"The two major pistols to operate on the long recoil operating principle are the Webley Mars and the ____________."Thing is, when I finally got around to test-firing it, it didn't extract the spent shell.
On closer examination, most of the extractor was gone.
Now, on a blowback operated pistol the extractor isn't, strictly speaking, what you'd call necessary. On a gun like a PPK or Hi Point or Colt 1903, the extractor is only really needed to extract unfired rounds from the chamber. Tip-up barrel blowback autos like those from Beretta or their Taurus clones don't even have extractors. During firing, the spent shell is blown backward out of the chamber by the equal and opposite reaction to the same gasses that push the bullet out the front.
On a short recoil operated pistol, i.e. one where the barrel and breech travel backward locked together for a length of travel shorter than the length of the cartridge, you might still get some functionality with a broken extractor. There might be enough residual chamber pressure at the moment of unlocking to kick the spent case out of the chamber, although without the extractor claw to hold it in position to meet the ejector correctly, there could still be issues.
On a long recoil operated arm like the Frommer Stop, however, the barrel and breech remain locked together all the way to the rear, and the extractor is needed to hold the shell in place against the breechface as the barrel returns forward. Without the extractor, the round will likely just stay in the chamber.
No problem. Just buy a new extractor, right? Ha ha ha.
So, maybe make a new extractor? I worked at Coal Creek Armory at the time, and we had a full machine shop and gunsmiths on the premises who could build a gun from scratch with a lathe and a mill and a block of steel.
Okay, first, it wasn't like just the claw was gone. That would be easy enough to weld up and re-cut. This would require fabricating an entirely new part, and it's not like machinist's drawings were available for the piece.
So just get another Frommer Stop extractor and duplicate it! Except that I could count the number of Frommer Stops I've seen in the wild in my 25 years of manning gun store counters and attending gun shows without taking off both mittens.
Eventually, after a couple years of trying to find one locally that we could borrow to copy, the acquisition of a second gun was required to duplicate the part.
(This memory was brought up by a discussion on old cameras on the internet last night. And an extractor is a lot simpler part than anything you're liable to find in, say, a Ducati Sogno.)
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