Interesting comments. I have no knowledge of other cartridges, I shoot the 45 ACP almost exclusively. They are the only cartridges I clip. The Ranch Products clips have never been specific to a certain brand of case, they have held everything I have tried.
I did hear about other chambering being finicky regarding which clip was used.
Do you (or anyone) have a photo of the Hearthco clip?
Kevin
The random issues and case specific thing for the other chamberings, particularly 38/357 is due to the lack of a SAAMI spec for the rebate under the case rim. The brass manufacturers do basically whatever they want in that area. Which makes all the brass be different as far as being retained in a moon clip.
The 45 clips are pretty much what began the moonclip era back in the 70s when Ranch Products started making moon clips for everyone. Before that about all I can think of that was out there were the gov half moons for 1917s.
Your 45s from Ranch come off dies that were built from prints provided to Ranch by S&W years ago. Ranch was the original OEM supplier to Smith for moon clips, until Tony Meeley (spelling?) was put in charge of the Performance Shop. Same with Ranch 610s etc all came from prints provided by Smith. Smiths concept when they used to engineer their moon clips was they did not want the user to be required to use a tool to load and unload the moon clips. Had to work with your fingers only and fit all cases.
The 45s were originally engineered to fit all cases and they are thick which is why your Ranch clips have served you so well over the years. The way those were done, it doesn’t need much flex to work and the rounds being able to “flop around” a bit in the clip is actually and advantage with the 45. Since the round typically used to be a ball round, you couple just throw the clip at the cylinder and the big round nose would fall into the charging holes.
Far as the ones Hearthco did when Dave crated the first EDM moonclips I don’t have any pictures stored. Far as his moon clips as far as I know, most of what he did was in the 38/357 competition guns. This was back before the “I gotta have 9mm revolver in competition” days. Dave’s EDM moon clips were what got copied by TK and you see out there today.
In all actuality it’s kind of an interesting historical story in the moon clip world. The real truth to it is TK began in the moon clip biz by buying Ranch moon clips and packaging them under the TK name and sell them to unsuspecting folks on the internet. Then along came Dave Hearth and his wire EDM moon clip. Dave would sell those to TK who repackaged them under his name and sold them in the internet. Same as the moon clip tool TK does nowadays. That began by selling the original slab style moon clip tool made by the original creator of that tool mooncliptool.net. Which was mooncliptool.com at the time, the original creator was not willing to take their name off the tool and put TK on it, so TK had a machine shop made a knockoff for him and the rest is history
About - MOONCLIPTOOL
About MoonclipTool
We started making these tools in
1990 after the 625 arrived on the scene and pin shooting became popular.
How do I know all this. I caught TK in the process of doing a knockoff of my Lock Delete two years ago. I called him out on it and threw the flags up in the air. Cut off selling him my parts. Then I began talking to a lot of folks in the industry who passed along all this interesting knowledge to me. Some called me. Some I called and talked to.
Well whatdya know. I was correct. A new knockoff from TK just popped up.
It’s a shame really. I have so many great thing I could make for the revolver guys and gun community in general. But me knowing full well that my original designs will be stolen stops y’all from getting the cool new stuff I have already made for myself and are in the shop never to be seen by the public.
