[ Alk Target Pistol ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a really neat German single-shot .22 calibre target pistol.
This was made by a company, or a gunsmith, or perhaps it's just being called an Alk ... (a-l-k).
And I don't know anything about where it came from, aside from Germany.
I've never heard of the company, I've never seen one of these before, but it's a pretty neat gun.
Whether it's actually factory made by a small shop
or a one-off gunsmith creation, I can't say for sure.
But it seems to be quite well made, and it's a neat mechanism.
So, let's dive in and take a closer look at it.
Alrighty, where to start here? We have a 12 inch long barrel, this is chambered for .22 rimfire.
We have a few markings up here on the top.
There's the "Alk", which is either the manufacturer or the model name, hard to say for sure.
And then ... there is a marking down here that was ...
all I can quite make out is something berg, presumably in Germany.
It looks like this has been refinished and that marking either was badly stamped in the first place
or it has been polished down a bit and is almost impossible to read now.
The other markings we have on here are a pair of German proof marks down there.
German proof mark and 5.3mm on the barrel there.
Now 5.3mm essentially means .22 rimfire.
The actual technical bore diameter of .22 rimfire is like 5.38mm,
and in Germany in particular it was thought that
you could improve accuracy by tightening down the bore a bit.
So you will find German .22s kind of like this,
marked with 5.3 or sometimes even 5.2mm, but it is .22 rimfire.
We've got a rather nice wide flat square notch rear sight there.
It is adjustable for both elevation and windage.
That's a nice textured ramp with a front bead sight.
And then the way this works is a simple blowback slide.
Which would suggest that it's semi-auto,
but it's actually a single-shot pistol, because there is no magazine.
What happens is when you fire, the pistol is going to cycle open like that.
You can see right here that big round cylinder, that is the ejector.
So when this cycles open it's going to pull the empty case out,
and right there - boom - that ejector is going to kick the empty shell out of the gun.
The other thing there is the striker that ... hits the cartridge rim there,
but it doesn't really matter, because the cartridge has already been kicked out by that point.
Now like I said, when you fire it cycles open,
and it's going to lock open in this position, courtesy of this latch right here.
You'll see how that works when we take it apart.
So once it's open you can then take your next cartridge,
drop it onto the loading tray there,
and then you just hit the button and it will close the slide and it's ready to fire another time.
Alright, for disassembly we will start with this obvious screw on the bottom of the action.
This is what holds the barrel in place, it's a captive screw.
We just loosen it like that ...
and then I can pull the slide back a little bit, and pull the barrel out.
We've got a lug right here that holds the barrel into the action.
That's the screw hole for that guy, and then these two just kind of hold it in place.
With the barrel out we can now lift out the slide assembly,
just lift it up and bring it forward, there we go.
And then this screw is what holds the main action into the wood.
Pull that out.
And there's a second one at the back here that has to come out as well.
There we go, pull that screw out.
And now we can lift this guy ... come on ... there we go, that comes out.
We're left with our wood stock here, pretty nicely inletted.
... You don't really have to do a good job finishing the inside of the stock
if you're not particularly interested in just artistic quality.
But this one has been nicely done on the inside.
Of course there's some nice checkering on the grip itself.
There's that.
Back here we don't have that much going on.
This is a striker-fired pistol, so there is a sear ... right there.
When I pull the trigger it's just going to drop the sear,
that will release the striker ... to fire the pistol.
Here is that hold open, you can see there's a little catch on it right there.
And when I push it in, it's going to let the slide drop forward.
That catches on this notch on the inside of the slide.
There are actually two serial numbers on the gun here,
782 is on the underside of the action ...
and also on the underside of the barrel.
So that does suggest a factory production,
but 782 also suggests a fairly significant number of these being made.
And I'm not aware of any records of any others.
And then we can take off this screw.
That is what locks the rear sight block into the rest of the action.
In order to take this off I would have to actually pull the trigger
so it can slide out, and I don't want to deal with that.
I don't know what the spring situation is like holding that trigger in place.
So we're going to leave this as it is, and just if we can put it back together there.
But that's how the last bits of this would come apart.
As for the slide itself, we've got two springs in the back.
So this one is the main spring that ... pushes the slide forward after it recoils.
And its guide rod here is also the ejector that comes out of that hole.
And then we also have a striker and striker spring.
That's a really pretty typical sort of piece.
The hook here, the little fin, ... is held by the sear back in there.
So that slides in there, and the striker spring ...
goes in behind it.
My gut feeling is that this is not commercial, this is a one-off creation
put together by an enthusiastic target shooter who's mechanically inclined.
I know a few gunsmiths who like to do this sort of thing for themselves.
It's the enjoyment of the project and the building
that really gives them a lot of happiness in doing it.
Now it could be I'm wrong. If you know anything more about the background of this pistol,
if it was in fact a commercial organisation, or if there are more of [this] pattern out there,
please let me know down in the comments, I'll be keeping an eye on them.
If not, well I hope you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.