Smith & Wesson Ladysmith Smith & Wesson Ladysmith The S&W Ladysmith (later styled LadySmith) is a series of handguns manufactured by Smith & Wesson starting early in the 20th century. Early models, branded were chambered in .22 Long. Starting in the 1980s, under the slightly modified "LadySmith" moniker, S&W manufactured several short-barreled revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. Smith & Wesson has produced firearms over the years in several standard frame sizes. "M-frame" refers to the small early Ladysmith frame. Later LadySmith small revolvers were made on the somewhat larger "J-frame", the standard S&W small-frame revolver. The tiny M-frame .22" hand-ejector Ladysmith revolver was produced from
Smith & Wesson Model 3 gunsmiths to reverse-engineer the Smith & Wesson design, and then began to produce copies of the revolver—both in their own arsenal at Tula and by contracting other manufacturers in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to manufacture copies of the revolver (a common practice at the time—Webley & Scott's British Bulldog revolver was widely copied, too, by European and American gunsmiths). The Russian and European copies of the S&W Model 3 revolver were generally of very high quality, but considerably cheaper than the S&W produced revolvers. This led to the Imperial government cancelling the order for significant quantities of Smith &