The Ounce is a folding .22 LR pistol designed to address common concerns about concealed carry. I ran it through the same Project Rimfire tests as other .22 pocket pistols and took a close look at whether this clever design actually makes sense as a practical self-defense gun.
Details are in the video below, or keep scrolling to read the transcript.
Hey everybody, I am Chris Baker from Lucky Gunner and today I’m going to talk about The Ounce pistol: an 11-shot semi-automatic .22 that folds like a pocket knife.
This is part five of Project Rimfire where I’m reviewing a ridiculous number of .22 handguns. I was not able to get my hands on one of these before our .22 pocket pistol roundup video, but I ran it through all the same tests, so we’ll see how it measures up in just a minute. But first… what the heck is this thing?
What is the Ounce Pistol?
The Ounce Pistol is produced by Third Bay, LLC. As far as I know, this is the only product they make. I guess the best way to describe it would be a folding bullpup long-recoil operated pistol.
Starting from the folded position, you press this blue button in the tang of the pistol grip. That releases the top half, then you have to manually open it the rest of the way. At this point, if the gun was loaded, I could fire it. There is no additional manual safety. To close it, press down this green lever and just fold it back up until it clicks.
Loading and Operation
Loading it is where things get really weird. It fires from a fixed internal magazine right here. To load it, you close it about halfway. Pop open the magazine cover. Push this thing over to the right. Then place the first round in there vertically (or dummy round, in this case). When the action cycles, this carrier thing here rotates down to feed a round into the chamber.
The magazine holds 10 rounds. After you chamber the first round you can go back and top off the magazine for a total of 11. When you’re done loading the magazine, close the cover. Fold the gun not quite all the way closed. Push this lever here up into this notch and hold it there while you fold it the rest of the way. Release the lever. Now when you unfold the gun again, that’s when it actually chambers the round. And you can tell it’s chambered because this indicator here will turn red. Or we can open the magazine again and see that there are only nine rounds in there now. And I can top off the magazine.
The gun does have sights right here on top of the magazine. They’re not great, but I’ve seen much worse on pocket pistols.
When you fire, the entire barrel and bolt retract in and out of the body of the pistol, which is what makes it a long recoil action. Empty shells eject down through this port here and pass through this opening in the bottom of the grip.
To disassemble for cleaning, I’m going to unload it first. Empty the magazine. Go through the chambering process again and the round drops out the bottom. Now, close it to the halfway point. Open the magazine cover again. Then rotate the side cover and it comes right off. Pull out the barrel assembly and then remove the bolt.
I’ve seen some confusion online over what materials The Ounce is made of. As far as I can tell, the two halves of the grip are polymer. The upper receiver, side cover, and the magazine cover are aluminum. The barrel and bolt are steel.
This is all the brainchild of Bill Osborn – product designer and founder of Third Bay. Basically, what we have here is an extremely clever piece of engineering from a complete industry outsider who broke every rule handgun makers have followed for the past 100 years. Sometimes that’s a good thing. We need outsiders to come in and shake things up every now and then. But is it actually a viable self-defense tool?
Project Rimfire Test Results
Well, let’s start with how it performed in our Project Rimfire benchmark tests. For the accuracy test – 5-round groups at 25 yards from a bench rest – it performed best with CCI Mini-Mags. Average group size was 3.4 inches. That’s better than two of the other three pocket pistols I tested. However, all those groups were hitting about seven inches high and three inches to the left at 25 yards, so the sights are definitely a limiting factor at that range.
In the Practical Test and the Speed Test, the Ounce actually out-performed all the other pocket pistols. You can find the details of those tests in the Pocket Pistol Roundup video.
The targets are closer for those tests, so the sight offset didn’t matter as much. Despite the odd appearance, it’s got a conventional grip angle. It points naturally. The single action trigger breaks at about 5 pounds with very little takeup. Overall, it’s an easy gun to shoot once you get through the tedious loading process.
But, you know, all of those tests were designed with larger pistols in mind that we’ll be covering later on in Project Rimfire. For a pocket pistol, our priorities are a little different.
