u/artisanalautist

History has a delightful habit of making successful designs look inevitable. John Browning’s pattern won because it was an extraordinarily good compromise. Any compromise that wins for long enough stops looking like a compromise, and starts looking like the only possible answer.

Some of you may remember me from posting on FOSSCAD. Phil Luty and I used to trade emails back in ancient history, so I’ve been around long enough to remember when the DIY choices were basically machine a subgun or make a zip gun.

Phil’s only publicly elaborated conception of a vaguely concealable homemade handgun was a single-shot 12 gauge involving rubber bands and hex keys as a firing mechanism. I’ve always liked pistols myself, and of course, something that rudimentary is not the only possible answer to the DIY question.

Yesterday I disappeared down a rabbit hole reading manufacturing papers on the old Southern California “Ring of Fire” companies, seeing as designers in this community are giving that family their moment in the Sun with recent developments of 3DP frames bringing back to life who knows how many evidence locker relics.

One detail tucked away in an Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners write up genuinely surprised me. The centre-fire Jennings/Bryco/Jimenez pistol generally used a steel breech insert cast into the zinc slide. The .22 eventually didn’t. According to the manufacturing literature and contemporary accounts, the earliest 5000 Jennings J-22s used a steel breechblock, but after endurance testing Jennings concluded it wasn’t necessary for the rimfire version and deleted it from later production. The slide became, in effect, a die-cast zinc component requiring only the secondary operations needed to finish it. At the time that the paper I was reading was being written, there was a plan to completely remove finishing of the breach block after diecasting. I can’t prove it, but it appears that serial numbers in the range forecasted had some sort of a change that needed a new specification firing pin, so I do think that happened.

When we break down what a slide is, you’re dealing with an assembly that does quite a few jobs. It encloses the action, carries reciprocating mass, supports the breech, guides the firing mechanism, contains the recoil system, and often carries the sights or more advanced optics. It is integral to rendering the system in which it operates semi automatic through the firing cycle.

We’ve become so used to seeing all of those jobs packaged into one machined steel component that it starts looking like a law of physics rather than one historical engineering solution. Looking back through some forgotten pistol designs, it’s remarkable how many designers simply refused to accept that premise

What if the slide wasn’t the breech?

The 1909 Jäger is one of those pistols that gets stranger the longer you stare at it. Initially it just looks like another early automatic pocket pistol.
Then you realise how little of the upper actually moves.

The barrel is fixed, most of the reciprocating portion of the slide occupies only the rear of the pistol. The breech itself is a separate precision component rather than simply being “the slide.”
Viewed with modern eyes, it almost feels like someone started with a conventional pistol and kept asking:

What actually has to move?

…until there was almost nothing left.

But that’s only half the story. The frame is just as interesting. Instead of the monolithic forged, cast, or printed frame we’re accustomed to, the Jäger is largely an assembly of plates, spacers and fabricated components. It feel almost like sheet-metal thinking before sheet-metal pistols became fashionable. Maybe someone could try sending some sketches to SCS.

So the Jäger isn’t simply questioning the slide. It’s questioning the frame as well. Rather than treating the pistol as two large expensive parts, it decomposes the entire architecture into smaller engineering problems. Whether that was commercially the right answer is almost beside the point.

The important thing is the question it asks:

Does the moving upper actually have to extend over the whole barrel?

It’s tempting to dismiss the Jäger as an Edwardian curiosity - apparently conceptualised in the course of one mad rush of a weekend. Then you remember the stamped-slide SIG P220/P225/P6 family. Mechanically they’re obviously completely different pistols. Philosophically, they’re asking something surprisingly similar. The stamped steel slide isn’t itself the hardened breech. Instead, the high-stress breech block is a separate hardened component retained within the slide by hardened pins. Different manufacturing era. Different production methods.

The same underlying question of a central ethos we all accept today in commercial slides but know relatively well can be malleable in 3D2FA quietly reappears:

Does the expensive, highly stressed part actually need to be the whole slide?

The pistol that genuinely surprised me wasn’t the Ring of Fire family. It was the Argentine Hafdasa HA.

Looking at the parts laid out on a bench, you suddenly realise almost everything is one of three shapes. Tube. Cylinder. Stamping. The receiver is a tube. The bolt is a turned cylinder.

The lower is largely there to carry the magazine and fire-control parts. The first version (not the one made by the staff of HAFDASA who went and did their own thing after HAFDASA went broke) is an open bolt semi auto - there is essentially no architectural excess. You can watch Ian at Forgotten Weapons cock one of these by putting his finger into the ejection port and pulling back on the bolt.

