Historically speaking, about the only thing worse than getting shot with an Auto Mag
was being a financial investor in a company that manufactured the Auto Mag.
[ The New Auto Mag 180-D ]
- Over!
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and perhaps today
we are looking at the end of the Auto Mag curse.
This is the most recent iteration of the Auto Mag 180,
manufactured by Auto Mag Limited.
And it's actually the first new iteration of the Auto Mag since the early 1980s.
So to put this in a little bit of perspective, first off,
the Auto Mag 180 is one of the early group of self-loading Magnum automatic pistols.
These would include guns like the Wildey Survivor, the Auto Mag, the LAR Grizzly,
basically oversized semi-auto pistols firing massively powerful cartridges.
They were intended for handgun hunting, for target shooting,
and for simply having a ginormous automatic pistol.
Now the original Auto Mag was designed by ... two guys, Harry Sanford and Max Gera.
And ... well, I have a video on the original Pasadena manufactured Auto Mags
which I'll link at the end of this video, you can take a look at that to see where the story really started.
But the short version is: in the summer of 1971 the guns first started shipping.
By the spring of 1972 Auto Mag had gone bankrupt.
But the concept of this pistol, and the Magnum magnificence of it,
was so alluring that investors continued to line up with the idea that,
"Oh, the last guys did it wrong, but we can do it right.
Like they ... finally got rid of the problems, we can take over the company and make them right.
And we'll make a ton of money, and sell a ton of guns, and it'll be great!"
This pistol went through no fewer than six different companies ... between 1973 and 1982.
There were a total of about 9,000 Auto Mag 180s manufactured by this sequence of companies.
And it really was the same tooling, the same pistol.
That just one company would go bankrupt and sell off all their assets,
and some other company, be it a real company or a paper iteration of the former company,
would buy up the assets at a huge discount, try to make the guns,
dump a ton of capital into making them, then not be able to get that many sales,
and have a ton of quality control problems, and go bankrupt themselves.
And this process would simply repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
Now Harry Sanford, the designer, passed away in 1996
and ownership of everything that was left at that point passed to his son, Walter Sanford.
Walter sold off everything that was Auto Mag
in 2015 to Auto Mag Limited, who are the current manufacturers.
Now, they're kind of in the same boat here as the previous buyers.
As it turns out the current owners bought the remnants of the company
because, well, initially they just had a friend who wanted to buy a couple of parts.
They tracked down the company and they're like, "Hey, we want to buy these couple of parts."
And Sanford's like, "Well, that's cool, I'll happily sell you the parts.
But I'd really like to sell everything." They send a list of ... what "everything" entails.
And the current owners (who formed Auto Mag Limited after buying everything),
they look at this list and they're like, "Wow, there's hundreds of frames that are still there,
and lots of other parts. And you know what?
Everyone's finally worked out the kinks, we can just assemble a bunch of guns,
sell them, and make some money, and it'll be great!
And then move on to the next thing." They're not really gun engineering people.
Until they actually get all of these parts and discover,
"Wow, this is actually a gigantic horrible money pit,
because all of these parts have huge problems."
So like they had 200 bolts - broken.
Because a lot of the original parts were cast.
Bolts and frames and cocking pieces were all cast,
they had porosity issues, they had durability issues.
The original guns had significant both quality control issues,
and just general functioning and reliability issues.
It was difficult sometimes to get them to run with more than 5 rounds
in the allegedly 7 round magazine, for instance.
So what's impressive is the current Auto Mag Limited,
instead of doing what all of the previous companies did,
and make some guns that don't really work, and sell them
until finally it catches up, and then they go bankrupt.
The current Auto Mag Limited has spent the last 7 years now actually re-engineering the gun,
and completing what the design should have been in the first place.
And this involves a couple of dozen tweaks to the design.
Some of them very significant, some of them very small.
But it seems like what these add up to is an Auto Mag 180 that is actually now
reliable, enjoyable, accurate, and actually a really nice gun.
Assuming that a .44 AMP (that's .44 Auto Mag Pistol),
assuming a giant .44 AMP self-loading pistol is the gun that you're looking for.
So let's pull this apart and take a closer look at some of the internals.
We'll compare it to an original earlier ... 1970s production Auto Mag,
and see some of what they changed in the design.
Alright, let's start by putting this thing in proper size perspective:
there's a 1911, these are frankly huge.
They offer both 6.5 and 8.5 inch barrel versions,
but if you're going to do an Auto Mag, why would you do it halfway?
This is the 8.5 inch, which I imagine has to be the one that would be more popular.
Mechanically this is identical to the original Auto Mags,
just with small features tweaked
to basically fix the system and turn it into a fully functional working gun.
We have a short-recoil operated, rotating bolt mechanism here.
And the way that you cock this thing, honestly, you cock the hammer first,
and then you can cycle the bolt back.
