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Editor Dan Shideler

Antique Guns: Can You Spot a Fake?

Cochran Turret Revolver.
The author thought he was buying a genuine Cochran Turret Revolver like this one that recently sold through Rock Island Auctions. However, his – bought through a local antique store – turned out to be a fake. The surest way to avoid getting burned is to buy through a reputable auction house like RIA were in-house experts ensure authenticity. Photo courtesy Rock Island Auction Company.

When it comes to fake antique guns, it's easy to wind up as the proud owner of a dud. Even a trained eye can be fooled by modern reproduction firearms that have been faked to look like the real thing.

The gun book business is the nuttiest enterprise I’ve ever been involved in. Take one of my recent projects, for example: The Gun Digest Book of Firearms Fakes and Reproductions by Rick Sapp.

I dreamed up this title after speaking to a number of prominent firearms auctioneers who told me that they’ve encountered a staggering amount of faked or fraudulent vintage firearms.

I thought that perhaps gun buyers would appreciate a nice little volume that showed them how to keep from getting burnt by buying a supposedly antique or rare firearm that’s really no such thing.

1858 Remington Army Revolver.
Shideler tried to find a faked example of an 1858 Remington Army Revolver for the cover of his book on fake guns. But no one would ‘fess up to owning a fake! Pictured here is the real deal – an authentic Army Revolver, photo courtesy Rock Island Auction Company.

I could have used a book like this myself about 15 years ago when I was in a small antique store in Fort Wayne, Indiana, now long out of business. (I mean the antique store is out of business, not Fort Wayne. Come to think of it, Fort Wayne’s out of business, too.)

As I passed row after row of glass cases, I glanced down and there it was, unbelievably: a Cochran Turret Revolver.

The Cochran, as you might recall, had a cylinder that rotated horizontally, like a turntable, with the consequence that at least one of its chambers was always pointed back toward the shooter. Not a good quality to have in a percussion pistol, which have been known to chainfire.

I asked the elderly lady in charge to open the case so I could handle the Cochran. No doubt about it, it was obviously the real deal. Patinated finish, old-style nipples, saw-handle grip made of shrunken, dried-out walnut.

I furtively glanced at the price tag. Two hundred dollars for a Cochran! I drew my credit card with a noise like a whip cracking, and that was that. Well, not quite. I asked the lady to wrap up the Cochran in tissue paper and began mentally congratulating myself on being such a shrewd cookie.

I was almost out the door when the lady called after me, “Have fun with that! My husband made it in 1948 when he was a high school shop teacher. Bye-bye!”

I was too ashamed to ask for my money back, so I sold the pseudo-Cochran at a magnificent loss a short time later. Bye-bye indeed!

Had I read a decent book on firearms fakes, I would have kept that $200 and. . .and. . .well, I probably would have spent it on Stroh’s and onion rings. But that’s beside the point.

There’s an old saying that holds that you can’t judge a book by its cover. This is blasphemy in the book publishing business, where you damn well better be able to judge a book by its cover. So I had to think of some nifty photo for the cover that would really demonstrate what the book was about. Eureka! I’d show a faked gun.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t. No one I talked to wanted to fess up to owning a faked gun. In my wide-eyed naiveté, I had neglected to consider that owning a faked gun isn’t exactly something you’d want to brag about, let alone plaster all over the cover of a book.

Then a little bell rang in my head, and I picked up the phone and called Richard Clauss of Garrett, Indiana. Richard is a master at restoring relic firearms. Could he, I asked, reverse the process and reduce a new gun to a relic for the cover of my book?

At first, Richard balked at the idea. To suggest such a thing was like slapping him in the face with a dead carp. When I explained why I needed a faked “antique” gun, however, Richard reluctantly relented and agreed to help me. He clearly felt ill-used, however, and kept saying, “I don’t know, Daniel. Somehow this just doesn’t seem right.” These artists! Sheesh!

Next I had to find the right gun. It didn’t take long for me to get my hands on a brand-new Pietta 1858 Remington Army Model revolver for $200, give or take a few dimes.

Now, I really like Pietta guns and think they’re some of the best replicas on the market, right up there with Pedersoli and Uberti. When I took the big .44 out of its box, I began to share some of Richard’s misgivings.

The gun was almost too pretty to monkey with. But I had a job to do, by gum, so I packed it up and sent it off to Richard. Next I had to find an original 1858 Remington for Richard to use as a go-by. By great good luck, my associate Ken Ramage, editor of the annual Gun Digest book, has an original 1858 Remington in just the right condition, one that collectors would probably call “heavily patinated with virtually no traces of original finish.”

Ken’s gun was just as tight as it was when it left the factory in Ilion, New York, over 140 years ago. What a great old gun! I photographed it and sent the pictures to Richard with this instruction: “Make the Pietta look like this.”

Richard received the gun around noon on a Monday. At about 2 p.m. that same day he called me and asked, “You sure you want me to do this?” Hell yes, I said. Tuesday morning the phone rang again. It was Richard. “Are you really sure you want me to do this?” Yes, yes, yes. “Okay, then,” Richard said. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”

Two weeks later Richard called me. “It’s finished,” he said. I fired up the VW and sped down to Garrett. When I entered the shop, there was Richard holding a weathered, original 1858 Remington.“Where’d you get that?” I sputtered. “Did Ken Ramage send you that?” Richard looked at me as though I’d just hit my head on something. “You sent me that,” he said. “It’s your Pietta.”

No it wasn’t. Yes it was! Richard Clauss had come through for me again — and, as usual, he was apologetic. “It didn’t turn out the way I first thought it would,” he said. “I was going to put wrench marks on the barrel and punch some rust pits in it, but I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t turn it into junk. I even plugged the barrel and chambers before I rusted it so you can still shoot it.”

I was delighted. I had asked Richard not to buff away the Italian markings, warnings and the Pietta name, since I didn’t want the gun to end up in somebody’s garage sale (probably mine) some day with a $600 price tag on it. But aside from the markings, the Pietta looked as though it had just spent the last 144 years in a barn in Appomattox, Virginia. How did Richard do it? Chemicals?

“No,” Richard said. “I tried to do it the way Nature would have done it. I built a little humidity cabinet and rusted the finish off it. Then I rubbed the gun with oil, degreased it, and browned it. Then I rusted that and started the whole process over again. I did that for a week and a half, and this is what I ended up with.”

And the grips? How did he age the grips?

“That was simple,” he said. “I just took them off and ground them into the gravel outside with my foot.”

Richard also explained that he had patinated the brass trigger guard with a commercially available solution made for that purpose. The result was a fake “antique” that would fool the casual, trusting buyer.

None of what Richard did was top-secret, but I wanted to be able to show the reader of the book how easily one could be led astray, and there was no way to do that except by demonstrating how realistic a faked gun could be.

I was delighted with the whole project, but Richard wasn’t.

“Daniel,” he said, “please don’t ever ask me to do this again, because I won’t. No good gunsmith should ever do such a thing.”

Amen, brother. I promised Richard that I’d pitch the gun into Simonton Lake before I ever sold it, and I meant it. The moral of the story? Caveat emptor, my friends. Let the buyer beware.

Cartridges: What’s In A Name?

The question of what a cartridge's name means is not as clear today as it was back in the good 'ol days. Photo courtesy Cartridges of the World, 11th Edition.
The question of what a cartridge's name means is not as clear today as it was back in the good ‘ol days.

Wild Bill Shakespeare tells us that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Meaning, I guess, that the names of things aren’t as important as their essence.

Ha! Try telling that to cartridge manufacturers. Quantum physics is a game of Candyland compared to figuring out our American “system” of cartridge names. It wasn’t always so bad. Before the era of self-contained metallic cartridges, life was sunny and shooters hadn’t a care in the world.

From left to right, the .32 Short, .32 Long and .32 Extra Long. From Cartridges of the World, 13th Edition.
From left to right, the .32 Short, .32 Long and .32 Extra Long. The .32 Extra Short (not shown), for example, was a .32-caliber cartridge that was, well, pretty damn short. The .32 Extra Long (right) was pretty damn long. The .32 Long (middle) was just kinda average.

After all, if you knew the approximate caliber of your rifle, all you had to do was to dump a palmful of blackpowder down the bore, stuff in a spit-patched ball or conical bullet, cap ‘er up, and let fly. Life was simpler then. The sky was crusted o’er with bluebirds. Dan’l Boone wore a big toothy smile, and injuns grinned and waved as he shot them.

Things were almost as straightforward when the combustible paper cartridge briefly superseded loose powder and shot during the Civil War. Used in guns such as the Sharps carbines and infantry rifles, the combustible cartridge was nothing more than a powder-stuffed paper tube tied to a bullet.

These paper rounds looked like scaled-down Dutch Masters panatelas and smelled almost as good when they burned. You distinguished one from another pretty much by pointing your finger and saying “this one” or “that one.” But they worked just fine, though they sometimes got wet, fell apart, or obstinately failed to combust.

But the paper cartridge was obsolete before it even got started. Years earlier, in the 1840’s, some anonymous European tinkerer had stuffed a .22 round ball into a percussion cap, and voila! the metallic cartridge was born. It was a monumental technological step forward, but before long the waters had become hopelessly muddy, especially in regard to distinguishing one cartridge from another. The only way to do that was with a name, and therein lay the rub.

Many of the earliest metallic rimfire cartridges, all of them by necessity blackpowder, bore honorific names indicating the inventor of the rifle for which they were chambered. These names were always informative but rarely memorable, to wit: .44 Henry Flat, .56 Spencer, .58 Miller. If you carried a Miller rifle, you needed a Miller cartridge, and that was that. You were safe as long as you could read a cartridge box.

Other early rimfires bore bland dimensional names that gave you a rough idea of their relative length and hence power: .32 Extra Short, .32 Short, .32 Long, .32 Long Rifle, .32 Extra Long. Some of these latter cartridges might have reached a length of several feet had the supply of adjectives held out. What these early names lacked in romance they made up for in meaning.

The .32 Extra Short, for example, was a .32-caliber cartridge that was, well, pretty damn short. The .32 Extra Long was pretty damn long. The .32 Long was just kinda average.

But such simple nomenclatural logic started falling apart in the mid-1860’s when bottlenecked cartridges were invented. Because many of the early lever-action repeaters were restricted to fairly short cartridges, the only ways to cram more powder behind a bullet were to blow out the case shoulder or squeeze down the case neck, both of which also improved headspacing and feeding.

The 56-56 Spencer.
The 56-56 Spencer. The first number referred to the caliber of the original straight case; the second to that of the necked-down derivative case. Or something like that. Photo by Hmaag.

Thus when Christopher M. Spencer necked down his original straight-cased .56 Spencer rimfire to .46, he thought it proper to call the new smallbore round the .56-.46 Spencer, combining both its names in the hyphenated style so common nowadays in chic yuppy marriages. The first number referred to the caliber of the original straight case; the second to that of the necked-down derivative case.

So far, so good. But Spencer soon realized that folks might confuse the .56-46 with his original .56, so he took to calling the earlier round the .56-.56 Spencer. This retroactive christening may have enlightened some shooters, but it left others looking in vain for a bottleneck that wasn’t there. To alleviate some of the mess he had created, Spencer helpfully referred to the .56-.46 cartridge as both the “#46” and the “46/100” in his catalogues. Good old #46.

Realizing that his supply of numerals was virtually inexhaustible, Kit Spencer fell victim to a mad frenzy of bottlenecking. Before the end of the decade, you could buy a Spencer rifle (the gun you “loaded on Sunday and shot all week”) in .56-.56 Spencer, .56-.52 Spencer, .56-.50 Spencer, or .56-.46 Spencer. And those were just the fifty-sixes! Within a few years, Spencer’s bottleneck fever had spread to a promising upstart, former shirt manufacturer Oliver Winchester, d/b/a Winchester Repeating Arms, Co.

Ever the innovator, Ollie Winchester modified B. Tyler Henry’s .44 Henry Flat rimfire into a centerfire in 1873, crimped on a tiny bottleneck, and gave the world the .44-40 Winchester (aka .44 WCF). He was just getting warmed up.

Flinging his cravat to the floor and hollering, “Don’t stop me, boys!” Winchester then bottlenecked the already-bottlenecked .44-40 even further, which resulted in the .38-40 Winchester (aka .38 WCF). Now shooters had to digest a new nomenclatural pattern quite unlike Spencer’s, one in which the first number (e.g., .44 or .38) referred to caliber and the second (e.g., 40) to the cartridge’s black powder charge expressed in grains.

