be rebated to 0.394″ (+.000 / -.010) with an extractor groove measuring 0.347″ (+.000 / -.020) to allow the 9mm Model 59 slide to serve as the test platform.

Creating this case would take Spencer’s talents. Starting with a .41 Magnum case, Spencer machined the rim off, then swaged it down into a cylinder of the proper diameter. The case was then cut to the proper length, and the rebated rim machined to the desired dimensions. Afterward, some material inside the cartridge was removed to make room for the components.

The resulting case head looked a little odd. The bottom half of the “.41 Magnum” headstamp had been machined off, leaving only a trace of the upper part of the letters intact. The experimental case retained the large primer pocket of the Magnum, which looked out of proportion to the rebated rim and gave the appearance of the case head being almost all primer. Spencer made 6 cases of this design for Baker, and also made up some steel dummy cartridges with the proper dimensions to facilitate testing.

Like Collins, Baker would use a pulled .38-40 caliber bullet as his chosen projectile. The 180 grain, .400″ diameter, jacketed soft point bullet would sit on top of a charge of Unique powder. Baker worked up two loads, one with 5 grains, another with 7 grains to launch it out of the test barrel. In order to hold the revolver bullet in place — which was used to being roll-crimped at the cannelure to secure it in its normal case — Baker glued it into the straight-walled experimental case with some red nail polish liberated from his wife’s collection.

Dick Baker used a S&W Model 59 barrel as the starting point for his experimental .40 auto.
The red markups indicate his changes to standard 59 dimensions to create the prototype barrel.

Launch Pad

With the cartridges complete, Spencer turned his attention to the barrel.

A Model 59 barrel was pulled from stock, and Spencer bored it to accept the .40 caliber projectile. On this first test barrel, the bore was left unrifled, as the men were more concerned about function and safety than they were accuracy. Rifling the barrel to engage the lead projectile would have increased pressure in the barrel and chamber, and would have made it more difficult to manufacture, so this first one would remain a smoothbore. The barrel was marked “40 CAL” on the top, but was otherwise left stock.

The barrel went into a Model 59 pistol also left in stock condition. No changes were made to the recoil springs or other components in the test bed pistol.

A closeup of the engineering changes required to create a .40 B&S barrel from a Model 59 barrel.
Note at top left Baker specified a .085R fillet radius on the barrel lug to increase the amount of
material and decrease the possibility of a chamber rupture. This was later changed to .090R in later drafts.

Lift Off

On the morning of April 28, 1978, Baker and Spencer mounted the unusual Model 59 pistol in a machine rest at Smith & Wesson’s test tunnel. They were joined by model maker and test technician Tommy Campbell, an avid competition shooter who would later become an IPSC pistol champion (earning the moniker, “Tommy Gun Campbell”), and captain the Smith & Wesson shooting team to many victories.

The first of the six loaded rounds was hand-fed into the chamber of the pistol, and the slide was sent into battery. Campbell took his position, and at 10:15 A.M., he shot the first .40 caliber bullet to ever be fired from a Smith & Wesson auto-pistol.

The bullet went safely downrange, earning smiles from the three men who were there to witness it. Baker immediately noted the ejection was violent, and the slide appeared too light for the power of the cartridge. But Campbell wasn’t deterred and asked to shoot the pistol himself, without the machine rest.

Baker was more than happy to let him be the first.

Campbell fired four more cartridges offhand, feeding them into the chamber manually, one at a time. At Spencer’s suggestion, Baker kept the final loaded cartridge as a souvenir to mark the event. The loaded cartridge was placed in a manila envelope, and the following day, Baker recorded the details of the test firing on the outside of the envelope, signing and dating it.

Baker also went downrange the following day to search for evidence of where the bullets had impacted. He had been so busy monitoring the gun as it fired, he hadn’t paid any attention to where the rounds landed. As he was looking around the former Springfield Armory test facility, he found one of the spent projectiles on the ground, and snickered when he saw it still had evidence of fingernail polish around its base. He pocketed the bullet and kept it alongside the loaded cartridge for posterity.

Baker called his project the “.40 S&W Auto” before model maker Norm Spencer
rechristened it the “.40 B&S” after making the first rifled barrel. All of Baker’s
drawings referred to the “.40 S&W Auto” long before the cartridge we know
as the .40 S&W was born.

Refining The Concept

After the success of the initial testing, Baker and Spencer were encouraged to expand their efforts.

Spencer made a set of dies to help manufacture cartridges for testing. The dies would simplify production of the ammunition and ensure greater consistency.
A more challenging task was to make a rifled barrel for the test gun. Baker completed a drawing to alter a .41 Magnum rifling broach to .40 caliber. It would be a complex machining job to modify an existing broach to these specifications, so Spencer approached his coworker, Mitch Motyl, for help. Motyl was Smith & Wesson’s top model maker — the “Michelangelo of Model Makers” — and he made the new broach just as Baker had designed it.

