The Airlite Ti Goes Magnum

Guns Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Charles E. Petty

Smith's .32 H&R Mag. pocket revolver takes the titanium concept to its logical conclusion.

Smith & Wesson has taken several giant steps in the last couple of years toward making a gun that weighs next to nothing. First was the Model 317, an eight-shot .22 revolver; then came the Model 342, a five-shot .38 Special. What made the 342 unusual was the use of titanium for the cylinder. Titanium made it possible to have a real pocket pistol that weighed only 11.2 ozs. It was even approved for use with P ammunition.

The appeal of ultra-lightweight guns is huge. People who carry guns don't want to be burdened with lots of weight, so alloy frames are popular. S&W has been a real pioneer in the use of aluminum alloys and even, briefly, made aluminum cylinders for .38 revolvers. That didn't last too long because of safety concerns, so for years we had to accept a weight limit of around 16 ozs. for a five-shot .38 Special revolver.

Then, in 1998 S&W introduced the first titanium cylinder in a .38 Special approved for use with P ammunition. It's a flyweight gun that is a joy to carry -- but a real handful to shoot. Now S&W offers an alternative. It's the same gun chambered for the .32 H&R Magnum.

Ins And Outs Of The .32

Many, many years ago various .32 caliber handguns were popular with both law enforcement and the general public. The .32 ACP was even a standard cartridge for military and police in Europe. In the U.S. we had .32 Short and Long Colt, .32 S&W and .32 S&W Long (they're not the same) for the various top-break revolvers but, one by one, they dropped off the map. The sole exception was the .32 S&W Long which lingers in catalogs to provide ammo for the legion of old guns.

As it turns out, the .32 S&W Long is also a whale of a target cartridge and is popular in international centerfire matches, but is rarely even considered for anything else. The world of self-defense cartridges has passed it by.

Then in 1984, Federal Cartridge, working with Harrington & Richardson, introduced the .32 H&R Magnum. In keeping with .38 and .44 history, it was simply a longer version of the previous "special" cartridges.

The .32 H&R Mag. fired an 85 gr. JHP bullet at 1,100 fps and a 90 gr. lead semi-wadcutter at 1,030--from a 4.5" test barrel. Only if you compare it with the .32 S&W Long's 98 gr. LRN at 710 fps. is the magnum name appropriate.

Since so many .38 P loads did the same thing, it wasn't exactly popular.

Were it not for the occasional production of single-action revolvers by Ruger and the sporadic chambering of various models in .32 Mag. by S&W, there is little doubt that the cartridge would have disappeared. There was nothing wrong with the .32 H&R Mag., but there were plenty of other cartridges that did as well or better.

At The Threshold

We're at a watershed for the .32 H&R Mag. right now. If this gun does not revive it, it's not revivable. Ammunition is both the strength and weakness of the AirLite Ti package.

I've always wanted to be able to test a gun with every available load. I thought this test was going to fulfill that fantasy since there were only two Federal factory loads, but I discovered that Black Hills Ammo also offers a loading, although the cartridge isn't shown in the catalog. It's an 85 gr. JHP that looks remarkably like the Hornady XTP (so does Federal's by the way). Then, just as this test was wrapping up, I learned that Georgia Arms is offering a 100 gr. JHP. (That's a 100 percent increase in available ammo already.)

The first trip to the range was a disaster. After shooting the first cylinder, extracting the fired cases was almost impossible. Examination showed that two of the five cases had split over half their length.

Federal's customer service explained that the earliest ammo had been improperly annealed during the case drawing operations. The ammo I had was loaded in 1985. It's long since been corrected, but I'm sure there's a lot of old ammo in red boxes still on shelves out there. Current ammo in the new blue packages is just fine.

Hammer And Hammerless

I got some fresh ammo from both Federal and Black Hills and the testing progressed with no further troubles. Two revolvers were included in the test One, the Model 332, is a Centennial hammer-less design; the other, a 331, has a hammer. There's a slight weight differential: 11.3 ozs. for the 332; the 331 is 1/10 oz. lighter. In either case weight isn't a concern. Neither is strength.

One of the neat things about titanium is its weight-to-strength ratio. It's as strong as steel at a fraction of the weight. Even if you couldn't identify the titanium guns by the unique color of the cylinder, S&W has provided a stylistic rendering of the titanium atom (with the correct number of electrons - 22) orbiting around the nucleus of a S&W logo.

The construction of the 331 and 332 is noteworthy. Any time you have a high recoil situation it creates stress throughout the gun. In addressing those issues with the titanium .38s, S&W had to come up with an entirely new system of attaching the barrel. There is a lot of torque involved when a bullet goes down the rifling and a real risk that a conventionally threaded barrel would twist in the frame.