Over the years, Winchester and his minions begat a brood of hyphenated cartridges (.40-65, .40-72, etc., etc., etc.) that still leaves us scratching our heads today. The last known outbreak of bottleneck fever ravaged New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882, leaving the .32-20 WCF and .25-20 WCF in its wake.

The .45-70-405 Government cartridge of 1873 combined a 405-gr. .45-caliber lead bullet with 70 grains of black powder.
The .45-70-405 Government cartridge of 1873 combined a 405-gr. .45-caliber lead bullet with 70 grains of black powder.

Confusing as they sometimes were, at least the old blackpowder cartridge designations meant something. They had to. Back in those days, you couldn’t just saddle up Ol’ Bo and gallop over the ridge to the nearest Wal-Mart when your rifle ran dry.

You had to handload your ammunition, pilgrim, and you better know how to do it. Many of the old blackpowder cartridge designations were really just cheat-sheets that told you how to put together a given load. The .45-70-405 Government cartridge of 1873, for example, combined a 405-gr. .45-caliber lead bullet with 70 grains of black powder.

The .45-90-405 was a longer version of the Government with an extra 20 grains of blackpowder. The massive .50-140-3-1/4 Sharps of 1880 threw together a .50-caliber bullet, a whopping 140 grains of blackpowder, and a 3-1/4”-long brass case. I assume you hired someone to fire it for you.

Things got a little gray in 1895 when the first American smokeless cartridges, the .30-30 and .25-35 WCF, hit the stores. Judging by name alone, you might think that these were old-formula blackpowder cartridges like the .44-40 and .38-40, but not so. The “-30” and “-35” represented the grain weight of the cartridges’ smokeless powder charges.

Not that the industry actually encouraged anyone to go out and reload the new smokeless cartridges. William T. Lyman, in his Ideal Handbook, implied that the new-fangled powder was only a little less touchy than nitroglycerin. Everybody was ignorant about the new “whitepowder,” as it was called in those early days, and cartridge manufacturers had nightmares about Farmer Brown over in Zanesville topping off a .30-30 case with Dupont smokeless shotgun powder and blowing his durn fool head clean off.

Anyway, the smallbore, fast-twist .30-30 and .25-35 rifles became hopelessly clogged with fouling if blackpowder was used in them, so Winchester hit on a happy idea that no doubt tickled Bill Lyman: the .32 Winchester Special of 1895. The .32 WS was a smokeless cartridge meant to be reloaded with blackpowder. It’s still a good deer cartridge, especially (as Frank Barnes says) “for those who don’t believe that smokeless powder is here to stay.”

In those waning days of the 19th century, two commandments governed the firearms industry:

I)Thou shalt not underbid a government contract.
II)Thou shalt not put a competitor’s name on thine own product.

when the .25-35 Winchester of 1895 appeared to be enjoying healthy sales, Marlin jumped into the fray with their own version, the .25-36 Marlin. (That “-36” was supposed to fool everybody.)
When the .25-35 Winchester of 1895 (left) appeared to be enjoying healthy sales, Marlin jumped into the fray with their own version, the .25-36 Marlin (right). (That “-36” was supposed to fool everybody.)

For this last reason, every successful new cartridge was viciously knocked-off by the competition, usually in slightly modified form to avoid charges of plagiarism.

For example, when the .25-35 Winchester of 1895 appeared to be enjoying healthy sales, Marlin jumped into the fray with their own version, the .25-36 Marlin. (That “-36” was supposed to fool everybody.) The Marlin round’s case dimensions differed enough from the Winchester’s that the two were not interchangeable, as some oafish shooters discovered when their rifles wouldn’t feed or eject properly.

Remington, which didn’t offer a lever-action design, had to sulk in its corner until 1906, when they introduced a rimless version of the .25-35 in their famous Model 8 autoloading rifle. The new Remington cartridge, called (surprise!) the .25-35 Remington—later the plain old .25 Remington–was one of three Remington rimless clones of well-established Winchester rimmed rounds, the other two being the .30-30 and .32 Remington. A fourth chambering, the .35 Remington, appears to have been original.

Sometimes fin-de-siecle smokeless cartridges were named to avoid confusion with existing blackpowder cartridges. We’ve seen that the .32 Winchester Special really was special, in a dumb kind of way, but ever wonder what’s so special about the .38 Special?

Today, it doesn’t seem very remarkable at all, but when it was introduced in 1898 it seemed, well, special when compared to the shorter, slower .38 S&W blackpowder round introduced in 1871. (To make matters worse, the .38 S&W itself later became known as both the .380 and the .38/200. Take your pick.)

Similarly, the .45 Colt cartridge of 1873 used to be called the .45 Long Colt, at least in non-military circles. The “Long” distinguished it from its “short” counterpart, the .45 Schofield, which was chambered in the huge S&W Army Model top-break revolver designed in part by Major George W. Schofield.

Later, the “Long” seemed a conversational necessity to avoid confusion with the shorter, smokeless .45 ACP, first chambered in a subdued form in the 1905 Colt Automatic Pistol, and the .45 Auto Rim, chambered in the no-nonsense 1917 Smith & Wesson and Colt army revolvers.

Wildcat cartridges have some of the niftiest names. Take Bill Eichelberger’s 10-caliber or 14-caliber wildcats, for example. Shown next to a factory 25 ACP case are the 10 Eichelberger Dart, and its bigger brother, the 14 Eichelberger Dart. The little brother can send a 10-caliber, 7.2-grain bullet to over 3000 fps; the larger sibling pushes a 14-caliber, 10-grain projectile to almost 3000 fps.
Wildcat cartridges have some of the niftiest names. Take Bill Eichelberger’s 10-caliber or 14-caliber wildcats, for example. Shown next to a factory 25 ACP case are the 10 Eichelberger Dart, and its bigger brother, the 14 Eichelberger Dart. The little brother can send a 10-caliber, 7.2-grain bullet to over 3000 fps; the larger sibling pushes a 14-caliber, 10-grain projectile to almost 3000 fps. Photo courtesy Cartridges of the World, 11th Edition.

Flowing through this verbal muck was the curious convention that the term ”.45 Colt” always referred to a cartridge while “Colt .45” always referred to a gun. But which gun? The Colt 1873 Single Action Army, the Colt 1878 Double Action Revolver, the Colt 1917 Army revolver, or the Colt 1905 or 1911 automatic pistols?

The term ”.45 Colt” always referred to a cartridge while “Colt .45” always referred to a gun. But which gun? The Colt 1873 Single Action Army, the Colt 1878 Double Action Revolver, the Colt 1917 Army revolver, or the Colt 1905 or 1911 automatic pistols? Photo by Hmaag.
The term ”.45 Colt” always referred to a cartridge while “Colt .45” always referred to a gun. But which gun? The Colt 1873 Single Action Army, the Colt 1878 Double Action Revolver, the Colt 1917 Army revolver, or the Colt 1905 or 1911 automatic pistols? Photo by Hmaag.

Such ambiguity could have caused endless confusion in the trenches of No Man’s Land: “Quick! The Hun’s coming over the top, private! Toss me that Colt .45! No, not that one—that one! No, not that one! That one! No, that one! Now throw me that box of .45 Colt. No, not that one–that one! No! Not that one, you idiot!—whoops!” It’s a wonder we’re not all speaking German, nicht wahr?

After the end of the first War to End All Wars, talented tinkerers began wildcatting existing rounds into cartridges offering superior performance or greater efficiency. With forgivable vanity, these ballistic cowboys often stamped their own names on their latest creations.

Today everyone has heard of the competent .25-06 Remington, but who remembers that it first saw the light of day in 1920 as the .25 Niedner, named after its inventor, A.O. “Pop” Niedner of Dowagiac, Michigan?

The ultra-modern .22-250 Remington first hit the stands way back in 1937 as the .22 Gebby Varminter© (note the copyright) after its inventor. Other contemporary wildcatters also affixed their names to wildcat versions of the Varminter’s parent case, the .22 Savage High Power, which was itself originally called the .22 Savage Imp for reasons which are no longer apparent.

Possibly to compete with the wildcatters, the major ammunition manufacturers toyed for an all-too-brief period in the ‘30’s with jazzy, art-deco names for their latest creations: .22 Hornet, .220 Swift, .219 Zipper, .218 Bee. The last great cartridge name of this sort was the .221 Remington Fireball (1967), chambered in the Remington XP-100 bolt-action pistol. None of these stylishly-named cartridges set any sales records, however, and manufacturers have since reverted to humdrum proprietary names such as the .416 Remington and .450 Marlin. Yawn.

Savage seems to have been something of an iconoclast when it came to naming new cartridges. One of the very few manufacturers to break the Second Commandment when it chambered its Model 1899 lever-action in .30-30 Winchester, Savage had a knack for giving its proprietary cartridges rather sexy names.

In addition to the High Power and the Imp, Savage was responsible for the .250-3000 Savage. This was not a .25-caliber case crammed with 3000 grains of powder (oh, don’t be silly) but an excellent .25 that blasted an 87-grain bullet out the spout at the unprecedented velocity of 3000 feet per second. Later, when velocity dropped below 3000 fps with a 100-grain bullet, Savage emasculated the name into the plain old .250 Savage.

Of course, if one name doesn’t work out, you can always try another. Case in point: the .244 /6mm Remington. When Remington introduced the .244 in 1956 to counter the .243 Winchester, they assumed that its primary use would be as a varmint cartridge in their slow-rifled Model 740 semi-auto rifle. Winchester, on the other hand, marketed the .243 as a combination varmint/medium game cartridge and rifled their guns with a slower 1:12 twist to stabilize the .243’s longer deer and antelope bullets. Voting with their wallets, the shooting public favored the .243 ten-to-one over the .244.

Calling time-out and going into a quick huddle, Remington decided to re-rifle the 740 for the more forgiving 1:12 twist. By that time, however, the .244 had gathered considerable unwanted PR baggage, so Remington decided to change the name of the cartridge to the 6mm Remington. The rest, as they say, is history.

Remington must have felt a bit of deja-vu in regard to their excellent .280 Remington. Twenty years after its 1959 introduction, Remington’s marketeers decided to capitalize on the 7mm craze by relabeling the .280 the 7mm Remington Express.

The .218 Bee -- a jazzy, 1930s art-deco name if ever there was one.
The .218 Bee — a jazzy, 1930s art-deco name if ever there was one.

The wisdom of this strategy was no doubt incontrovertibly proved in reams of corporate memos and white papers. When sales of the Express began to smell bad, Remington wiped the egg from its face, did a few months’ penance, and reintroduced the Express as—ta da!—the .280 Remington. Which just goes to show that, as Emerson said, it’s funny how things work out sometimes.

Even the most dull-witted shooter, among whose ranks I occasionally number, realizes that a cartridge’s given caliber designation needn’t bear any relation to the actual diameter of its bullet.

The .357 Magnum is just a long .38 Special, which is pretty much a 9mm, which is actually a .356-caliber, which dimension is also applied—now, keep up with me here—to the .356 Winchester rifle cartridge, which uses the same size bullet as the .358 Winchester, the .35 Remington, the .350 Remington Magnum, and the .35 Whelen. But don’t you dare confuse any of these thirty-fives with the .351 Winchester Self-Loader, which was, surprisingly, actually a .351-caliber. Somebody in New Haven must have got himself fired for that one.

The .308 Winchester is considered a .30-caliber, as are the .30-30, the .300 Winchester Magnum, the .300 H&H, the .300 Weatherby Magnum, the .300 Savage, the .30 Carbine, the .30-40 Krag, the .30 Remington, the .30 Mauser, the .30 Luger—but also the .303 Savage, the .307 Winchester, the 7.5 French MAS (how did that get in there?), and of course the .32 ACP, which is also known as the 7.65–not to be confused with the 7.62, which is just another name for the .308 Winchester, which is where we started in the first place. If this makes sense, you may have a career in the ammunition industry.

Lately, in the pre-dawn hours when every paranoid fantasy seems not only plausible but imminent, I’ve been waking up in a clammy sweat, fresh from nightmares about hideous wildcats. The .50-140-3-1/4/.38-40 Sharps-Winchester. The .45-.45-.45/.38/.32 Colt & Wesson. The .58/.25 Henry Miller Gallager Spencer Sharps Winchester. The 7.65/7.62/7.5-.458 Necked-Up Magnum.

I’d chalk it up to indigestion if it weren’t so close to the truth.

Unzipping the Zipper

The .219 Zipper.

