What's Old is New, and Then is Now

Have you ever had to check to see if a muzzle loading firearm was loaded? If you haven't, it's not that hard.

First you make sure that it's not primed or cocked, and then you drop a long dowel down the muzzle, and mark it at the crown. Then pull it out and hold it alongside the barrel with the mark even with the muzzle end. If the other end of the rod doesn't come even with the breech end, there's a powder charge and a projectile in there.

It's obviously easier with revolvers, whether cartridge or cap 'n' ball, since you can observe the contents of the chambers directly.

When self-loading pistols were first introduced, a lot of thought went into various ways to ascertain the chamber's status without having to cycle the action. Many early autos, like the Luger, had extractors that doubled as visual/tactile loaded chamber indicators.

Savage's Model 1907 pocket auto originally had a clip that encircled the breech, shaped kind of like a pocket clip on some pens, with a tab that extended rearward and would be forced outward by the rim of a chambered round.

Later models dispensed with it, as it required separate machining steps to both the barrel and slide, added an extra part, and could tie up the slide if the finger-like indicator tab were to break off.

Besides, loaded chamber indicators are very much a "trust but verify" sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather check the chamber manually regardless.

.

The Final Savages

The very last Savage .32 pistols were made in the 1920s. Here's one of them.

(If you want to collect Savage's cool Buck Rogers-looking Art Deco auto pistols, I can't recommend Bailey Brower's volume highly enough. It's essential.)

.

Vintage Pistolero

If you've been enjoying the write-ups on the old Savage automatics, or are just into vintage handgunnery and Americana, the booklet The Tenderfoot's Turn, by Bat Masterson is available in Kindle format for only ninety-nine cents.

Commissioned as an advertising gimmick by Savage Arms to promote their futuristic ten-shooter back in the day, original copies bring big money in good condition. The Kindle copy will let you read it without having to worry about folding, spindling, or mutilating a piece of fragile antique ephemera.

.

It's getting ever more savage...

...over at the other blog!

Savage!

Dick Williams has a piece up over at American Cop on a Savage 1917 he picked up recently.

They're such neat guns, with their sort of ray gun Art Deco lines, striker-fired operation, and double-column magazine. (Elbert Searle was over a decade ahead of Browning and Saive with that.)

Savage Model 1917-20

With collectable Colt and Smith prices through the roof, Savage pocket autos are still pretty reasonably priced for the collector on a budget. Also, there are at least two dozen variations, just in the production models of .32 and .380, which makes for fun collecting.

Table of .32 production totals and serial number ranges in Savage Automatic Pistols

While the pistols are cheaper and there's not as large a field of collectors, that means reference materials are more scarce and expensive. James Carr's little volume Savage Automatic Pistols is a handy identification guide but is short on background material, long out of print and expensive when you find a copy. The coffee table book Savage Pistols by Bailey Brower is a more comprehensive history and lavishly illustrated, but it's not cheap either.

Maybe I'll do a Sunday Smith style series of posts on the Savages I've managed to accumulate.

When I'm done with those, I think Bobbi has a few, too, and I don't think we've duplicated any models between us, but I'm not sure.

EDIT: Heh. In the linked piece, Dick Williams mentions that this was his first experience with a Savage, and I noticed a couple issues. 

The first thing that caught my eye was referring to the gun as blowback operated as opposed to locked-breech recoil. Which it is...kinda? 

The Savage is supposed to be a mechanically-delayed blowback, with the rotation of the barrel as the bullet travels through the rifling keeping the barrel and breech together until the projectile exits the muzzle. As to whether or not it actually does this in real life, though? Well, that's a matter of some debate. 

The other was this:

The gun has an external hammer attached to which is a long firing pin that moves rearward with the hammer when the gun is cocked and forward when fired. The Savage is the first gun I’ve seen with this feature as opposed to the internally mounted, spring operated firing pins on the more modern guns I normally shoot.

While the Savage certainly looks like it's hammer-fired, the thing that looks like a hammer spur is just an external cocking piece linked to the striker. The intent may have been to allow the user to de-cock the gun by controlling the "hammer spur" while pulling the trigger, gun safety as we currently know it having not yet been invented in 1907.

.

Savages!

Date of Manufacture, Left to Right: 1911, 1914, 1915, 1919, 1921

Having been more-or-less priced out of the Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector market, I have turned my attention to filling gaps in my Tip-Up and Top-Break Smith collections, as well as learning about Savage pocket pistols.

Above you may behold a selection of striker-fired, double-stack, vest-pocket-sized semiautomatic pistols that were marketed to tenderfeet and housewives more than a hundred years ago. I'll have fun learning the ins and outs of this particular field of firearms history!
.