And this is one of the immediate improvements that you'll recognise
if you've ever handled an original Auto Mag.
Originals were actually really quite difficult to cycle open manually.
And what they've done on this is dramatically lightened the force required to do that.
So I can pretty easily cycle that back, lock it open.
Once it is locked open the barrel and barrel extension do slide freely
through, well, this would be their normal ... distance of travel [when cycling].
So when you're firing for real this is going to come back this far.
That's going to cause the bolt to cam open, and then once it's unlocked it cycles back.
We'll show you that in detail in a moment.
Here is the magazine, that holds 7 rounds.
And that is seven rounds of .44 AMP, which is essentially rimless .44 Magnum.
This is Starline manufactured brass, .44 Auto Mag.
And again for comparison's sake, there's 9mm Parabellum.
So this is significantly bigger, ... we're talking about 240 grains at about 1,200 feet per second,
so it's a quite powerful cartridge.
Now while we're looking at the magazine I want to start showing you some of the improvements,
because this is the new production magazine, and this is a magazine from an original.
In this case a North Hollywood manufactured Auto Mag.
So one improvement to the new ones is that the base plate
is now removable instead of being welded on.
More importantly, and you can't really see it here because it's a small change,
but the new magazines have actually been elevated.
They sit approximately 0.110 inch higher than the originals,
and that solved some of the feeding problems that original ones had.
They tended to push rounds into the feed ramp.
Well, with this new design of slightly taller magazine
the rounds get pushed straight into the chamber,
instead of having to hit the feed ramp, and then slide up into the chamber.
So that's a good example of the sort of improvement that they've made to these new Auto Mags.
It's also worth pointing out that the old ones just don't look nearly as good.
The weld seam is way more visible, not as clean.
You can see here they've actually cut a dimple as a stress relief
so that you won't get a crack propagating from the top of that weld.
And the material just looks a lot nicer on the new guns.
While we're here let's take a quick look at the markings (this is going to be a little tricky
because this is such a shiny gun), but they have their own new Auto Mag logo.
(It's very reflective there, it's already starting to get smudged from me handling it.)
But Auto Mag, this is the Classic Edition in .44 AMP.
And then on the other side (again hard to read there with the reflections),
we have Auto Mag Model 180-D, made in Loris, South Carolina.
Alright, at this point we can continue with disassembly by simply pulling down this lug.
Note that I have taken the magazine out, but I leave the bolt locked open.
And then when you pull this disassembly tab down,
you can just take the barrel and barrel extension off of the gun.
To continue with our disassembly, at this point what we're going to do is drop the bolt forward.
There are two recoil springs on the Auto Mag, and they are located in these two channels.
So there's a little hex screw there.
This is actually not a separate screw, it is the recoil spring guide rod on each side.
And so I can just unscrew each of these.
It's going to pop just a tiny bit when it's completely unscrewed, but there we go, not very much.
There's one ... and there's the other.
Now I can take the bolt out of the gun.
So as I push the bolt back it's going to rotate, which would be the unlocking cycle,
and sort of pop open, and you'll notice at this point
the cocking piece on the back twists off to the side.
It is under spring tension, ... what that normally is doing
is trying at all times to rotate the bolt into battery so that it's locked.
So when I pull the bolt all the way back, this (there we go) this comes off.
... That yellow is some grease in there which I'm going to leave
because that's helpful for proper operation.
And you can see that there are two openings on what would normally be left and right,
that match these two lugs on the back of the bolt.
So to assemble this the cocking piece goes on the back,
there we go, and rotates into position like that.
I can then take out the firing pin, right there.
Now in order to take the bolt out there is a cross pin, right here,
that I'm just going to push out with a plastic punch.
There we go. That is essentially the cam pin,
that's the equivalent of a cam pin in an AR,
because it runs in this track in the bolt.
When the bolt is all the way forward ...
that cam pin hits this curve,
and the bolt is forced to rotate which locks it in place.
Anyway, we're going to go ahead and pull it out here.
There is a little spring detent in the bottom of the frame that holds that in position.
So you kind of have to wiggle this out because of that detent.
Here is another one of the improvements made.
The original Auto Mag actually had a firing pin that was heavy enough
that it could in the ... right/wrong circumstances fire out of battery.
... Basically if you didn't have a magazine in, you put a cartridge straight into the chamber,
and dropped the slide without any resistance on it,
there was a chance that the gun would detonate.
Because the firing pin had enough inertia to slam forward
with enough force to detonate a primer.
Apparently, the weight of the firing pin was increased
during the original development process to fix some other problem.
And they didn't realise that it had the secondary effect of causing the occasional out of battery.
So what the new company did is they re-manufactured the firing pin out of titanium,
so that they can keep essentially the same shape, the same geometry, but make it lighter.
So this went down in weight by about 30%.