The .219 Zipper persisted fitfully from 1938 to 1962 in that purgatory reserved for cartridges that look good on paper but somehow never quite measure up in real life. At this late date, it’s difficult to determine exactly how the .219 Zipper ended up on the compost heap of shooting history.

The rosy-tipped dawn of the modern varmint cartridge broke in the early 1930s with the debut of the .22 Hornet, a smokeless version of the old blackpowder .22 Winchester Center Fire. With its little 45-grain jacketed bullet scooting along at 2500 fps, the Hornet proved that the high-performance varmint cartridge was a marketable proposition, and before long it faced a fusillade of competition.

One of these competitors, the .219 Zipper, persisted fitfully from 1938 to 1962 in that purgatory reserved for cartridges that look good on paper but somehow never quite measure up in real life. At this late date, it’s difficult to determine exactly how the .219 Zipper ended up on the compost heap of shooting history.

Some sources say the Zipper first saw the light of day in 1936; others say the Winchester 64, the first rifle chambered for it, didn’t arrive until 1938. We can speculate, however, that the sad story of the .219 Zipper really began with an even earlier cartridge, the .22 Savage High Power.

Introduced way back in 1912, the .22 Savage High Power was based on a necked-down .25-35 WCF case topped off with a 70-grain softpoint bullet that clearly marked it as a crossover varmint/deer load. Chambered in Savage’s time-tested, field-proven Model 1899 lever-action rifle, there was every reason to think that the High Power would succeed.

Despite impressive ballistics and aggressive marketing by Savage, however, the High Power gave consistently inconsistent performance on deer-sized game, and poisonous word-of-mouth resulted. Instead of loading the High Power with a lighter bullet and repackaging it as a varmint cartridge, Savage shrugged, said aw nuts, and dropped the .22 High Power in the early ‘30s. For a while it seemed as though the concept of a smallbore lever-action varminter was a dead letter.

But it wasn’t − not if Winchester Repeating Arms Co., Inc. had anything to say about it. By 1935, Winchester had become a true believer in the high-velocity varmint cartridge, having already developed the fiery .220 Swift for their Models 54 and 70 bolt-actions.

Watching the rise and fall of the .22 High Power from behind their curtains in New Haven, Winchester decided that a pure varmint cartridge similar to the defunct Savage .22 might succeed in a lever-action. After all, to many contemporary shooters, a rifle wasn’t really a rifle unless it had a lever hanging off it. And since bolt-action enthusiasts were showing some interest in the .220 Swift, perhaps lever-action fans would appreciate their own special varmint package.

So, taking hammer and tongs to everyone’s favorite guinea pig, the .25-35, Winchester’s engineers emerged in 1936 with a new .22 varminter designed specifically for a lever-action.

Whereas the obsolete High Power had featured a long .228” bullet requiring a fast 1:12” rifling twist, however, the new Winchester cartridge incorporated a 46- or 56-grain .224” bullet tailored to a gentler 1:16” twist. Playing fast and loose with their vernier calipers, Winchester named their hot new number the .219 Zipper.

So far, so good. With an advertised muzzle velocity of around 3100 fps with the 56-gr. jacketed bullet, the Zipper approximated the performance of the much-later .222 Remington, one of the best-balanced varminters of all time. Although the .219 couldn’t compare with the Swift − the H-Bomb of .22’s − it represented a huge theoretical improvement over the Hornet, which suddenly became yesterday’s news.

Marlin 336C in 219 Zipper.

Unwilling to chamber the brand-new Zipper in the dated Model 1894 design, Winchester assigned it to a special variant of the 94, the sporty Model 64. The five-shot 64/Zipper featured a 26-inch round barrel to wring every last drop of velocity out of the .219 and also had a rather racy look to it, if such a thing can be said of a lever-action.

So there it was. Winchester began marketing their new 64/Zipper varmint package sometime in 1938. Licking their pencil tips and flipping open their order books, they waited patiently for the Zipper to catch fire. And waited. And waited.

Uh-oh. If word of mouth truly was the best advertising, the .219 was in big trouble. A growing number of field reports indicated that although the 64/Zipper was accurate enough for the first one or two shots, subsequent shots strung vertically as the barrel heated up.

At a time when the Model 70 was wowing everyone with its phenomenal long-range accuracy, varmint hunters expected more than the 64/Zipper could ever deliver. Speaking with one voice, they solemnly pronounced the Zipper a big fat dud. Faced with the inevitable, Winchester zapped the Zipper in 1941 and never bothered with it again after WWII.

So what went wrong? In the words of Cole Porter, it was just one of those crazy things.

Looking back, we see that the fault lay not so much with the Zipper as it did with its pairing with the Model 64. Based on the Model 55 action, itself a variant of the venerable Model 1894 action, the 64 was built around a long, rear-locking breechblock and provided acceptable woods accuracy in its .25-35, .30-30, and .32 Winchester Special chamberings.

The long-range, high-velocity .219 was an entirely different proposition. The 64’s receiver, cut at both top and bottom, wasn’t rigid enough to go toe-to-toe with the hot Zipper, and it couldn’t accommodate telescopic sights. More than accurate enough for woods whitetails, the 64 just wasn’t cut out for a long-range varminter.

What really nailed down the lid on the Zipper’s coffin, though, was the fact that factory Zipper ammunition, as loaded by Remington and Winchester, was available only with round- or flat-nose bullets. In those days, there was a widespread and not-unfounded belief that if you loaded multiple spire-point cartridges in a tubular magazine, recoil would cause the nose of one cartridge to detonate the primer of another, thus exposing you to serious injury or even the D-word.

Documented cases of such detonation are scarce at best, but it was and is a hypothetical possibility. As a result, the Zipper was life-sentenced to stubby soft- and hollow-point factory bullets that shed velocity, and hence energy, disappointingly quickly. Thus the .219 had a maximum effective range of only about 175 yards − not such a great practical improvement over the Hornet after all.

You might think that Winchester’s sad experience pretty much closed the book on the Zipper. Think again. The .219 was given a new, albeit brief, lease on life in 1955 when Marlin announced, to widespread wonderment, that its popular 336C lever-action carbine henceforth would be chambered in .219 Zipper. Why Marlin did so is something of a mystery.

The closest Marlin had ever come to a varmint chambering in a lever-action was its old proprietary  flop, the .25-36, which was a crossover load in the spirit of the .25-35 Winchester and .22 Savage High Power. Perhaps Marlin felt that the 336C’s combination of a scope-friendly receiver and Micro-Groove rifling could help the Zipper perform up to its potential.

The nation’s varmint hunters, however, intoxicated with the .222 Remington (1950) and new .243 Winchester (1956), greeted the 336/Zipper with a huge collective yawn, and the chambering was dropped in 1960 with fewer than 6,000 sold.

Factory Zipper ammunition hasn’t been loaded since 1962 or thereabouts, but the handful of Zipper enthusiasts out there can still buy .219 reloading dies from some of the specialty die manufacturers. Cases can be formed without too much trouble from .25-35 brass which, at this writing, is still in production.

Loading data can be found in a number of older handbooks, Waters’ Pet Loads being perhaps the best-documented, and there is certainly no shortage of .22 bullets to fit the Zipper’s bill − keeping in mind, of course, the ancient admonition concerning spire-points in a tubular magazine. If you’re loading for a Model 64 or 336C, you can use any .224 spire-point bullet as long as you limit yourself to one round in the chamber and one in the magazine.

Be advised, however, that Marlin’s hair-deep Micro-Groove rifling will wear quickly under red-hot loads. With conservative loads, accuracy in the 64 or 336C can be quite acceptable for leisurely three-shot strings, 2-inch groups at 100 yards being easily obtainable.

Some custom bolt-actions and single-shots were chambered for the Zipper in the late ‘30s, the good Lord knows why, and such rifles can safely handle bullets of any profile. Most of them, though, have long since been rechambered for the blown-out .219 Donaldson Wasp or .219 Zipper Improved wildcats, which provide anywhere from 300 to 400 fps extra velocity. Of these, the Improved was the more practical cartridge because its case could be fire-formed from factory Zipper ammunition with no further modification.

The Donaldson requires case trimming and perhaps some other tinkering, depending on who furnishes the reamer. But as promising as these wildcats may have seemed half-a-century ago, they’re both seriously outclassed by the .223 and .22-250 Remingtons.

It remained for Browning’s later rotary-bolt BLR chambered in .22-250 to show that a lever-action could indeed succeed as a long-range .22 varminter. With its up-front locking lugs and box magazine, the BLR is in effect a lever-operated bolt action, and quite an impressive one, too, capable of MOA accuracy as far as you can see. In some ways, the BLR/.22-250 represents what the 64/Zipper and 336/Zipper should have been, but never were.

The 1930s were golden years in the evolution of the high-performance .22 factory varmint cartridge. The decade witnessed the birth of the .22 Hornet, the .220 Swift, the .219 Zipper, and the .218 Bee. Of these, only the first − the Hornet − enjoys basically good health.

Two of the others, the Swift and the Bee, have managed to cling to life despite occasional brushes with obsolescence. The lever-plagued Zipper, however, is remembered today only as proof that, as Claude Rains observed in The Invisible Man, there are some things that man was meant to leave alone.

Tingle’s Creation Still Amazes

As you fire the Tingle, you're amazed at what can be accomplished with a surplus milling machine, a set of hand files, a drill press and raw talent. The enormous Tingle .44 revolver might not look like much, but it’s a shooter.
As you fire the Tingle, you're amazed at what can be accomplished with a surplus milling machine, a set of hand files, a drill press and raw talent. The enormous Tingle .44 revolver might not look like much, but it’s a shooter.

On the eve of the great American muzzleloading revival of the early 1960s, before Italy had emerged to dominate the traditional muzzleloader market, a handful of American gunmakers toiled away on designs.

Some, such as Royal Southgate and Hacker Martin, became famous in their sooty sphere; some did not. One of these unheralded craftsmen, Bob Tingle of Shelbyville, Ind., lays claim to several firsts, including the first 20th-century American percussion target pistol, the first American percussion arm using coil springs, and the first American percussion pistol featuring a frame-mounted firing pin. But Tingle’s most ambitious achievement was the mighty Tingle .44 Blackpowder Magnum Revolver.

Never heard of it? Welcome to the club.

Predating Ruger’s Old Army .44 by more than a decade, the Tingle .44 Blackpowder Magnum Revolver is all but forgotten today. Only 25 of these massive single-action revolvers were built. What is most odd about them, though, is not that so few were built, but that they were built at all.

An Unpredictable Genius

Born Sept. 18, 1925, in Decatur County, Ind., Robert G. Tingle was a cranky World War II veteran who set up an all-purpose blacksmith and welding shop just outside the smallish town of Shelbyville in east central Indiana. According to Jim Guy, Tingle’s sole full-time paid worker, Tingle was an unpredictable eccentric with a knack for shaping metal.

“Bob was a mechanical genius,” Guy said, “and he could out-cuss anyone I ever met. When he got in a bad mood, which was fairly often, he’d lock himself in his shop and yell at anybody who tried to get in. I never really figured him out.”

In 1959, Tingle decided to put his talents to use manufacturing black-powder guns. According to Erwin Fagel, one of his shooting buddies, it seemed the thing to do at the time.

“Bob and I were shooting black powder in the early 50s, long before it became popular,” Erwin said. “We’d go out to Brady Meltzer’s farm and shoot all day long. We shot original guns because they didn’t make replicas back then. Pretty soon, Bob decided he could probably make a decent gun himself. And he could. He could make anything.”

Machined mostly from scrap metal and surplus barrels acquired by sorting patiently through scrap piles, Tingle’s first gun debuted in late 1959 as the Tingle Blackpowder Magnum, a single-shot .40-caliber percussion pistol with a center-mounted hammer. John Amber, editor of Gun Digest, wrote admiringly of Tingle’s pistol, and it was a big hit at the National Muzzleloading Rifle Association’s annual shoot the next year. Tingle was inspired to enter the gun business full-time as the Tingle Manufacturing Co.

The Next Step

What next? A revolver, of course. It would be called the Tingle .44 Blackpowder Magnum Revolver, and production of the resulting handgun began with a 25-unit test run. The enormous six-shooter was the first American percussion revolver to be manufactured in almost a century.

As it happened, the first run of 25 was destined to be the last. According to Fagel, Tingle decided that building them was too labor-intensive to be practical, and one day he simply stopped the project and never resumed it.

