Transforming the Rhino into a Rifle

This project started during an internal discussion where we were admiring the Colt Model 1855 Carbine carried by Bull Harris (played by Arthur Hunnicutt), a sherif’s deputy, in the movie El Dorado—not to be confused with director Howard Hawk’s other western, Rio Bravo, also starring John Wayne, who similarly teams up with a younger hot shot named after a US state and a drunken lawman to keep the peace of a small town.

“What an amazing revolver rifle!”

“I would love to have one.”

“Wouldn’t be cool if Chiappa made a revolver rifle?”

By now you should be quite familiar with the premise that the Chiappa Rhino is our favorite revolver. Those thoughts then merged into the following query:

“What if WE made a Rhino rifle?!”

Initial drawings and measurements immediately ensued. The design and prototyping process continued for months. The final product is the fifth major version (nearly every major version started back at the beginning), built from countless minor versions, and hundreds of modifications in between. Inventing an entirely new platform for any type of shooter is not simple or quick. Inventing grips has its own challenges, but they largely include varying hand sizes and preferences. Designing a stock incorporates shoulder distances, cheek welds, sighting heights for irons and red dots, in addition to hand sizes, angles, and trigger reach.

Early on, we discovered the process could not stop at a stock. Users would want a foregrip. But the current selection of available third-party foregrips is designed for rifles that have longer barrels and a shroud or buffer between the barrel and the shooter’s rest hand. The Rhino’s longest barrel is six inches and because of its unique design, the barrel is on the bottom. Such realities led to two likely scenarios should we not design a foregrip: if someone doesn’t grab the hot barrel, their hand will easily slide upwards and into the bullet’s path. Like all our products, the foundation is function; aesthetics, though part of a product’s DNA, emerges following functionality. While these were applied to the foregrip, the driving force was safety. We wanted to ensure the shooting experience was firstly safe, but also smooth, comfortable, and enjoyable. While the foregrip has more of a space-age look (sorry, Bull, for not sticking to a 19^th-century design, but at the same time, the Rhino itself carries its own space-age, futuristic vibes), a full-hand enclosed, cutlass-style design was implemented to make it difficult for a shooter to enact the scenario of innocently blocking a bullet with a hand.

The paring of our foregrip and stock with the Rhino pistol platform is proving to be a favored entirely new platform, satisfying our original direction to transform the Rhino into a rifle. It’s compact, comfortable, smooth-shooting; it goes well with a $0 Form 1 SBR tax stamp; and—put simply—it’s totally cool!

*Photo by IMFDB.com