Spencer took the new broach to the foreman of the barrel shop at Smith & Wesson and convinced him to build a barrel with it. If the Production Manager had known the men were sneaking a custom job into the production line, he would have had a fit. But the job was quietly completed and the team soon had a .40 caliber rifled barrel for their Model 59.

Baker left this second barrel with Spencer, and when Spencer caught wind of some overly-curious Smith & Wesson employees lurking about in Baker’s absence, he figured it would be a good move to stake their claim on the project before others jumped it and made it their own. Taking the initiative, Spencer went into the shop and marked the hood of this second test barrel with the characters “40 B&S,” to make it clear that Baker and Spencer were the force behind the exciting wildcat. When Baker returned and discovered the change, he approved immediately!

Baker and Spencer modified a Model 59 magazine to allow them to feed the gun via normal operation. Baker found the lips of the magazine had to be opened up a bit to allow the slide to pick up the round from the magazine. The rebated rim on the .40 B&S didn’t allow the slide much to grab, but they made it work with some tinkering.

The additional testing confirmed Baker’s suspicion the 9mm slide was too light for the power of the cartridge. A strengthened recoil spring wouldn’t be enough to do the job. Additional slide and barrel mass was required to control the slide velocity and keep the gun from battering itself to death. Baker figured this out early, but it would take some of the first (and biggest) manufacturers of .40 S&W pistols a lot longer to put these pieces of the puzzle together in later years.

Still, the additional testing confirmed the project was viable, and allowed Baker to refine the dimensions of the cartridge and the guns firing it. Using drawings for the Model 59 as a template, Baker carefully noted the changes required to turn the 9mm barrel into a suitable .40 caliber component. He also blueprinted the .40 B&S cartridge, and took additional notes on the changes he would make to build a suitable .40 caliber case from the ground up. In Baker’s eyes, a suitable case would eliminate the rebated rim (using an increased rim dimension of .422″) and use a small pistol primer, to avoid the risk of an ejector or extractor striking the oversized primer and causing an out-of-battery detonation.

Dick Baker’s drawing for the chamber dimensions on the .40 B&S.

Selling The Idea

Baker had worked out the dimensions by May 9, 1978, and went to friend Herman Bockstruck at the Olin Corporation in East Alton, Illinois, to inquire if they could make the ammunition. Bockstruck looked at Spencer’s dies and Baker’s experimental cartridge, and told Baker yes, they could certainly make the ammunition under the Winchester marque if Smith & Wesson ordered it.

Armed with this assurance, the prototype gun and ammunition, and a series of successful tests, Baker pitched the idea to Smith & Wesson’s executives. Sadly, the Bangor Punta-era management team couldn’t recognize the significance of what they were looking at, and rejected it.

Today, knowledgeable enthusiasts remember the Bangor Punta era at Smith & Wesson as a dark time when accountants and bean counters nearly killed the brand and its reputation. Quality control took a dive in the wake of severe cost-cutting measures and misguided management initiatives that were dreamed up by executives who weren’t gun-guys. When a neglectful Bangor Punta finally bailed out, the damaged, but iconic, American company passed through the hands of several owners before a British conglomerate finally rescued it. They salvaged the tarnished operation and brought the quality back, but later signed an anti-gun pact with the Clinton administration that made the company an industry pariah and sent it into another tailspin.

So, the Bangor Punta crowd wasn’t known for its gun savvy, its keen leadership, or its stewardship of the Smith & Wesson brand. As one of the last gun-guys left in management, Baker knew a .40 caliber pistol would resonate with the shooting public, but the Marketing whiz kids said it wouldn’t sell, so the .40 B&S died on the spot.

Baker went back to working on the projects the bosses were paying him for, and finally retired from Smith & Wesson in 1986. After leaving Springfield, he did independent design work for companies like Fabrique Nationale, New High Standard Manufacturing, and Henry Repeating Arms, and did some work as an expert witness, but he never worked on the .40 B&S again.

Note Baker’s chamber drawing was labeled “.40 S&W Auto” before
Spencer proposed the “.40 B&S” moniker.

Moving On

The .40 caliber auto was too good of an idea to die though, and others continued to carry the torch.

After Cooper used his influence to launch the 10mm Auto in 1983, Whit Collins was motivated to go back and resume work on the .40 G&A which had inspired Cooper’s and Baker’s enthusiasm. Collins abandoned the .30 Remington case and instead used a shortened version of the 10mm Auto case as the basis for his new .40 caliber cartridge, the Centimeter. For a brief moment, it looked like the famed Pachmayr Gun Works would pick up and carry Collins’ banner, but things didn’t work out.

However, when master gunsmith Paul Liebenberg left Pachmayr to hang out his own shingle as Pistol Dynamics, he collaborated with Collins, barrel maker Irv Stone of Bar-Sto Precision fame, and Bud Watson of Watson Precision. Together, “Team Centimeter” optimized the cartridge and produced 1911-pattern guns chambered for it, keeping the .40 caliber flames alive.