If you get a chance to examine a Tingle .44 Blackpowder Magnum Revolver — such as the one in the NMLRA Museum in Friendship, Ind., for example — your first reaction will probably be an awed, murmured expletive.
The gun is a strikingly eclectic mixture of features. If a Colt Walker and an 1858 Remington sneaked out of their holsters and had children, this is what the offspring would look like.

The massive Tingle .44 dwarfs a .45 Ruger Vaquero.
The massive Tingle .44 dwarfs a .45 Ruger Vaquero.

Proven Performance

Unloaded, it weighs almost 4 3/4 pounds. Lacking investment casting or heavy forging equipment, Tingle resorted to a three-layer laminated steel frame that is pinned and bolted together. Silver-soldered to the frame are two bulky recoil shields. The topstrap is joined to the rear of the frame with a 3/16-inch slotted machine bolt. The 7-inch octagonal barrel, a Winchester cut-down, is threaded into the frame for a full inch, prefiguring the Ruger Super Redhawk by a quarter-century. The gun is topped with a ventilated rib bearing the simple, hand-stamped attribution: “TINGLE MFG. CO. SHELBYVILLE IND. U.S.A.”

The hammer nose is flat, and the rebounding firing pin is frame-mounted. A blade front sight is slotted lengthwise into the barrel rib, and the rear sight is a simple U-notched blade mortised into the frame. The hammer and loading lever are case-hardened, and the rest of the gun is rather casually finished in a thin blue-black.

The big Tingle .44 revolver won’t win a beauty contest, but it shoots like a barn on fire. Each chamber can accommodate 60 grains of FFG black powder, which is just about redline for a revolver. But when loaded with a modest charge of 25 grains of triple-F and a 124-grain .435-inch roundball, the Tingle will shoot 3-inch groups at 25 yards off sandbags. Firing for groups isn’t particularly challenging; the massive, brooding handgun sits squarely in your hand with all the solidity of a pool table in a basement. The trigger pull is fairly light and crisp at about 3 pounds.

As you fire the gun, you’re amazed at what can be accomplished with a surplus milling machine, a set of hand files, a drill press and raw talent. Granted, some of the gun’s eccentricities would make Sam Colt come roaring out of his grave. The edges of the frame are sharp enough to peel the hide off an unwary knuckle. The chamber mouths mike at anywhere from .427-inch and .431-inch. The grips are a bland species of cast-off walnut.
Still, the darn thing shoots well.

End of the Magnum

Abandoning the concept of his mammoth .44 revolver after the first run of 25, Tingle concentrated on building his single-shot .40-caliber target pistol, a single-barrel mules-ear, or “sideslapper,” shotgun, and a side-hammer .45 percussion rifle with a concave cheekpiece.

Many of Tingle’s early guns are marked “Tingle Blackpowder Magnum.” One day in 1965, however, Tingle found a letter in his mailbox. It was from Smith & Wesson, and it politely informed Tingle that Magnum was an S&W trademark dating back to 1935.

Not wanting to tangle with a 900-pound gorilla, Tingle cease-and-desisted. The single-shot target pistol became the Model of 1960, the .45 percussion rifle the Model of 1962 and the mule’s-ear shotgun the Model of 1965.
Of these, the most successful was the 40-caliber single-shot Model of 1960. Unpatented, it likely inspired Thompson-Center’s later Scout pistol and carbine. Examples of the Model of 1960 occasionally appear on firearms auction Web sites, where they rarely fail to attract a winning bid.

The unpredictable Tingle died unpredictably Jan. 26, 1978, during a whiteout Hoosiers still call “The Big Blizzard.” Leaving his house in the early morning, he slogged through thigh-deep snowdrifts to his shop at Shelbyville’s Smithland Pike. Halfway there, he sat on a tree stump to catch his breath and died of a crushing heart attack at 52. The Tingle Manufacturing Co. died there with him in the swirling, indifferent snow.

Conclusion

In the two-and-a-half decades since Tingle’s death, time has provided perspective on his work. Some of it is ungainly and rough around the edges. But still, you somehow get the impression that Tingle’s guns will still be banging away when other contemporary muzzleloaders have rotted into clumps of red rust.

As for Tingle, his fame endures only among the relatively few folks who have owned or read about his firearms, the most intriguing of which was the mighty Tingle .44 Blackpowder Magnum Revolver.

Targo! Gone But Not Forgotten

History doesn't record who thought up Targo — a game of miniature skeet. However, Mossberg must take some of the responsibility, because they promoted the game and made guns for it.

Zing!” the ads said. “And out sails the target. Bang, goes the gun — a puff of powdery black appears against the sky as the pellets find their mark — and there’s the top-notch thrill for every shooter!” Thus in Fall 1940 did Mossberg introduce Targo, the latest craze in clay shooting.

Can’t You Feel the Excitement?

As a hopeless dub at the trap range, I find it difficult to hit a moving clay bird with a cylinder-bore 31/2-inch 10-gauge loaded with 2 ounces of cubed No. 9 shot over a spreader wad. I shudder at the thought of playing Targo, a game of mini-skeet, in which you tried to hit a 2 11/16-inch flying disc with a .22 shotshell. But for some clay shooters who couldn’t get enough of a good thing, Targo must have seemed a godsend.

History doesn’t record who thought up Targo, but Mossberg must take some of the responsibility. They promoted the game, marketed the Targo trap thrower and made the guns for it. The basic idea must have been inspired by that red-headed stepchild of American rimfire cartridges, the .22 shotshell.

Genesis

The lowly .22 shotshell has always pouted on the edge of respectability. Many shooters probably didn’t even notice it in the 1900 Sears, Roebuck Wish Book, where it made an early appearance. Almost lost in a snarl of cornets, gramophones, celluloid collars and buggy whips, it peeped up from the sporting-goods section, banished to a corner of the page reserved for pinfires and other losers, priced at $5.25 per thousand, Cash On Delivery.

We don’t know who invented it or why. It might have been developed for pest shooting or for use in shot-out rifles that wouldn’t shoot straight, anyway. Apparently, the Stevens No. 161/2 “Favorite” smoothbore was the first factory gun chambered for it.

At the time, Targo was just a glimmer in Mossberg’s eye.

The first .22 shotshell was based on the .22 Long case. A cardboard-over-powder wad separated the powder from the No. 12 shot — one size larger than dust — and a greased overshot wad was crimped in place at the neck. Those stubby rounds must not have cut the mustard, because manufacturers soon began offering the .22 shotshell in the elongated, pucker-crimped case we know today.

In shotgun terms, the .22 shotshell is a ridiculous 430-gauge, since it takes about that many .22-caliber roundballs to weigh 1 pound. The typical .22 shotshell contains 175 No. 12 pellets, give or take. (I know. I have counted them.) Each pellet has a diameter of only .005-inch, just about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

Introduction

During the relative calm before the storm of World War II, Mossberg rolled out Targo. The game apparently wasn’t bound by an iron girdle of rules and regulations. The bird sailed away, and you tried to hit it. If you did, you won. If you didn’t, you were like most people.

Mossberg’s first Targo gun was the bolt-action smoothbore 42TR, which had an eight-shot detachable magazine, though a 15-shooter was available as an option. So as not to doom it to a lifetime of missed Targo birds, Mossberg also supplied the gun with the novel RA-1 Rifle Adapter, a 4-inch section of rifled barrel that screwed onto the 42TR’s muzzle. (And you thought that rifled choke tubes were something new!)

But there was more to Targo than the 42TR. To play the game as sanctioned by Mossberg, you needed the entire setup, and it was rolled out in high style. You could buy the 42TR separately, of course, but the serious Targo addict would want the cased kit. The Blue Book of Gun Values by S.P. Fjestad records fewer than a dozen cased Targo kits in existence today.

According to one of my correspondents, Bob of Skeetmaster, “The set came with rubber practice birds, some clays, a net, a clay carrier for your belt, the thrower and adapters (smoothbore and rifled). I assume the net was for the clays that you missed, preventing them from hitting the ground and breaking.” (By the way, Bob has collected a lot of Targo material but is still seeking a practice net. If anyone has one gathering dust, contact me at Gun List, and I’ll forward your info to Bob.)

The standard Targo kit included the Model 1A thrower, which attached to the barrel of the rifle and was operated by the shooter. That way, the Targophile could enjoy his solitary pleasure without the shame of being observed. The 1A could also be mounted on a pistol-shaped frame or used as a freestanding unit, which presumably would expose you to the ridicule of your trap operator.

Understandably, the pistol-mounted and free-standing throwers are rare today.

Mossberg pumped up Targo in a big way, offering six models aimed at the sport: the 26T and 320 TR single-shots, and the 42TR, 42T, B42T and 340TR bolt-action repeaters. Targo must have been fairly popular because it inspired several knockoffs, the most notable of which was Moskeeto. Moskeeto won a sort of official recognition when it was adopted by the Royal Canadian Air Force as a training aid during the war. Apparently, the thinking was that if you could hit a wafer-sized clay bird with a .22 shotgun, shooting down an ME-109 with a machine gun would seem easy.

The Idea Survives

Targo was discontinued by Mossberg in the mid-’60s, but the idea of mini-skeet wasn’t dead. A Gun Digest of that era reported that Remington, incredibly, was entertaining the notion of introducing a coin-operated mini-skeet game built around a special .310 shotshell. The idea was dead on arrival, however, a soon-forgotten victim of its improbability.

If you have an irresistible urge to play Targo, my advice is to seek professional help immediately.

However, the guns, launchers and even the tiny birds are available through the on-line gun-auction sites. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives classifies the Model 42TR Targo under Section II as “Firearms Classified As Curios Or Relics.”

Remembering the Late Model G

On March 6, 1906, Morris F. Smith of Philadelphia received Patent No. 314,242 for an “automatic gas-operated rifle.” That rifle was the Model G, which had a swell buttplate (left).
On March 6, 1906, Morris F. Smith of Philadelphia received Patent No. 314,242 for an “automatic gas-operated rifle.” That rifle was the Model G, which had a swell buttplate (left).

The road to progress is not without its occasional pothole. One notable example with firearms is the Cochran Turret Revolver, an early percussion handgun in which the rotating, slab-like cylinder was mounted flat on its side with its chambers pointing outward like the spokes of a wheel. Thus, at any given moment, at least one of the loaded chambers was always pointed backward — toward the shooter. (Oops!)

The Late, Great Model G

Another example is the Standard Model G, America’s first gas-operated semiautomatic sporting rifle. Arguably the most unique American rifle — a combination autoloader and pump repeater — the Model G was a lesson in how even the best concept can go astray. We must pity Morris F. Smith of Philadelphia, Pa., who thought the thing up.

Not much is known of Smith. We know, however, that on March 6, 1906, he was awarded Patent No. 314,242 for an “automatic gas-operated rifle,” illustrated nearby.

Gas-operated arms were nothing new; John Browning had designed a workable gas-operated machine gun, the Colt Potato Digger, nearly a decade earlier. But no one had yet adapted the force of expanding gas to a semiautomatic sporting rifle until Smith did so.

Other types of semiauto sporting rifles were available in 1906. Winchester’s Model 1903 (later the Model 63) .22 Self-Loading Rifle was already a smash hit. Also that year, Browning designed a high-powered semiauto that would still be offered a half-century later: the classic Remington Model 8 (later the M81). Winchester followed the 1903 with the models 1905 and 1907 centerfire semiautos, the latter of which only succumbed to the wheels of progress in 1957. But until the Model G, the only autoloaders that made it into production in America were the Remington and Winchester’s self-loaders.

All those rifles were based on long-recoil (Remington) or straight blowback (Winchester) actions. True, Winchester’s William Mason had begun work on an experimental gas-operated autoloader about 1900, but it never made it past the prototype stage. Nowadays, when almost every centerfire semiauto rifle and shotgun is gas-operated, we should remember that it started with the Standard Model G.

Smith’s patent specification pretty well summed up the idea behind the Model G: “My present invention relates to firearms or guns in which powder-gas pressure developed in firing is utilized for actuating the working parts in reloading after each shot is fired.”

So far, so good. In the next line, however, Mr. Smith entered the realm of fiction: “(The object) is to greatly simplify the mechanism of such a gun and to render it more reliable in action and more durable in use.”
“Reliable?” “Durable?” Does the Model G’s “mechanism” in the patent drawing above appear to be simplified to you?

Problems Abound

Nowadays, we can be sure that Smith was the only person who ever used those terms with the Standard Model G. Soon after its introduction in 1910 by the Standard Arms Co. of Wilmington, Del., the Model G acquired a toxic and enduring reputation as a jammer.

