Ruger Vaquero - Design Details

Design Details

The Ruger Vaquero is a New Model Blackhawk with fixed sights consisting of a front blade and a notch milled into the frame at the rear. The first version was a 7+1⁄2 in (190 mm) barrelled revolver chambered in .45 Colt with a simulated color case-hardened frame and a blue barrel, grip frame, and cylinder. This was followed by models with a 5+1⁄2 in (140 mm) barrel and a 4+5⁄8 in (120 mm) barrel based on the other common barrel lengths of the Colt SAA. The three versions were offered in stainless steel and other calibers including .44 magnum, .357 magnum, and .44-40 Winchester. Originally all Ruger Vaqueros were shipped with walnut grips incorporating a Ruger logo in a medallion. In 1998 some models began shipping with a faux-ivory grip and limited runs with gold inlay and engraving were offered.

Like the New Model Blackhawk the Vaquero does not require the hammer to be half-cocked for loading and unloading, and uses a transfer bar mechanism which prevents the cartridge under the hammer from being fired without the trigger being pulled.

The "New Model Vaquero" comes with checkered black plastic grips, which look similar to the checkered black rubber grips Colt used in the late 19th Century. Ruger placed the safety warning which used to appear on the left-side of the barrel beneath the barrel on these models to make the gun more aesthetically pleasing.

Read more about this topic:  Ruger Vaquero

Famous quotes containing the words design and/or details:

    For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.
    Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)