Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we have a chance to take
a look at a pretty scarce Spanish service pistol.
This is a Gabilondo y Cia Llama M82,
or "Llama" if you prefer the Americanised pronunciation.
Either way, Llama or "Llama", that is not actually the name of the company.
It means flame in Spanish, and it is a trademark
that was acquired in 1932 by the company Gabilondo y Cia.
And they are one of the trifecta of the big Spanish handgun makers.
And most of their very successful pistols were put out under that tradename Llama.
So much so, that to a lot of people that's actually the name of the company.
... The three Spanish pistol makers would be Star, Astra and Llama.
Anyway, getting a little aside here.
This is a pistol that was developed for Spanish military trials.
At this point, we're talking early 1980s - maybe even late 1970s,
all of the Spanish gun makers were under pretty significant financial stress.
And they were all really hoping to get a military or a police contract for a new pistol
just to keep the company going, to give them a revenue stream.
And so they all came up with guns to submit to the military.
Now Gabilondo also had the Llama Omni design,
which ... they were selling in the early to mid-1980s in the US on the commercial market.
It had a pretty nice trigger pull, but was an absolute mechanical disaster.
Very expensive, very complicated thing to make.
And it is wise of them that they didn't bother to submit it,
or if they did submit it the Spanish military rejected it very quickly.
Because instead Gabilondo went ahead and developed
what is essentially a copy of the Beretta 92, at least mechanically speaking.
It's a gun with a lot of very effective safety mechanisms, it's reliable, it's well made.
And you wouldn't know it from the outside, but it is in fact
a mechanical copy of the Beretta 92. So let's take a closer look.
In terms of basic fundamentals, what we have here is a steel framed, double action,
hammer fired, double stack, basically a modern 9mm service pistol.
And the similarities to the Beretta begin right here with the magazine,
which is in fact interchangeable with the Beretta 92 - with one small change in feature.
So this holds 15 rounds, here's a Beretta one (this is actually a South African Vektor magazine).
But you can see the difference right here, the M82 has a magazine safety.
Although it was sometimes removed for commercial production guns,
and in fact it has been removed from this pistol, so I can't show it to you actually functioning.
But this little tab on the magazine body is meant to elevate a little tab in the gun,
and disable or remove the magazine safety.
However, Beretta magazines that don't have that little tab
as long as you don't have the safety in the gun, will work just fine.
They'll lock open, they lock in place. It's a Beretta magazine.
Now in addition to the magazine safety, which like I said isn't on this particular pistol,
there is also a slide mounted safety which doubles as a de-cocker.
So if I have the hammer cocked and I activate the safety, if I engage the safety,
it will drop the hammer although it prevents it from hitting the firing pin.
And you can't actually cock the hammer with the safety engaged.
So I can run the slide to unload the pistol for example.
But when I drop the slide down the hammer is going to drop down to that position.
So when you disengage the safety, your first shot is double action.
Two things you can see here, first off Gabilondo decided to take sort of a traditional
enclosed slide instead of going with the open slide design that Beretta did.
And then of course we have our markings on the side.
So that's the actual company name, Gabilondo y Cia, out of Vitoria, España.
We have a serial number down here.
These were done in I believe segments of ten thousand.
"P" and then "A", "PB", "PC" and so on.
The four digits there are your serial number, and the last two digits here
are the date of production, so this is 1988 production.
On the inside of the frame down here we'll see in a minute,
there is actually a Spanish proof mark that also corresponds to 1988.
On the other side of the slide we have that Llama trademark name there,
and calibre, which is 9 Parabellum.
And down here on the frame is the military model designation, M82.
And then lastly we have Llama logos on both of the grip panels.
There's one more marking on this particular example and that's
on the bottom of the trigger guard, those are the import marks.
This was brought in commercially by Stoeger, who was an importer of a lot of Spanish pistols.
The magazine release down here can actually be swapped from side to side, which is kind of cool.
This is a fairly early example of a pistol with that capability.
And it's worth pointing out here that the safety is ambidextrous, it's on both sides of the slide.
Disassembly is about one step more difficult than a Beretta.
Instead of just being able to flip the disassembly lever down here,
we do actually have to move the slide back.
So you can see there's a little cutout in the slide there,
you are going to line that up with this disassembly lever.
The easy way to visualise that is you are going to line up the front edge of this panel
with the front edge of that feature right there.
Then you rotate the disassembly lever down ...
and the slide comes right off the frame.
The recoil spring is captive, and it's not uncommon for them to be loose like this one is.
So if you take it apart upside down the recoil spring will stay in place.
If you take it apart right side up, the recoil spring will flop around and then fall out.
The barrel will look very familiar to anyone who is familiar with a Beretta.
So that's the barrel and the locking piece.
This is going to toggle up and down as the slide moves back and forth.
And we have these two recesses right here in the slide
into which ... the wings on the side of this locking flap are going to lock.
So when the slide is in battery the barrel is locked into the slide.
When the whole thing moves backward the barrel will move backward with the slide
until this pin is hit, which is going to force the locking wedge to drop.