All guns jam, of course. It goes with the territory. But the Model G brought a new dimension to the word “jam.” When other guns jam, you spend a few minutes monkeying with a stovepiped shell casing or, at worst, a broken extractor. When a Model G jams, however, your shooting is finished for the day — if not the week.

I’m afraid I speak from experience. I have owned three Model Gs, one in each available chambering (.25, .30 and .35 Remington). Each was a heartbreaking, maddening jammer.

The problem with the Model G was that no steel then in general use could withstanding the ferocious energy of expanding powder gas.

In Smith’s design, the expanding gas bled from the barrel via an adjustable port and traveled backward toward the bolt through a gas tube below the barrel. The gas exited the tube to push against a cup-shaped piston, which was attached with a feeble crosspin to a scissors-like pair of bolt extensions. When all went well, which was too seldom, the piston thrust the bolt extensions backward, initiating the extraction-ejection-reloading cycle.

When all did not go well — usually on the third or fourth shot — the wimpy little crosspin sheared off and locked up the entire works. The shooter was done for the day (unless you count muttered profanity).

It wasn’t supposed to be that way, Standard Arms insisted. The Model G was supposed to be “the neatest looking, handiest to carry, easiest to operate, quickest to reload, best all-round automatic rifle in the world,” according to the Model G owner’s manual sent to me by friend Dan van Vorst of Palominas, Ariz.

True, the Model G had a lot going for it. It incorporated a flush-mounted, bottom-opening integral magazine that permitted the use of pointed bullets. Its gas action mitigated recoil, and its lines were surprisingly modern and businesslike.

But in the guts department, the Model G just wasn’t up to the job.

Perhaps Smith had an inkling of the weakness of his concept because he designed the Model G to function as a manually operated pump rifle, too. By closing the adjustable gas port and pressing in on a small button in the rifle’s forearm, you could rack the action much as you would that of a pump shotgun.

Let’s talk about that forearm. It might be the most beautiful or gaudiest piece of metalwork ever to grace a firearm. Cast of brass alloy, it features a bas-relief moose and assorted Germanic scrollwork. The matching buttplate, shown nearby, is probably the busiest, most intricate of all time.

Still, a pretty forearm and buttplate weren’t enough to save the Model G.

Within several years of the Model G’s introduction, as the skies over America’s hunting grounds turned blue with a chorus of curses directed at the doomed rifle, Standard Arms Co. threw in the towel. They discarded the Model G’s gas system and put their money on the pump-only Model M (as in “manual”), a dumbed-down version of the G. That was to no avail, however. By then, the Remington Model 8 had sold shooters on the virtues of the semiauto. Standard Arms Co. sank from sight without a ripple before 1920.

Forehand & Wadsworth: ‘Other Guys’ Deserve Mention

F&W relentlessly knocked off Smith & Wesson’s .32- and .38-caliber double-action top-break revolvers in  hammer and hammerless versions.
F&W relentlessly knocked off Smith & Wesson’s .32- and .38-caliber double-action top-break revolvers in hammer and hammerless versions.

Immediately after the Civil War, in which bloody battles raged within eyeshot of the nation’s capitol, and previously quiet city streets ran red, America became a nation of concealed-carriers. Some gunmakers, such as Smith & Wesson, rode this wave of gun consciousness to enduring fame. Others did not.

Consider Forehand & Wadsworth.

The Forehand & Wadsworth factory was in Worcester, Mass.
The Forehand & Wadsworth factory was in Worcester, Mass.

The Stately American

Largely forgotten today, Forehand & Wadsworth was for a time one of the nation’s best-known manufacturers of small, concealable revolvers. In a market flooded with inexpensive pocket guns such as Avenger, Tramp’s Terror, Bang Up and Christian Protector, the guns of Forehand & Wadsworth managed to retain some respectability.

Some of that reputation undoubtedly derived from the stateliness of the brand name, which was faintly British and unmistakably confidence-building. I can hear it now: “Stand back, vile ruffian! I am protected by Forehand & Wadsworth!” Exit ruffian, stage left.

However, Forehand & Wadsworth was a true-blue American enterprise presided over by Sullivan Forehand, a bookkeeper with a knack for numbers, and Henry C. Wadsworth, a former officer in the Union army. These ambitious entrepreneurs rose to prominence in the firearms industry of the 1870s in a time-honored manner: They married the boss’s daughters. And in that case, the boss was Ethan Allen, one of America’s most visible arms makers.

Allen is not to be confused with the strong-willed Revolutionary War hero of the same name who compelled the British to surrender Fort Ticonderoga. This Ethan Allen was a pioneering gunmaker who opened his first shop in Grafton, Conn., in 1832. Allen’s guns were held in high regard, and about 1842, he entered a partnership with Charles Thurber. Their firm of Allen & Thurber relocated to the burgeoning metal-working city of Worcester, Mass., in 1847.

Thurber retired in 1856, and the company became known as Allen & Wheelock when Allen’s brother-in-law, T.P. Wheelock, joined what would become almost a dynasty of American gunmaking.

F&W introduced a nice copy of Webley’s snub-nosed Bull Dog revolver. This sturdy little gun was available in a seven-shot .32 version, a six-shot .38 and a six-shot .44 that chambered the stubby .44 Webley.
F&W introduced a nice copy of Webley’s snub-nosed Bull Dog revolver. This sturdy little gun was available in a seven-shot .32 version, a six-shot .38 and a six-shot .44 that chambered the stubby .44 Webley.

Genesis of a Company

Enter Forehand. Hired as an accountant at Allen & Wheelock in 1856 after a stint at Worcester’s Pratt & Inman steelworks, Forehand soon lost his heart to Allen’s daughter Nettie, and they were married in 1859. Wadsworth had already married another of Allen’s daughters, and when Wheelock left Allen & Wheelock in 1863, it seemed like a good time to take another look at the situation.

Allen renamed the company Ethan Allen & Co., the “& Co.” referring to his sons-in-law Forehand and Wadsworth, who became his active partners. When Allen died in January 1871, the firm was renamed Forehand & Wadsworth in honor of the two new principals.

The first guns bearing the Forehand & Wadsworth name understandably resembled the guns of the former Ethan Allen & Co. They included a .22-caliber single-shot derringer, a .41-caliber version of same and an elegant single-action .22-caliber sidehammer revolver.

The sidehammer incorporated what would become an F&W trademark of sorts; an oddly pinched-up lug at the rear of the topstrap. This lug, into which was milled the rear sight notch, became more apparent on the F&W Center Hammer Revolver, which bore the names Terror, Bulldozer or Swamp Angel. (The last was named after an enormous Union cannon that did its best to level Charleston, S.C., in 1863 and then exploded.)

In the early 1870s the Center Hammer morphed into what would become the flagship of the F&W line: the rimfire .32-caliber or .38-caliber Forehand & Wadsworth Double Action.

Some modern collectors lump the F&W Double Action — and almost all F&W handguns — into the category of “suicide specials,” but I’m not one of them. My F&W Double Action, which my grandfather carried regularly in his days as a banker in the heart of Dillinger country, still shoots fine, though its anemic .32 rimfire round won’t strike terror into many hearts.

I’ve always thought that F&W’s revolvers were a cut above those offered by most of the company’s contemporaries, though admittedly not up to the standard set by Colt and Smith & Wesson.

Being no dummies, Forehand and Wadsworth also pursued the military market, no doubt inspired by the lucrative government procurements that became routine during the Civil War. This resulted in what enthusiasts consider the Holy Grail of F&W collecting: the .44-caliber Old Model Army and New Model Army.

These large, solid-frame single-action revolvers are scarce; fewer than 2,000 were made. By all accounts, they were serviceable. Unfortunately, however, with their 1873 patent date, they encountered stiff competition from the 1873 Colt Single Action Army .45 and, later, the Smith & Wesson No. 3.

By 1880, under Forehand’s leadership, Forehand & Wadsworth was offering several single- and double-barreled shotguns in addition to its revolvers. The double, known as the Breech-Loading Shot Gun, was an attractive rabbit-ear model available in 12- and 10-gauge. With its single side-mounted hammer, the Single Barrel Breech-Loading Shot Gun resembled in its general lines the Morse percussion rifle. Forehand and Wadsworth must have been satisfied enough with the gun to beat the competition over the head with it.

“Several have attempted to imitate it,” the company’s 1880 catalog said, “but they make miserable failures.”

And F&W’s New Hammerless Single Barrel Breech Loading Shot Gun was a surprisingly streamlined top-lever 12-gauge available with a 30-, 32- or 36-inch barrel and automatic extractors.

The company’s Breech-Loading Shot Gun was an attractive rabbit-ear model available in 10- and 12-gauge.
The company’s Breech-Loading Shot Gun was an attractive rabbit-ear model available in 10- and 12-gauge.

But Forehand & Wadsworth was built on revolvers, and revolvers remained its bread and butter. As did almost everyone, F&W relentlessly knocked off Smith & Wesson’s .32-caliber and .38-caliber double-action top-break revolvers in hammer and hammerless versions. No F&W production records from that era survive, but judging from the number of its S&W clones today, the company must have sold a boatload or two of them.

As the company closed out the decade, it also introduced a nice copy of Webley’s snub-nosed Bull Dog revolver. This sturdy little gun was available in a seven-shot .32 version, a six-shot .38 and a six-shot .44 that chambered the stubby .44 Webley. F&W was candid in its assessment of its copy of the Webley: “It is the leading double action of the cheaper grades.”

Forehand, who might be described today as a workaholic, ran Forehand & Wadsworth pretty much as a one-man show. Under his steady hand, the company flourished. Wadsworth remained in the shadows until retiring in 1883. Not much is known of his subsequent activities except that he died in Brazil before 1898.

F&W revolvers are not always marked as such. F&W catered to retailers, jobbers (wholesalers) and catalogers, who often stenciled the products with their own idiosyncratic names or had F&W do it for them. Some include Indian, Indian Bull, Boston Bull Dog, Terrior (the latter probably a misstamp for Terror, or Terrier, or both).

In 1890, believing his name had achieved prominence, Forehand renamed his company Forehand Arms Co. That’s a useful bit of trivia because it helps assign general dates to the Forehand guns, and it means that any F&W product labeled “Forehand & Wadsworth” was built well before 1898 and can be considered an antique, free of federal transfer restrictions.

Retirement was not in Forehand’s vocabulary. The end came for him at 5:40 p.m., Sept. 7, 1898. After a day of fishing in nearby Rutland, Mass., he complained to his coachman of chest pains, which were dismissed as another of Forehand’s chronic attacks of indigestion. Events proved otherwise, however, and he died barely an hour later, surrounded by his family, at age 66. His funeral was held Sept. 11 at his home at 5 Benefit St. in Worcester. He was buried in that city’s Rural Cemetery.

Forehand’s sons, Frederick and Charles E,. ran Forehand Arms Co. until 1902, when it was sold to a competitor, Hopkins & Allen — no relation to Ethan Allen. By then, the products of the Forehand Arms Co. had become unremarkable little break-action revolvers. The collector value of guns marked “Forehand Arms Co.” is considered less than that of those bearing the full F&W name, though no one is likely to sell off his Colt Paterson collection to invest in any Forehand-marked guns.

One final note: I am indebted to the folks at the Worcester, Mass., Public Library who went out of their way to unearth the original Sept. 8, 1898, obituary of Forehand, which recounts much of the story of his life.
During a time when concealed carry is such a hot topic, Foreman and Wadsworth deserve to be remembered.

This article appeared in the December 3, 2004 issue of Gun List (now Gun Digest the Magazine).

The First Colt Clone

Most people don’t know about the Great Western Arms Co., which made the first Colt SAA clone. Even reference books can’t get it straight! But for a while, the Great Western was the idol of the American handgun scene.

Heads up, trivia buffs. Here’s a poser: In John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist, 1976, what make and model of six-gun did he use?

Are you kidding? Everybody knows The Duke used a first-generation Colt Single-Action Army. True, he usually did. But in his final movie, Big John used a Great Western Frontier Model in .45 Colt.

Odd as it might seem today, for a brief time in the mid-1950s, revolvers made by the Great Western Arms Co. of Los Angeles, Calif., were the beau ideal of the American handgun scene. At that time, Colt’s SAA was out of production, Ruger’s Vaquero wasn’t even a twinkle in Bill Ruger’s eye, and the Italian houses of Uberti and Pietta hadn’t been founded. If you wanted an authentic, brand-new single-action .45, you wanted a Great Western.