And after their testing, they are content that the titanium firing pin
does not cause out of batteries the way that the steel could.
Now we can take a look at the bolts. This is our new bolt, this is our original bolt.
And you can see a lot of subtle changes here.
So for one thing, this relief cutout has been substantially changed in profile.
And this is part of what was responsible for the
unreliability of the original guns with a full magazine.
The problem was if you had 6 or 7 cartridges in the magazine
there was enough upward pressure on the magazine stack
that it would actually interfere with proper operation of the bolt and cause malfunctions.
And so by changing the relief cutout that's sitting over the magazine,
they actually appear to have leveraged that force
into actually assisting the bolt to rotate closed, instead of preventing it from cycling.
... That's a nice bit of engineering tweaking to the gun.
They've made the whole locking system a bit stronger
by making the locking lugs a bit longer front to back.
So this is our new bolt, that's our old bolt, you can see that these are a little bit shorter than these.
One more element of change here, the cocking pieces on the original Auto Mags were cast parts.
And so there were some tolerancing issues with them,
and there were also some quality control issues, these could crack and break.
On the new gun the cocking piece, and a bunch of other parts.
I believe the hammer is one of them, and some of the other small parts
that used to be made as castings are on the new guns machined from stock.
And so this is stronger, and frankly it looks nicer,
I don't like the sort of dull cast finish that the originals had.
They've added some shine-reducing serrations on the back of the new ones.
And just overall the manufacturing quality has been substantially improved.
There were issues with the original guns, they were like,
"Hey, we're going to make a gun completely out of stainless steel."
"Have we ever made anything out of stainless steel, and do we really know what we're
doing with that material?" "Well not really, but we'll figure it out."
So obvious how this can lead to some problems.
One of the other details of operation of the Auto Mag is the accelerator here.
This is a lever where, when the barrel assembly is fully forward in battery,
this accelerator lever is pushed back like this.
As the barrel begins to move backward, this lug
is eventually going to hit this front wall in the frame.
That will happen at the point where the bolt has unlocked.
And again that's because this cam piece is locked right here,
and as the bolt moves back within it it's forced to rotate to lock and unlock.
Anyway, when the accelerator hits that wall it gets pushed up like this.
And then the top end of the lever, right up there, kicks back.
That is going to hit the bolt and give it a little bit of extra ... acceleration
to open it, to properly extract the empty cartridge, and send the bolt backwards to fully cycle.
Inside the back of the bolt there is a wire spring with a little tab coming down from the top.
That is a torsional spring, that tab on the top ... sits in that little notch there.
And so, when the bolt is assembled into the gun
it sits in this configuration where that spring has been wound up 90 degrees.
And what that means is that at all times
the bolt is attempting to rotate clockwise, which is rotating into battery.
So as soon as it goes all the way forward that spring pushes it into battery, like so.
And when the gun cycles open it has to overcome that force,
that spring pressure, to unlock going counter-clockwise.
And there you go, there is one of the new Auto Mag 180-D pistols fully field stripped.
Now only time will tell if the standard production version of the newest Auto Mag here
lives up to the standard of this sample gun that I have,
and the few others that have got out there.
They've shipped a handful of them, not a ton yet, they're still in production and building guns.
But this one at least, has really set the bar pretty high.
I went into this filming ... without any particularly high expectations for the gun.
Frankly Auto Mag Limited had been talking to me for close to 4 or 5 years
about wanting me to do some video on this gun.
And I told them, "I will be happy to do video once you have a gun that you're actually shipping."
And frankly I didn't expect we would ever get to that point.
But we have, they are shipping these, albeit slowly still.
And taking this one out to shoot, it was way beyond any of my expectations.
It is very accurate in my experience.
It ... has been completely reliable, I've not had a single malfunction with it, which really shocked me.
It's actually a really pretty pleasant gun to shoot, ... perhaps magnitude of the recoil aside.
If you don't mind heavy-kicking guns, you'll love this thing.
If this is what you're looking for, I think it's really well done.
The engineering seems to really be on point with this gun now.
Of course, this is a sample sent by the company.
It's not mine to keep, I didn't buy it myself. I didn't get anything in exchange for this review
aside from the ammunition that I used up in the filming of this review.
And there have been times when the sample guns that come out from a production run
are much better than the standard production ones.
But honestly I don't think that's going to be the case here,
because I think the reason that this is better is the cumulative effect of
7 years of engineering tweaking and R&D to actually refine the design
to the point where it should have been when the gun was first released.
So I guess the short version of this is: if you think the Auto Mag is pretty cool,
you may now have the opportunity to get one that actually works as well as it should.
I am taking this one to a backup gun match,
because of course I'd take an 8 inch .44 AMP to a backup gun match.
We'll have that video tomorrow, so stick around to check it out.
I think you'll enjoy it, I certainly enjoyed it. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video.
Thanks for watching.