About the SAA empty cylinder carry

Traditional single-action revolvers are absolute mechanical works of art. A lot of guys who grew up running modern polymer striker-fired guns eventually pick up a Colt Single Action Army clone for the nostalgia. The problem is they don't grasp just how different the lockwork is inside that frame. If you handle one of these classic wheel guns with modern habits, you are setting yourself up for a catastrophic negligent discharge.

It all comes down to the mechanical interaction between the hammer and the sear. In a traditional clone, when you slowly pull the hammer back, you hear four distinct, loud clicks. Those clicks happen as the fine tip of the sear drops into specific notches cut directly into the base of the hammer. The traditional flat leaf mainspring anchored to the grip frame puts massive downward tension on that hammer, making those clicks feel incredibly heavy and positive. The first notch is the safety notch. The second is the half-cock notch, which physically lowers the cylinder stop so you can spin the cylinder freely for loading. The final notch is the full-cock notch, locking the gun entirely to the rear and ready to fire.

The danger lies entirely in that very first safety notch. It is a tiny, incredibly thin lip of machined steel. If you lower the hammer into that safety notch with a live round in the chamber, the gun feels completely safe in your hand. But if you drop the revolver and it lands on the hammer spur, the sheer physical force of the impact will effortlessly shear that fragile metal lip clean off the hammer. The sear slips, the hammer drops, and the gun fires.

This mechanical vulnerability is drastically magnified by the firing pin geometry. If you look at a modern defensive revolver, it relies on a transfer bar system. The hammer hits a flat bar of steel, which then transfers the energy to a frame-mounted firing pin. If your finger isn't actively holding the trigger down, the bar drops out of the way, making the gun completely drop-safe. But on a true traditional clone—like the standard Uberti 1873 El Patrón—there is absolutely no transfer bar, and it explicitly does not feature a retractable firing pin. The firing pin is a solid, sharp spike of hardened steel permanently pinned directly to the face of the hammer.

Because that firing pin is fixed, if you load all six chambers and rest the hammer completely down against the frame, that steel pin protrudes right through the recoil shield and rests directly against a live primer. A stiff bump to the back of the hammer will instantly detonate the cartridge. There is zero mechanical safety net between the hammer and the bullet.

This exact vulnerability is why the old cowboy rule of "load one, skip one, load four" is mandatory. You load one cartridge, leave the next chamber completely empty, and load the remaining four. When you pull the hammer back to full cock and carefully lower it, the internal hand rotates the cylinder so that the empty chamber indexes perfectly under the hammer. Now, if the gun falls, that fixed firing pin just slams into empty air. When I need single-action revolver parts and replacement springs to keep these intricate actions timed correctly, I pull them from [Brownells]. If you want to shoot the classics, you have to respect the mechanics of the 19th century.