Decline of the SAA

Great Western Arms Company Revolvers
Anybody who’s seen The Shootist, John Wayne’s final movie, is bound to be struck by the parallel between the on-screen plot involving a dying old gunfighter and the real-life spectacle of a terminally ill Wayne giving his last on-camera performance. But ill as he was, Wayne took care of his guns. As Doc O’Meara relates in Guns of the Gunfighters, the script of The Shootist called for Ron Howard, who had just killed Wayne’s assassin with Wayne’s revolver, to fling down the gun in disgust. Wayne then grinned approvingly and breathed his last. But Wayne, who used his own embellished Great Western revolvers throughout the film, wasn’t about to let Howard or anyone else fling his beloved guns around. What you saw Howard throwing to the barroom floor in that final scene wasn’t a Great Western but a carefully modified Ruger Blackhawk — a gun that helped put Great Western out of business. Talk about poetic justice. — Dan Shideler

Today, most people don’t know Great Western, the first Colt SAA clone, existed. No wonder, because even reference books can’t get it straight. One says Great Western’s guns were imported from Germany. Wrong. Another says they were imported from Italy. Wrong. Another says the company was headquartered in Venice, Calif. Wrong. To be fair, Great Western’s brief manufacturing life span — eight years — didn’t afford much opportunity for extended scholarship. But there’s a story there nonetheless. As everyone knows, all modern solid-frame, single-action .45s have their roots in the classic Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army (that is, the Colt Model P). With its one-piece frame, hand-fitting grip, side-mounted ejector rod and characteristic “click-click-click-click,” the Colt SAA defined an era of American history. A list of shootists who favored the SAA or its civilian counterpart, the Peacemaker, reads like a who’s who of the wild West: Emmett Dalton, Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, John Wesley Hardin, Teddy Roosevelt, Doc Holliday, Belle Starr, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Tom Threepersons and Elmer Keith. (Doc O’Meara presents a wonderfully readable overview of the SAA and those who preferred it in his books Guns of the Gunfighters and Colt’s Single Action Army Revolver, published by Krause Publications.)

By the end of World War I, however, the single-action .45 was on its way out. The semiauto and double-action revolver were clearly the wave of the future, and they conspired not to praise the old SAA but to bury it. From a peak of 18,000 units in 1903, SAA production dwindled to just 800-plus units in 1940, its final year. At the time, the Colt SAA was the only full-sized, fixed-sight, single-action revolver made in the United States. A relic of bygone days, it was as anachronistic in mid-20th century America as the Pony Express. Immediately after WW II, Colt discontinued the old trooper with no thought of bringing it back.

The New Old West

In the late 1940s, however, a strange thing happened: America entered a twilight zone of old-West nostalgia. Ghost Riders in the Sky by Vaughn Monroe topped the jukebox charts in 1949. Popular radio dramas included Tales of the Texas Rangers and Frontier Town. Two of the top 10 television programs of 1950 were westerns: The Lone Ranger, starring Clayton Moore, and Hopalong Cassidy with William C. Boyd. The next year, Gary Cooper won an Oscar for his portrayal of Peacekeeper-toting Sheriff Will Kane in High Noon, and the movie’s folksy theme song, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, went top 40.

Don’t ask me how it got started. Perhaps it was a subconscious longing for a simpler, preatomic age. Regardless, thousands of middle-aged suburban men who wouldn’t know which end of a horse the feedbag goes on suddenly started wearing bolo ties and rattlesnake boots and saying “howdy.” Dude ranches sprang up across the Southwest. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to be a cowboy — or at least pretend to be one.

That popular longing for the good old days of the wild West eventually made an impression on William B. Ruger. With his keen ability for identifying trends, Ruger realized he stood at the brink of a vast new market. Investing the proceeds of his popular .22 semiauto pistol into new design and tooling, in 1953 he introduced his Single Six .22 single-action. With its 19th-century styling, the Single Six was a smash hit and proved there was a market for the single-action revolver. But as nice as the gun was — and is — it had two shortcomings: It was “just a .22,” and it wasn’t a “real Colt.”

There apparently wouldn’t be a “real Colt” any time soon. At the time, Colt Firearms Co. was sitting fat and happy with a bushel of Korean War government contracts and saw no need to resume production of an 80-year-old design. Meanwhile, prices for used SAAs, Peacemakers and Bisleys — even doggy ones — shot through the roof.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and so did William R. Wilson, a California gun enthusiast with a strong entrepreneurial sense. There was a demand, and he would fill it. According to Bob Deubell — whose Web site, www.greatwesternfirearms.com, is a treasure trove of information — Wilson approached Colt in 1953 and asked if it planned to resurrect the SAA. Colt said the SAA was done.

Great Western Rises

A man on a mission, Wilson returned to Los Angeles, where he wasted no time enlisting partners and tooling up a factory on Miner Street, starting the Great Western Arms Co. Inc. to produce copies of the classic Colt SAA. Wilson was the new company’s president, and its first product was the Great Western Standard Model. Guns started rolling off the line in May 1954 and incorporated some genuine SAA components Wilson had procured from Colt.

Wilson subsequently enlisted Hy Hunter of Hollywood to handle marketing and distribution. A prominent gun retailer and firearms importer, Hunter merged the Great Western line into his existing retail and mail-order distribution channels, which were crammed with numerous Belgian, German and Italian guns. The persistent rumors that Great Western’s guns were manufactured abroad probably originated with the company’s association with Hunter. By about 1960, Hunter’s line included a West German SAA knockoff that looked pretty much like the Great Western, so perhaps you might be excused for assuming that the Great Western line was imported.

It wasn’t. All Great Western Arms Co. guns were manufactured in Los Angeles.

Except for some minor dimensional differences, the Great Western Standard Model, later called the Frontier Model, was the spirit and image of the Colt SAA in all major respects except one: its hammer. The Colt had a hammer-mounted firing pin, but the Great Western’s firing pin was mounted on the frame. The design originated with Idaho gunsmith Herb Bradley in the 1930s and was subsequently refined by Christy Gun Works of Sacramento, Calif. According to Deubell, the first several hundred Great Western Frontiers used a genuine Colt SAA hammer with integral firing pin. After 1955, a Colt-style hammer was available as an option for an additional $8.

Great Western Arms Company RevolversGreat Western Product Line

The flagship of the Great Western line, the Standard Model, was a fixed-sight SAA copy available in 43/4- , 51/2- and 71/2-inch barrels. Chamberings were advertised as .22 Long Rifle, .22 WMR, .38 Special, .44 Special, .357 Magnum, .38-40, .44-40, .44 Magnum, .45 ACP, .45 Colt, and “.357 Atomic.” The Atomic was a nonfactory .357 Magnum load incorporating standard brass, 16 grains of Hercules 2400 and a 158-grain bullet. Some claimed the .357 Atomic churned up 1,600 feet per second at the muzzle, which would have made it a real scorcher for its day. (For today, too.) Apparently, 50 or so Great Westerns were chambered for .22 Hornet, which was something unique: the first factory revolver to be chambered for a high-velocity varmint cartridge. According to Keith, some Standard Models were also chambered in .30 Carbine, another first, if true.

Some of those chamberings probably existed only in Great Western catalogs, as no production examples have been identified. As was true with many small gunmakers, there was apparently a reality gap between what Great Western’s catalog stated and what it built. No company production records remain, but Deubell, with whom Great Western is something of a passion, estimated that 50 percent of the company’s production was chambered for .22 rimfire.

A Buntline version with a 12- or 121/2-inch barrel was offered, as was a 31/2-inch-barreled Sheriff’s model that lacked an ejector rod assembly. A target version, the Deputy, featured a 4-inch barrel, a target front sight, an adjustable rear sight, and a full-length rib similar to the old King target rib popular in the ’30s and ’40s. A Fast Draw model with tuned action, brass grip frame and short front sight completed the revolver lineup.

Great Western also manufactured about 20,000 clones of the Remington Model III double derringer chambered in .38 S&W and .38 Special. The indefatigable Hunter simultaneously imported a West German double derringer that looked much like the Great Western, which further reinforced the impression that Great Western guns were shoddy postwar imports.

Actually, Great Western guns were built to take some punishment. The Standard or Frontier Model, for example, used the finest materials. The frame was forged steel. The hammer was made from 6150 chrome-vanadium steel. The hand, trigger and cylinder bolt were made of beryllium copper, and cylinders in calibers .357 and larger were made of 4140 chrome moly steel. That’s a lot of beef.
Finishes? Name it. You could have a Great Western in plain white metal; blued steel with case hardening; or Parkerizing, nickel plating, silver plating or gold plating, with or without engraving. If the faux-stag “Pointer Pup” grips didn’t thrill you, maybe ivory or mother-of-pearl would. For a buyer who wanted to save $20, Great Westerns were available in kit form — in white — for all calibers except .44 Magnum. Henry M. Stebbins said in Pistols: A Modern Encyclopedia, published by Stackpole in 1961, that the kits weren’t aimed at average shlubs.

“(These kits) aren’t for amateurs,” he wrote. “The machine operations are done, and instructions come with the kit, but the deburring, fitting, polishing and finishing are for the buyer to do or to have done. This calls for gunsmithing skill.” Kit guns were marked with a “0” serial prefix.

Fans and Detractors

Great Western peaked during its first few years. In a masterpiece of marketing straight from the pages of Col. Sam Colt, Wilson presented President Dwight Eisenhower with a beautiful Great Western. Wayne was given a pair of engraved, gold-trimmed, ivory-stocked Frontier Models. (He carried those in The Shootist.) California Gov. Goodwin J. Knight was given an inscribed presentation revolver, a gun now in Deubell’s collection.

Dee Woolem, a stuntman at Knott’s Berry Farm in California, went to bat for Great Western after perfecting a quick-draw technique that earned him the title of “father of fast-draw.” Woolem traveled the country, promoting himself and his new gun. Those celebrity tie-ins provided a promising start for Great Western, but all was not well.

It is not recorded that Wilson had a detailed understanding of the labor-intensive nature of firearms production. His company obviously lacked Colt’s 120-plus years of handgun-building experience. There is no question that Great Western used the finest materials, but its regular production guns were too often characterized by abysmal fit and finish. Word about that soon spread, aided by Keith, America’s most prominent handgunner.

In one of the most damning firearms reviews ever printed, Keith hammered Great Western in his popular 1955 book Sixguns, published by Bonanza Books.

“The (Great Western) gun we tested was very poorly timed, fitted, and showed a total lack of inspection,” he wrote. “The hand was a trifle short, the bolt spring did not have enough bend to lock the bolt with any certainty, the main spring was twice as strong as necessary and the trigger pull about three times as heavy as needed. … As received, it certainly was neither safe, nor in shape to have been put on the market.

“There is no earthly reason why this new single action could not be just as good as the famous old Colt, but it will have to have a lot of redesign work to ever make it superior. … I cannot recommend them as finished arms.”

Keith’s blistering review constituted Strike One for Great Western.

Strike Two was Ruger’s introduction of its Blackhawk single-action in 1955. The magnificent revolver had an indisputable “cowboy” look despite its adjustable rear sight and tall ramp front sight. Unlike the old Colt and Great Western, it was a “modern” single-action that featured coil, not flat, springs and an investment-cast frame that shaved cost without sacrificing strength. And, wonder of wonders, the Ruger Blackhawk retailed for about $87.50, which was $4 less than the Great Western Frontier at $91.50.

Strike Three was Colt’s crushing 1956 announcement that, on second thought, it would bring back the SAA. Faced with a creeping tide of red ink because of the cancellation of its Korean War contracts, Colt reversed its earlier decision, called the old SAA in from the bench and marketed it energetically. The high-quality Colt was everything the Great Western was — and everything it wasn’t, too. The new second-generation Colt retailed at $125, or 37 percent higher than Great Western’s comparable model. Price, however, was no object: Colt’s renowned quality and the genuine romance of the magic Colt name easily trumped the contrived romance of the Great Western.

Ruger and Colt splashed their new sixguns throughout the firearms media, advertising in prestige publications such as American Rifleman, where their full-page ads appeared regularly. The inevitable effect was that Great Western got lost in the noise generated by Ruger and Colt.

Great Western Arms Company Revolvers

Too Little, Too Late?

That was too bad. Most authorities agree that by about 1960, Great Western had a handle on its quality problems. Wilson had hired Dwayne Kastrup, a leading Colt SAA technician, as Great Western’s chief gunsmith. Kastrup’s influence was immediate and profound. In the second edition of Sixguns (1961), Keith sounded a conciliatory, admiring note.

