Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you’ve likely encountered the scene: Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones is confronted with a black-robed villain wielding a comically large sword in a crowded Cairo marketplace. After witnessing the opponent skillfully swing his blade about, an exhausted Jones draws his sidearm and simply shoots the would-be swordfighter. Lore has it that the idea to swap what was scripted as a drawn-out whip-vs-blade melee for a quick-draw single shot came from Ford, who was suffering from a case of dysentery and didn’t feel up for multiple days of fight choreography.
Caleb Daniels, firearms enthusiast and author of Licensed Troubleshooter: The Guns of James Bond (a Maxim article on that is forthcoming), figured that if it’s good enough for an ailing Indy to rely on in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s good enough for him to carry in his native Kansas City.
As Daniels notes on his Substack, the gun is a modified, World War I-era Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector 2nd Model—so named as the second version of a revolver that implements the now-ubiquitous swing-out cylinder. Instead of a break-action system in which spent cases are pushed out of the cylinder when the barrel is unlatched and pivoted on a hinge downward, the cylinder swings out to the left of the frame and the operator uses an ejection rod to push them out manually.
The Hand Ejector 2nd Model Jones wielded by cinema’s most famous archaeologist is, of course, a prop gun, one that had its barrel cut down and featured British proof marks all over—thousands of examples chambered in .455 Webley were purchased by the British during WWI as a supplementary side arm. Of the estimated 70,000 manufactured by Smith & Wesson for the British, several modified pistols were resold stateside after the war with cylinders shaved down to accept the much more popular .45 ACP—to varying degrees of reliability and safety.
Rather than buying and modifying—some might say effacing—a WWI-era Hand Ejector 2nd Model chambered for .455 Webley, Daniels was able to source one that had already been converted back to .45 ACP for the American market. He then tapped renowned gunsmith Keith Ford of Grinnell, Iowa-based firearms superstore Brownells to transform the base gun into a replica of Indy’s by cutting down the barrel, resolving a cylinder issue, and installing a movie-accurate ramped front sight supplied by Raiders Arms—the Baughman-style ramped front sight installed on the prop gun to prevent holster snagging was too short to actually be usable. Most importantly, Ford ensured that the gun can safely shoot a downloaded, non-jacketed .45 ACP cartridge.
“This build has been a dream my whole life, and [a] rather consuming one,” Daniels explains on Substack. “This is a gun I intend to shoot, carry, pass down, and make memories with the rest of my life. It’s a gun that I know my children’s children and beyond will be able to appreciate, paired with an affinity for the history that is behind it, and the stories that inspired the build.”
If you’re interested in building your own, Daniels has a base gun recommendation that’s more available than a WWI-used Hand Ejector 2nd Model—the Smith & Wesson 1917, an American military adaptation of the Hand Ejector 2nd Model, To make matters easier, the platform was recently revived as the modern Model 22-4.
“The benefit of the 22-4 of course, is the use of modern materials in the manufacturing process,” Daniels explains. “Gone are the concerns of high-pressure rounds or the harms of full metal jacket bullets. Deleting the frame lock is easy enough, and if you’re already having the work done to the gun, you absolutely ought to have that done as well.”