At which point the barrel stops moving and the slide can continue, thus cycling the pistol.
For comparison's sake, here is a Beretta 92 barrel and locking wedge,
and here is our Llama M82.
Notice that the Beretta is just a little bit longer.
It's long enough that you can't actually swap a Beretta barrel into the Llama.
However, I do also happen to have the barrel out of a Vektor SP1,
which is also a copy of the Beretta, and that is the same length as the M82.
And this barrel I can actually drop right into the Spanish slide.
It is also interesting to note that the locking blocks are not interchangeable
between the Beretta (or Vektor and the Beretta clones) and the M82.
The M82's locking piece is the same design,
but it is just slightly narrower side to side than a Beretta one.
So if I take my M82 locking block, I can drop that onto my Vektor barrel.
And then that will drop right into the slide and it will function very nicely.
So that's how similar this is. A lot of critical dimensions
are actually copied from the Beretta in the design of the M82.
Before we move on to looking at the frame, let's take a quick look at the safety itself.
What we have here is a two-part firing pin, and so when I engage the safety
it's going to rotate the rear moving part of the firing pin assembly up out of the way,
so that the hammer doesn't have anything that it can actually hit.
When this is in the fire position the hammer will hit that moving piece,
which will in turn hit the front section of the firing pin and fire the pistol.
Now when it comes to the frame the Spanish did not go quite so far in copying the Beretta.
Although perhaps they should have, this has some shades of Llama Omni to it.
So let me take off the grip panels.
Alright, I'm getting horrible flashbacks to the Omni here, and it's not going to get any better.
We have external components here, this can pop out of the frame a bit.
Which it's not supposed to do, so we have to hold that in place.
Got little teeny wire springs.
This semi-circular cutout right here by the way,
is where the magazine safety would originally be located.
So you can see the tab there, and as I snap the magazine all the way into place,
you've got that tab coming up inside that little cutout.
Again, this particular pistol is a commercial export,
had the magazine safety removed but that's where it would be.
One interesting element to this is the removable backstrap.
So if I take these two pins and slide them backwards
to release the mainspring housing.
... That's going to pop off because it's under spring tension to begin with
because we have our hammer spring right there.
In fact you can see there's a little cross slot right there.
And the hammer spring has a pin running across it down here at the bottom
that is going to link up with that slot.
And so that's holding the ... spring in place
to allow the guide rod down into the base of the mainspring housing.
Where this gets like typically late pattern Llama is we have now our ...
hammer spring that is just kind of flopping around here.
And into theory (there we go) I can take it out.
But now it's a little bit finicky to fish it back in here and get it into just the right position.
In addition the pin that holds the hammer in place is really happy to just fall out.
And then you've got the hammer that's loose in here, ... now the hammer comes out.
And if you're not familiar with how to get all this stuff back together,
this presents a really awkward nightmare to try and reassemble.
So like I said, ... this is definitely better than the Omni,
but I'm still a bit surprised that this stuff
all made it into Spanish service without simplification.
I mentioned the proof marks on the frame, they are down here under the left side grip panel.
The typical three Spanish proof marks. This is "H2", which is the date code for 1988.
There's the M82 field stripped plus a little bit extra.
Normal field strip you wouldn't be taking out the hammer spring and such.
If I gave it a good shake I could probably get some of the other
fire control elements to fall off the gun, but I'm not going to do that.
Despite this complexity, the M82 was by all accounts
a strong, robust, reliable, effective service pistol.
You have to be a little bit careful with the bits coming out
when you start to go beyond a basic level of slide removal for disassembly,
but other than that, the gun served well.
One of the interesting aspects to this story is, as I said at the beginning,
the Spanish companies were all hurting for business at this point in time.
So much so that Astra and Llama actually came to an agreement that they would split
the manufacture of the winning army pistol, regardless of who got the contract.
So it ended up that Llama (or Gabilondo) got the contract,
Astra was actually subcontracted to make the slides and some of the small parts
for these pistols as a way to keep both companies cooperatively in business.
Of course that didn't prevent Astra from going out of business in 1997,
which is also when these guys went out of production.
So production began in 1986, the first deliveries to ... army acceptance was in 1987
when they replaced the Star 9mm that had previously been used by the Spanish military.
Star by the way, had a really good compelling entry into these trials,
the Star Model 30 or Model 31s.
Not accepted by the army, but they were accepted by the Guardia Civil, the national police force.
At any rate, production ended in '97.
... A very small number of these pistols were brought into the US commercially,
including this one, you saw this was imported by Stoeger.
Who was one of the main importers for Spanish pistols during this time.
But really they didn't see much commercial sale at all,
they are primarily just a Spanish Army pistol.
So it's really cool to get a chance to take a look at this one.
I should add they have since been replaced in the Spanish Army by H&K USPs.
So they are on their way out. Not sure exactly what's going to happen
to all of the ex-army examples.
But the chances are pretty good that they are all going to be destroyed,
because that's what the Spanish government is doing with surplus firearms these days.
Anyway, a big thanks to the viewer who loaned me this particular example to take a look at.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.