“When we started this book, we could not recommend the Great Western Single Action,” he wrote. “Since then, we are happy to report Great Western has really gotten on the ball and is now cooking on all four burners. All the late manufacture Great Western single actions we have seen and tested are excellent arms: accurate, properly timed and adjusted and for the most part have good trigger pulls.”

Then came the stunner: “The Great Western Arms Company of California is now turning out better finished and fitted single actions than any we have seen from Colt,” Keith wrote.

It was quite a reversal of his earlier opinion. Stebbins was also sympathetic in his 1961 book.

“The Great Western Arms Company is ambitious and progressive,” he wrote. “It’s perfectly possible that they will build a single-action that’s of better quality than present or past Colts, as well as of more durable modern design. Some would even say, without qualification, that they now make the best.”

But the accolades were too little, perhaps, and certainly too late to help Great Western. Few firearms companies had fallen so far so quickly. By 1959, Great Western’s production of finished guns had become sporadic. Gun Digest stopped recognizing Great Western after its 1959 edition, and as far as I can tell, editor John Amber never gave it another thought.

In 1959, the assets of the moribund Great Western Arms Co. were purchased by gun importer E&M Co. (Early & Modern Firearms, now EMF). E&M attempted to carry on the Great Western name, promoting whatever finished goods remained in stock and heavily pushing the Great Western kits. A sales organization, Great Western Arms Sales Co., was established in North Hollywood, Calif. The company continued to promote Great Western products. However, by mid-1964, Great Western’s advertising was of a quality usually reserved for do-it-yourself earthworm farms.

Then, poof. Great Western winked out, going gentle into that good night.

What Remains

Because no production records remain, it’s difficult to construct a manufacturing chronology of Great Western’s final years. It seems likely that when E&M acquired Great Western, it marketed completed guns and then assembled what finished guns they could from parts. After that, kits and spare parts would have been all that remained. Such a scenario would explain the inconsistent nature of much of Great Western’s late production.

Today, EMF is a leading importer of single-action revolvers and other cowboy-action guns. Forty years after the demise of the original Great Western Arms Co., EMF still retains Great Western as a registered brand name. In a karmic gesture, EMF announced a new “Great Western II” single-action revolver line at the 2004 SHOT Show. The Great Western II is made in Italy by Pietta, and it continues that company’s reputation for outstanding quality and value.

It’s ironic: For 50 years, some people mistakenly said Great Westerns were made in Europe. Now they’re right!

EMF estimated that 50,000 total Great Western revolvers were made, including kit guns. That’s not a bad record, considering the company only manufactured guns for about eight years. That also means Great Westerns are scarce enough to excite collector interest.

Referring to the obsolete .225 Winchester cartridge, Frank C. Barnes once wrote in Cartridges of the World, “It might be well to hang on to your (.225 rifle) because not a great many were sold, and eventually some gun writer will rediscover it as the greatest .22 varmint cartridge conceived by the mind of man, and at that point all your shooting friends will wish they had one, too.”

A similar situation exists with Great Western revolvers. Once considered the pariah of single-actions, they’re now quite collectible.

That derives partly from Great Western’s status as the first Colt clone, partly from the relative scarcity of their guns, and partly from the high quality of most later examples. The bane of any small manufacturer is inconsistency, however, and the quality of existing Great Westerns is across the map.

My Great Western Frontier .38 Special is a good example. Bearing serial No. 17882, it is midproduction gun, probably from 1957 or 1958. Almost 50 years old and showing signs of heavy use, it is still tighter than many brand-new Colt clones. The click-click-click-click of its action is still crisp and positive. Fore- and-aft cylinder play is almost nonexistent, and its indexing is flawless. So what’s to criticize?

Its finish, that’s what. Although the gun has obviously been ridden hard and put away wet, enough of the original finish remains to make a judgment call. It actually has fingerprints in the cyanide-dip case-hardening on the frame, something I would not have thought possible. I don’t mean faint fingerprints, either. I mean permanent, indelible fingerprints sharp enough to scan into an FBI database.

The back of the hammer shows obvious tool marks. The cylinder base pin latch has burrs on it. Even looking past the holster wear, it’s obvious the revolver is not a jewel in the crown of Great Western. This has no effect on the gun’s shooting qualities — it’s as accurate as any single-action I’ve fired — but it makes me wish the company had spent a bit more time on fit and finish.

Browning Auto-5: Those Hammerin’ Humpbacks

The Browning Auto-5 Humpback.
The Browning Auto-5 Humpback.

It was a sad day in 1999 when Browning announced it was discontinuing the Auto-5 humpback. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house — at least not my house.

My first experience with the Auto-5 came in 1996 at the hands of Lonnie Ray, my father-in-law. He had invited me to go duck hunting the day after Thanksgiving as soon as the turkey wore off. As dawn broke, I crouched in a duck blind on the edge of a flooded cornfield in Porter County, Ind. I hadn’t brought a gun with me during my holiday visit, so Lonnie lent me his Belgian Auto-5 Magnum.

I had seen many humpbacks through the years but had never fired one. When a lone drake mallard skittered over the paper-thin ice, I painted a stripe through him and touched ’er off. My life would never be the same.

Neither would my shoulder. As the duck crumpled, that old humpback slammed into me like an Erie-Lackawanna freighter on its 4:19 Toledo run. Beaming, Lonnie said, “That old Browning really hammers the ducks, doesn’t it?”

“Uh huh,” I gasped. “But how do you get them to shoot it?”

The Classic Design

Ah, the art and mystery of the Browning humpback. It’s been gone for six years, and every day and in every way, its square, uncompromising profile looks better. For 96 years, it remained in production — longer than any other model of shotgun. John Wayne used a humpback. So did John Dillinger. Its fame was such that even current Browning shotguns such as the Gold Classic High Grade are still described in company catalogs as “beautiful semi-humpbacks.” It was one of the greatest sporting firearms of all time.

Introduced in 1903, the original Auto-5 was a marvel for its day. It embodied the first practical application of the long-recoil principle in a sporting firearm. Nowadays, the idea of a shotgun with a barrel that blows backward to eject the empty hull, cock the hammer and chamber a fresh shell seems laughably primitive. But in 1903, it was a daisy.

Not only was the Auto-5 the first successful autoloading shotgun, it was also the most flexible autoloader of its day. Today’s gas-operated rifles and shotguns gobble up anything you stuff in them, from light target loads to magnums. During the first few decades of the 20th century, however, that was different. In those days, autoloading pistols and rifles operated reliably only with one specific bullet weight and powder charge. Light loads wouldn’t cycle the action, and heavy loads would beat up the gun. The Auto-5 was different.

What made it different was the “friction ring.” This small, reversible ring of steel, beveled inwardly on one face, sits atop the recoil spring and encircles the magazine tube. With its beveled face pointing toward the magazine cap, the friction ring forces a springy collet called the “friction piece” to constrict around the magazine tube when the gun is fired, putting the brakes on the backward motion of the barrel during recoil. This is helpful if you are shooting heavy loads. With the friction ring reversed so its flat face points toward the magazine, the friction piece cannot constrict. That lets off the brakes and lets light loads cycle the action.

To switch from light loads to heavy loads or vice versa, you could remove the barrel, reverse the friction ring and replace the barrel. The problem arises when the friction ring is set in the wrong direction. Shooting a light load with the ring in the heavy-load position will typically produce a jam. Conversely, shooting a heavy load with the ring in the light-load position will typically belt the holy hell out of you, as I discovered in that Indiana duck blind. My teeth still hurt.

Many Other Features

In its day, the five-shot Auto-5 was all you needed for bobwhites to bears. Unlike its competitors, the Auto-5 incorporated a magazine cutoff, a small T-shaped lever protruding from the lower left side of the receiver. Flipping this lever let you feed one round directly into the chamber without having to unload the magazine. If you were pounding the cornfields for pheasants and kicked up an 8-point buck, you could flip the cutoff lever, open the action to eject your No. 6 load, slip in a slug, and say goodbye to Mr. Buck. At least that was the theory.

The Auto-5 also introduced American shooters to the idea of an operating handle. For the benefit of those, including me, who incorrectly call it “that finger thing,” the operating handle is the small cocking piece you pull to charge a semiauto shotgun. Today, every semiauto has an operating handle. It seems like the most natural concept in the world, doesn’t it? However, the Auto-5 was the first sporting gun to feature an operating handle. Other semiautos of the day used plungers, toggle-joints and who knows what else as cocking pieces.

Foolproof reliability made the Auto-5 successful. Its natural-pointing characteristics made it beloved, though. Some shooters, such as my friend Jim Schlender, can pick up any shotgun and bust birds with it. Some of us, however, have a tough time finding shotguns that fit. For those so handicapped, an Auto-5 does what no other shotgun does: It points. That Gibraltar-like receiver rising before our eyes gives us a thrill no other shotgun can.

I am a good example. During a recent trap outing at the magnificent Iola, Wis., Conservation Club, I missed 10 straight with Jim’s Winchester 101, as fine a shotgun as I’m ever likely to hold. In frustration, I dug my 1939 Auto-5 out of my trunk. (I bought this grand old gun years ago in South Bend, Ind., home of the Fighting Irish, so I call it “the Humpback of Notre Dame.”) Sure enough, the birds began breaking — not all of them, but enough to make me smile.

History and Imitation

By all rights, the Auto-5 should have been made by Winchester. After all, John Browning designed much of the gun under Winchester’s roof in New Haven, Conn. But Winchester’s refusal to pay Browning royalties for the design precipitated a notorious falling-out between the parties, so Browning left Winchester with his Auto-5 design under his arm. He ended up at Fabrique Nationale in Belgium. FN began manufacturing the gun in 1903, but it wasn’t officially imported into the United States until 1923. However, many examples apparently made it across the Atlantic soon after the gun was introduced.

Thus, the first Browning-designed humpback officially sold in the United States wasn’t the Browning Auto-5. It was the Remington Model 11, a near-knockoff of the Auto-5 that was produced under license from Browning from 1911 to 1948. In 1930, another officially licensed Auto-5 clone appeared: the Savage Model 720. Finally, in the 1970s, two other Auto-5 clones were rolled out: the Auto Pointer, made by the Yamamoto Co. of Tokyo, and the Herter's SL-18, made by The Pine Co., also of Japan.

It’s confession time. In terms of shooting qualities, I cannot tell any difference between a Belgian Auto-5, a Japanese Auto-5, a Remington 11, a Savage clone or an Auto Pointer. I’ve shot them all, and they all do well for me. We will pause a moment while Browning collectors gnash their teeth and rend their garments. Sorry! The cachet of the “Belgium Browning” has always seemed more imaginary than factual to me. In fact, the best-shooting humpback I’ve fired was a Savage 745, the alloy-receiver variant of the Model 720. The Belgian guns are superb, of course, but the beauty of an Auto-5 is in its design, not the maker’s name engraved or roll-stamped on it. Purists sniff and snort about “Japanese Brownings” and barely acknowledge the existence of the Remingtons, the Savages or, God forbid, the Auto Pointers. Shame on them.

Cataloging the Imitations

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Auto-5 has certainly been flattered. There are enough flavors of humpbacks to confuse the casual shooter.

These humpbacks are not true clones. If they were, all parts would interchange. They don’t. Really, 100 percent parts interchangeability among humpback variants is a problem. Some parts, such as recoil springs, interchange between guns of the same gauge. Others, such as safeties and magazine cutoffs, don’t. Other parts, such as forearms and metric-thread screws, interchange on paper but not in real life. Other parts, such as buttplates and barrel extensions, don’t interchange but can be fitted. Some  can’t, no matter how much bad language you use. I’ve found parts interchangeability among humpbacks seems to have two or three rules and 5,000 exceptions.

The forends on humpbacks tend to split, and the old hard-rubber buttplates get brittle or shrink with age. Although the design is sturdy, replacement parts are occasionally necessary. If you’re trying to rehabilitate your humpback, the good news is that most critical components — barrels, forearms and buttstocks — are available as newly made or NOS (new old stock) parts. Gun Parts Corp. sells enough parts to repair almost any humpback, and even major catalog houses such as Cabela’s sell wood and aftermarket barrels. A 10-minute Internet search will find enough humpback parts to build one from scratch.

Conclusion

Browning’s Web site (www.browning.com), one of the finest in the shooting industry, includes a historical timeline. In the entry for 1998, these two touching sentences appear: “The famous Auto-5 shotgun, invented in 1903, and one of John M. Browning’s greatest inventions, lives out its life. Amid much concern and thought, it is discontinued from the line.”
Sigh.