At the urging of Tom Campbell, who was still working for Smith & Wesson and shooting on their championship team, Liebenberg’s “Team Centimeter” began work on putting the cartridge into a Smith & Wesson Model 5906. Campbell recognized a pistol shooting a .40 caliber round like the Centimeter would offer significant advantages in competition, allowing the gun to easily score Major, while improving on the magazine capacity of the .45 ACP. With Liebenberg’s team working on the gun and the cartridge, Campbell began to compete with the combination.

Campbell’s successful experience with the Centimeter 5906 encouraged him to formally push the idea at Smith & Wesson. His attempt nearly ended like Baker’s earlier experience, when the .40 B&S was rejected by managers at Smith & Wesson who couldn’t understand the potential of what they were being offered.

Fortunately, when the one door was shut, Campbell found another one that was still open, with the final result that Liebenberg joined Smith & Wesson and “Team Centimeter” led the reluctant company toward the creation of the .40 Smith & Wesson and a pistol to chamber it, the 4006.
But that’s another chapter in the story, which will have to wait for another time.

Dick Baker’s drawing for the .40 B&S case shows dimensions exceptionally close to
today’s .40 S&W. He was constrained by trying to fit the experimental case into a
9mm barrel. Had he started from scratch, some of his dimensions may have been
even closer to where we eventually wound up.

Parallel Developments

It’s amazing how closely the .40 B&S project mirrored the later effort of the .40 Smith & Wesson. Even though the two projects occurred independently of each other, the similarities between the two are remarkable.

The .40 B&S was a rebated rim cartridge, of course, but that was merely a limitation imposed by the test platform, and Baker’s drawings clearly show that he intended the final version to host a full rim and a small primer, like the .40 S&W. His original target of 400 ft-lbs of muzzle energy is a dead ringer for what the 180 grain .40 S&W delivers at 1,000 fps.

The SAAMI specifications for the .40 S&W are remarkably similar to the drawings Baker completed 12 years prior, in 1978. Baker’s prototype cartridge called for a case length of 0.844″ compared to 0.850″ for the .40 S&W, and a 0.422″ body and rim compared to 0.424″ for the .40 S&W.

The S&W 4006 — the first gun chambered and produced in .40 S&W — was nothing more than a modern embodiment of the gun Baker suggested in 1978, namely an improved 59-series gun with a heavier slide.

It seems if Baker had been given the green light in 1978, there’s little doubt the final product of his efforts would have been virtually identical to what we know as the .40 S&W today. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and it took much longer to get a .40 caliber cartridge and pistol out of Springfield.

Again, Baker’s drawings, including this case drawing, were for the “.40 S&W Auto.”
The .40 B&S label came later in the experiment.

Updating The Record

Baker and his partner don’t get much of a mention in the popularly-accepted history of .40 caliber cartridge development, but it was their work that led to the first .40 caliber Smith & Wesson autopistol and cartridge. The .40 S&W cartridge, and the 4006 introducing it in 1990, both bear an exceptional resemblance to the test articles Baker commissioned and helped to manufacture from his drawings in 1978. They are even more similar to the improved products Baker unsuccessfully pitched to a clueless Bangor Punta management team who didn’t recognize an opportunity when they saw one.

Baker was not a member of the team that developed the .40 S&W and the Model 4006 to fire it, but in an indirect way, his fingerprints are still on it. In an ironic twist of fate, it appears the first runs of 4006 barrels were actually made using the modified .41 Magnum broach Baker had designed and Motyl had crafted for the .40 B&S. Spencer reports the old broach was dusted off and put into service to cut the very first production .40 S&W barrels since the company lacked a suitable broach for the job. The .40 S&W bullets fired from the first run of Smith & Wesson autoloaders were all sent on their way with a spin generated by the guiding hand of the .40 B&S.

Recognition Due?

In 2002, Smith & Wesson celebrated its 150th anniversary and published a special collector’s edition of Smith & Wesson Handguns. In recognition of his contributions to the company’s history and product line, Baker was presented with a copy of the magazine which had been autographed by S&W notables, including the current president of the company and several of Baker’s former coworkers. Smith & Wesson historian Roy Jinks was among those who endorsed the magazine, as well.

Jinks was one of a shrinking pool of old heads by then, but he remembered Baker and Spencer’s work on the first .40 caliber project, and in his autograph he paid tribute “To Dick Baker, .40 CAL.” Jinks knew that while the .40 S&W project had garnered the attention and fame, Baker and Spencer had been hot on the same trail years earlier. If things had gone slightly differently in a conference room back in 1978, the history of Smith & Wesson’s first .40 caliber pistol would have been radically different.

And that’s no B.S.

The author would like to thank Richard “Dick” Baker, Norm Spencer, Tommy Campbell and Paul Liebenberg for their contributions to firearm and ammunition development and for their assistance with this article.

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