Last week Ian from Forgotten Weapons stopped by the house to borrow some equipment for an up coming video and he brought me a surprise. He had won at auction some Chinese pistols and had a few extras. So some horse trading perused. For some strange reason I just had to have this early Chinese hand made pistol. There was no magazine and it was missing the grips but still in good condition. This pistol shows to what length people will go to to have a weapon. The entire pistol looks to be made with hand tools, ie. chisel,file and hand drill. It is an interesting weapon so lets take a closer look at it.
The first two views are the completed pistol in a right and left view.
These next two pictures show it field striped.
You can see the chisel marks on the frame where the metal was cut away and filed to make the grip openings.
The trigger bar and disconnector looked like they were beat out of what ever they could get and then filed.
You can see the chisel marks in the slide grove.
The magazine catch is also missing, but it too was also chiseled out.
A close up of the hand made screws
a top view of the frame showing the barrel notches and the spring grove.
Close up of the barrel groves
The slide
A close up of the block, look at the chisel marks here.
The barrel was also hand made
The recoil spring and guide.
I am not sure what caliber this pistol is in. The magazine well looks to be large enough for 7.62×25. A caliber way to powerful for a basic blow back pistol.
This pistol is an interesting design and build.
Very neat. Any rifling? You should try fitting some other mags and also see what fits the chamber.
Yes there is rifling, it’s crude but there.
7.62×25 in a blow back? ha ha ha, nope! couldn’t extort me into pulling the trigger!
all jokes aside, this actually very interesting to look at it in terms of where everything came from, some of it is easy really, the cocking “grips” for lack of a more descriptive term are lifted right from a Mauser C96 as these Chinese pistols are want to do in most cases, the trigger looks to based of of the M1911, which I wouldn’t have put in China till WWII, I believe the TT-30 and TT-33 Russian handguns use the same trigger, but I wouldn’t expect them to make it into china till WWII either, which puts the gun at fairly late manufacture.
How does the gun take-down? it doesn’t have the Browning cross pin in front of the triggerguad, and the uninterrupted rails would prevent the slide from being able to be lifted off the frame at rearmost travel, there is a lug on the front of the barrel looks like it might line up with the mainspring housing on the slide at lock-up, or what passes for it, is it the Colt 1900 system? where you retract the slide and turn the barrel? that would make sense of the hook on the safety arm, and what looks to be two points for it to lock into the slide.
out of curiosity, does the safety work? or is it purely aesthetic?
and does the Colt 1900 use the same trigger system? because that would make sense as the Colt was used at least in Shanghai, which might allow it to influence a gunsmith further inland.
This pistol seems to be chambered for 7.63×25 Mauser, which was weaker than the Tokarev…
7.62 Mauser or Tokerev I don’t care, if it was 7.62 browning I might consider it, but the recoil spring doesn’t look to me to be capable of handling that even
It looks like a crude copy of a Ruby to me.
Having tried my hand at scratchbuilding with limited tools, I’m in minor awe at the amount of effort the builder put into that.
It’s easy to look down on a rough finish and chisel marks until you’ve tried removing more than a trivial amount of metal that way.
We make weapons here and I am amazed of the work this person accomplished with the limited tools he had.
not blow back ? not sure…
rotating barrel locking: there is locking recesses in the slide :
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