Although I realize that modern Browning shotguns, such as the Gold Series, are fine guns, I’ll always leave room in my gun rack for at least one Auto-5 or a humpback clone.

But come to think of it, Browning had it wrong. The Auto-5 never “lived out its life.” There are still hundreds of thousands of humpbacks out there. Every year, I see them in Michigan’s aspen thickets, in Indiana’s cornrows and on Wisconsin’s granite hillsides.

“Lived out its life?” Say what? Everybody knows that humpbacks live forever.

This article appeared in the November 5, 2004 issue of Gun List (now Gun Digest the Magazine).

Honoring the 1911. . .in Utah

1911
Sweeney's 1911

Courtesy of Glenn Beck's “The Blaze” (www.theblaze.com):

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — State lawmakers are debating whether to designate a semiautomatic pistol as the official gun of Utah, despite protests from people who believe it’s inappropriate because of recent mass shootings.

The bill to make the Browning M1911 the official gun breezed through a committee hearing this week and is scheduled to be debated by the full House as early as Wednesday.

Republican Rep. Carl Wimmer said the state should have the gun as one of its state symbols to honor John Browning, a Utah native who invented it in 1911.

“He invented a firearm that has defended American values and the traditions of this country for 100 years,” Wimmer told the House Political Subdivisions Committee.

Utah has 24 state symbols recognizing the history, geography and culture of the state. They include a state cooking pot, a state tree, a state hymn and a state folk dance.

The committee approved the bill to add a state gun on a 9-2 vote.

Wimmer said the Browning M1911 is widely used by the military, police officers and private citizens, which is why he chose the pistol instead of another Browning gun.

Gun Violence Prevention Center board member Steve Gunn told The Associated Press honoring the M1911 is wrong because the people who opened fire in most recent U.S. mass shootings used semiautomatic pistols. That includes the Jan. 8 Arizona shooting in which six people were killed and 13 — including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — were wounded with a Glock pistol.

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But you don't have to go to Utah to celebrate the 1911. You can do it here.

For the Concealed Carry Newbie. . .

defensive handgun skillsJudging from the industry stats I've seen lately, the concealable handgun market is chugging right along. (The sporting rifle and shotgun market are a bit flabby and the AR craze is cooling off, at least temporarily, if you care to know.) I'm not sure what's driving this surging interest in concealed-carry guns but suspect it's the spate of pro-gun court rulings that have been issued as well as the growing realization that citizens are primarily responsible for their own well-being. Whatever the reason, we've got a lot of first-time “concealed carriers” entering the gun market. That's a good thing, just on general principles.

It's been 30 years since I first acquired my carry permit, and guns are a big part of my personal and professional life. But I can still remember when I was a newbie. In those days, there weren't a lot of how-to guides that explained how to use a self-defense handgun: you had to read a schwad of magazine articles (still a good idea) or enroll in a defensive handgun class (also still a good idea).

For today's concealed-carry newbie, however, things are a lot easier. Besides having more options in guns, ammo, holsters and accessories than ever before, we've got excellent one-volume guides to concealed carry such as Defensive Handgun Skills by Dave Fessenden. Fessenden, a certified NRA Firearms Instructor, has cleared away all the clutter about concealed-carry handgun techniques and distilled a lifetime of experience into only 128 pages. He's given us what I think is the best how-to guide to carrying and deploying defensive revolvers and semi-autos — he doesn't overwhelm you with technical jargon or complex technical issues. For the concealed-carry beginner, it's a no-sweat introduction to the carry gun — and at only $11.55, it's about half the price of a large delivered pizza, even a crummy one. Check it out here.
And keep shootin'!

Shooting the Widowmaker: the Winchester Model 1911

Probably the least-collected pre-'64 Winchester shotgun is the Model 1911 Self Loader, also known affectionately as the Widowmaker.

For those of you who came in late, the M1911 was Winchester's attempt to knock off the Browning Auto-5. When John Browning and Winchester couldn't come to terms on Browning's new autoloading shotgun — Winchester refused to pay Browning royalties and didn't want to cannibalize sales of its Model 1897 pump shotgun, anyway  — the great John B took the new design to Belgium, where Fabrique Nationale made it a worldwide best-seller.  Unfortunately for Winchester, most of the patents involved in the Auto-5 had been registered in John Browning's name, so Winchester couldn't do more than produce a loose facsimile of Browning's gun.

Which is exactly what the Model 1911 is. Winchester had turned to Thomas C. Johnson, designer of Winchester's “Self Loading” line of rifles (Models 1903, 1905, 1907 and 1910) and  said, “Build us an Auto-5.” The trouble was that Winchester's own lawyers had so tied up the Auto-5 with patents, which were now assigned to Browning, that just about the only features Johnson could borrow were the Auto-5's long-recoil operation and kinda-sorta humpbacked profile.

Browning's patents even covered the cocking handle on the bolt! So Johnson designed the M1911 to be cocked — now, get this — by one's grabbing the barrel and jerking it sharply backward. A short section of the barrel near the muzzle was even knurled to provide a sure grip.

If this sounds awkward to you, you're right. Most long-recoil shotguns, the M1911 included, contain a rather large recoil spring to push the barrel back into battery after a shell is fired. Cocking the M1911 involves compressing this spring, and it ain't easy. Common practice in the old days was to rest the gun's butt on the ground and use both hands to cock the barrel using a downward motion. This left you momentarily looking down the barrel of a loaded, cocked 12-gauge shotgun. Hence the “Widowmaker” nickname.

It gets worse. The rear of the M1911's  receiver contains a cushion-type barrel buffer that's supposed to soften the wham-bam of the recoiling barrel. On most of these guns, however, the buffer is about as cushiony as a cast-iron doughnut, and the gun will kick you hard enough to leave a mark with anything but the lightest field loads. In the accompanying video showing what it's like to fire the 1911, I'm shooting Brenneke 2-3/4″ standard rifled slugs and as you can tell, recoil is stout.

As bizarre as it is, the M1911 can still get the job done, but give me a real A-5, a Remington M11 or a Savage 745 any day. By the way, our good friend John Malloy has written a nice introduction to the Widowmaker for the 2011 edition of Gun Digest. 

And let's all try not to make any new widows, okay?

Collectible Guns: Check Your Closets!

Silver Streak
Silver Streak

You never know what kind of interesting and valuable collectible guns are lurking in your closet or in some old trunk in the attic. Sometimes it pays to dust off these oddballs and list them for sale in an online gun auction.

A good friend of mine, Phillip Peterson, is a licensed gun dealer who sells quite regularly through Gunbroker. Phillip, who goes by the username “neatguns,” specializes in vintage, oddball and military guns and accessories.

Last week, Phillip listed a “Vintage Sheridan Silver Streak Pellet Rifle 20cal” with a starting bid of $99. The description read, “Sheridan Products Inc. Silver Streak multiple pump forearm pneumatic pellet rifle caliber .20 / 5mm. There is no serial number. Early production version with hold down safety, slab side stock and knurled sight adjustment knobs. Mfg 1949-52. Excellent condition. No notable damage or wear. The forearm has a crack visible from the back but the factory pins should keep it from cracking through. Mechanism is functional and it shoots OK. Original instruction book included.”

Kinda cool, I thought. If no one bids on it, I'll go a hundred bucks.

Well, the auction closed last night — at $405.56! That just shows how ignorant I am about vintage airguns. I had no idea an early Silver Streak could go so high, especially one in less-than-pristine condition. Oh well! Just another lesson in my ongoing education, I guess. Now I'll be keeping my eye open for similar models of similar vintage at the antique shows and garage sales. (I've already checked my closets.)

Phillip sells a great many guns every year, which incidentally is how he arrives at the values he lists in Standard Catalog of Military Firearms, of which he's the editor.

Unlike some price guides that contain values by “experts” seeking primarily to pump up their own collections, Phillip's book assigns values strictly on the basis of real-world, street-price trends. Phillip is scrupulously honest, even though his diet consists mostly of Mountain Dew and Ding Dongs.

From One Snubbie Fan to Another

The Snubnose Files
The Snubnose Files

I've always been a big fan of short-barreled revolvers. In fact, I think the original S&W M36 Chief's Special is one of the greatest guns ever designed. (I  once owned a S&W Highway Patrolman .357 N-frame that someone had given the “Fitz Special” treatment, with cutaway triggerguard, shortened barrel, rounded grip frame and custom grips. It was every bit  as cool as it sounds, and I  was the only kid on the block who had one. Ditto my old “Fitzed” Colt Army Special snubbie in .41 Long Colt. Now that was a carry gun, although you didn't just run down to the WalMart to buy ammo for it.)

How nice it was, then, to bumble across a website devoted entirely to the snubbie! It's  called The Snubnose Files, and you can check it out here. Gun Digest Books also puts out a super-informative guide to pocket handguns — not just revolvers but snubbies, too — titled “Gun Digest Buyer's Guide to Concealed Carry Handguns.” Written by Jerry Ahern and priced at less than $17, it's a bargain. See it here.

Don't say I never gave you anything.

Nobody Ever Called Them Pretty

It's hard to imagine an uglier piece of metal and wood than some of the contraptions churned out by H&R. As far as ugly ducklings go, H&R handguns might take the cake.

Harrington & Richardson has been out of the handgun business since the company (then doing business as H&R 1871, Inc.) was acquired by Marlin in 2000. Most people probably didn't even notice.

H&R handguns weren't ever anything you'd brag about owning, unless maybe it was one of their USRA single-shot .22 target pistols or maybe a nine-shot top-break Model 999 Sportsman. I've owned one of the former and two of the latter, and I never felt ashamed of them. I must admit, however, that most of H&R's pistols and revolvers look positively clunky and stupid compared to, say, a Colt Police Positive or a S&W M39.

But for pure butt-ugliness, nothing could approach H&R's .32 Self-Loading Pistol and its Model 925 .38 S&W revolver. Hoo boy! The .32 Self-Loader was a licensed knockoff of the British Webley7.65mm Pocket Auto (and was also available in a scaled-down .25 ACP version), but the Model 925 sprang unassisted from H&R's fevered corporate brow. Neither was a cheaply-made gun; it's just that their styling was so impossibly awkward that they look weird even to my jaded eyes, which is saying quite a lot.

I've tried to include as much information as possible about these guns in the 2011 Standard Catalog of Firearms (21st Edition), but I haven't quite been able to give them the coverage they probably deserve. However, when you consider that the book contains info on more than 25,000 different firearms from around the world, it's a pretty good one-volume reference/value guide for the firearms generalist who buys and trades guns fairly regularly — as I do. 

Anyway, these two poor, forlorn H&Rs are my candidates for Ugliest Pistol of All Time. In my experience, both were utterly reliable and acceptably accurate, but let's face it: they're about as pretty as the southbound end of a northbound mule.

Thoughts on the 1911

As we all know, 2011 is the centennial of the most popular handgun in the world, the Model 1911. Just this last weekend, though, as I was shooting my Taurus PT1911 in .38 Super, the question occurred to me: just what makes a 1911 a 1911? The terms “1911” and “1911A1,” of course, are merely military nomenclature for approved design specifications.

Taurus PT1911 .38 Super

One of the most important specs for the 1911 is that it fire the “Cal. .45 Automatic Pistol Ball Cartridge, Model of 1911,” otherwise known as the .45 ACP.  This chambering was so central to the design of the Model 1911 — in fact, the cartridge was developed somewhat before the 1911 itself was — that I suppose you could argue that no “1911” that is chambered for anything other than the .45 ACP  (.22 LR, 9mm Parabellum, .38 Super, 10mm, .460 Rowland, etc.) can be considered a “true” 1911. For its part, Colt never marked any of its nonmilitary 1911-style guns as “1911s,” preferring the bland “Model O” designation or descriptive names such as  “Super 38,” “Ace,” “Commander,” “Combat Commander,” “Delta Elite,” or “Government Model.” Common practice is to lump all 1911-style pistols together as 1911s, and that's a much better term than “1911 clones,” if you stop and think about it.

But maybe you don't want to stop and think about it. Neither do I, really. Instead, I'd much rather re-read Pat Sweeney's new book, “1911: The First 100 Years.” I say “re-read” because I had the very great pleasure of editing this book, which surely ranks as one of Pat's best. Entertaining, funny, informative — it's Pat Sweeney at the top of his game. You can order it here.

Anyway, over the next 13 months or so we're sure to be hearing more about the 1911, whatever you call it.

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