Design Goals and Target Audience
The Ounce pistol was conceived as an attempt to address common concerns that make a lot of people hesitant to carry a gun for self-defense. The designer specifically mentions size, weight, fear of others seeing the gun, and concerns about unintentional discharge while carrying.
Now, I would probably argue that those are not the biggest barriers most people have to concealed carry. I would also argue that there are much simpler solutions to those concerns than coming up with a completely novel handgun design. But, that said, the Ounce does address all of them pretty well.
It’s small and light – just 9 ounces loaded. It definitely does not look like a gun when it’s folded. It fits in my pocket very comfortably and does not leave a gun-shaped outline. And it seems like a safe design. The barrel retracts when it’s folded, so there’s no way for the internal hammer to hit the firing pin. Even without a holster, I don’t have to worry about anything getting in the trigger guard.
Reliability and Accessibility
But there are some other non-negotiable criteria for any self-defense gun. Two of the big ones are reliability and accessibility. So how does the Ounce do there?
I ran it through the basic 200-round reliability test I’ve been doing for the other .22s in this series. I only had a single malfunction. That’s fewer than any of the other .22 pocket pistols. But it’s still one too many. A self-defense gun should really be able to pass this standard with flying colors.
And then there’s the issue of clearing a malfunction. In this case, it was a failure to feed. The only way to cycle the action is to repeat the chambering process. Close it most of the way, pinch the lever, close it all the way, and open it again. There’s no tap-rack-bang here. If this gun were to fail in the middle of an incident, it’s pretty much game over.
Accessibility is usually determined by how we carry the gun – holster choice and location on the body, cover garments, stuff like that. With the Ounce, the design of the gun itself presents a challenge for accessibility. Deploying the Ounce is a four-step process. First, you have to retrieve it, probably from a pocket. Then you have to press the release button, which is pretty small. A spring forces it open a little bit, but you’re going to have to manually open it the rest of the way. I tried different methods of flicking it open one-handed and it’s possible, but the quickest and most reliable method is to just use your other hand. And then finally, you’ll have to reposition your firing hand on the grip before you can actually fire.
Now, all of that is not quite as complicated as I’m making it sound. And it actually was not as slow as I thought it might be. As a warning, when you try to do this quickly, it’s really easy to muzzle your support hand after the gun is open, so I just went with a one-handed grip. With a little practice, I was able to open it and hit a target three yards away in about two to two and a half seconds. For comparison, I can do that with my normal carry gun with a belt holster in roughly half that time. But that’s a drawstroke I have practiced literally tens of thousands of times. I’m sure, with more practice and technique development I could learn to deploy the Ounce a bit quicker, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be as fast as a conventional handgun.
I’m more concerned with just how fussy the process is. The small release button. The fact that it requires two hands. My grasp on the gun doesn’t feel very secure until I get that full firing grip with my strong hand.
It’s kind of like carrying a gun with no round in the chamber. It seems like it would be quick and easy to just rack the slide as you draw the gun. But in reality, if you look at recordings of armed encounters, people fumble this all the time. It adds a layer of complexity to an action you might have to perform under a great deal of stress.
The Bottom Line
I take no pleasure in criticizing this gun. It really is an incredible feat of engineering. The fact that somebody not only came up with this idea, but also managed to go through all the steps to put working models into production is nothing short of amazing. The concept of a folding pistol that doesn’t look like a pistol is undeniably cool.
But achieving that requires a mechanism that’s vastly more complex and delicate than anything found in a conventional pistol. The manual of arms is unintuitive, especially for people new to concealed carry – the very audience this gun is intended for. And the method of deployment is relatively slow and introduces multiple opportunities for user error. That’s a lot of trade-offs for a gun that folds into a package not much smaller than existing pocket pistols.
The Ounce is available directly from Third Bay for $899. That’s a lot of money for a novelty, and it’s a lot of money for a .22 pocket pistol. But I would happily pay that for a more conventional .22 pocket pistol if it were truly premium quality and solved a real, persistent issue in this category – reliability. The people behind the Ounce clearly have the engineering talent to tackle a challenge like that. I just wish that’s where they had chosen to aim it. And speaking of aiming… next time you need some ammo, be sure to get it from us with lightning fast shipping at Lucky Gunner.