It feels less like someone designed a pistol from “what do I want it to do” than like someone kept deleting components until the thing still worked. The comparison that kept coming back to me wasn’t another pocket pistol. It was the Ruger Mk and the Ruger Standard. Not because they’re mechanically identical, surely they are not. But because they both arrive at a remarkably similar architectural conclusion: fixed barrel, compact action contained within a tubular upper, the functional circular mechanism concentrated in that upper, the lower hanging beneath as the grip and fire-control assembly.

The Ruger refines the concept into a superb sporting pistol with a receive which can be rendered out of plumbing pipe - just ask the Australian gun dealer I won’t name on the ancient Weaponeer forum who did exactly this, sold a bunch of “ghost” Ruger Mk derived pistols (the first of which seized was found in the x ray machine at a court carried by a paranoid psychologist) and did a few years in jail.

The HA strips it down until it becomes almost brutally minimal.

If the Jäger asks:
How little of the upper actually needs to move?

the Hafdasa asks:
How little pistol do you actually need?

And who doesn’t like a receiver made out of a pipe**?**

The Lercker

The more I looked at the .25 ACP chambered Lercker, the less it looked like a pistol. It started looking like a Sten that had been shrunk until it happened to fit inside a handgun, fitted with a novel bolt. FA still relies a fixed firing pin. Tubular receiver. Simple blowback. The unusual part is how the moving mass is packaged, in a pistol, in the 50s when it was developed.

Instead of sitting entirely behind the chamber, it is divided between forward and rear sections connected together, so that the overall moving assembly is redistributed around the fixed barrel, like an Uzi or Mac, but then complicated further to allow FA vs SA.

Ring of Fire: When manufacturing becomes the architecture

By the time I came back to the Ring of Fire guns, I found myself looking at them completely differently.
I’d stopped thinking about them as “cheap pistols.”
I started thinking about them as manufacturing exercises.

Every design decision seems to ask the same question:

Can the manufacturing process define the geometry instead of the milling machine?

Pressure die casting wasn’t just a production method. It became part of the architecture.
The external form, the internal cavities, how finished a part was when it came directly from the die. Secondary machining still existed, but the mould had already done most of the heavy lifting.

That’s a fundamentally different philosophy from simply machining a conventional slide more cheaply. It’s redesigning the pistol around what the manufacturing process does well. The company history is just as fascinating. Names changed. Owners changed (… on paper). Bankruptcies came and went. Lawsuits arrived with depressing regularity, as will be the case if you make many guns (I was shocked to learn while reading another association of toolmarks and firearm examiners that they had one die per gun, for a frame and a slide, and die cast them one at a time!), and you make them accessible.

Yet running through all of them is a remarkably consistent manufacturing philosophy. The companies evolved, disappeared, re-emerged and rebranded. The underlying production ideas showed far more continuity than the corporate names did. There was very little in the way of major refinement other than cutting a wider ejector slot on a finished slide in the Bryco era.

Five questions
We can’t suggest these pistols are competing with one another across time, space, country of origin, and utility or market contexts. Each one was answering different questions.

The Jäger asks:
Does the breech have to be the slide?
The SIG asks:
Does the expensive steel have to be the whole slide?
The Hafdasa asks:
How little pistol do you actually need?
The Lercker asks:
Does the reciprocating mass have to live where history put it?
The Ring of Fire companies ask:
Can manufacturing become part of the architecture itself?

Some of these concepts were commercial dead ends, and deserved to be. Some were superseded and replaced - for example, the P6 slide was later
made solid and could replace a pinned bolt version on a drop in basis. ROF guns kept punching on for decades.

Thing is, dead ends and superseded, needs driven design concessions of yesteryear’s industrial machinations can still contain good ideas.

The Jäger separates the breech.
The SIG separates the hardened wear surfaces.
The Hafdasa strips the pistol back to tubes, cylinders and stampings.
The Lercker questions where the moving mass belongs and how big a calibre you want or need and turn it FA
The Ring of Fire companies ask how much of a pistol can be defined by a mould rather than a milling machine.

None of them replaced the Browning pattern.
But together they remind us of something that’s easy to forget: The slide was never a law of nature back in the day and it isn’t now.

Images in the comments.

Occurs to me all modern gas masks tend to be an efficient case of “straight from your nose/mouth to the filter”.

When and why did the “hose to the filter” set up die off, and are there any slim line respirators which are modern or milaurp in the last 40 years where the respirators is dead centre or straight off to one side (or both sides)?

Where can I get a complete, wildcat barrel made for a decent donor 9x19 pistol?

I’m trying to get together a wildcat which is basically “halfway between 9mm Ultra/9mm Police and 9x19” for a semi auto pistol, but given you can’t really replace cut metal out of a 9x19 chamber, I’m now clear how to make it happen.