Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy
Auction House taking a look at
a 1921/28 "overstamp" Thompson submachine gun.
This is the second in our ... continuing series
of the history and development of the Thompson.
And so if you didn't see the first episode, I would suggest
you go back to the previous video and check that out.
There will be a link at the end of today's video to go both
back to that one and to go forward to the next one in the series.
At any rate, today we're looking at the 21/28 overstamp.
So to set the stage a little bit, sales have been going pretty slowly for Thompson.
There ... aren't a whole lot of people who are looking for a hand-held machine gun in the 1920s.
Sales were largely restricted to police
and security sorts of organisations, as well as export sales.
They would be happy to sell to banks, for example, that wanted to protect their money.
They made some sales to corporations that wanted them as basically labour negotiating tools.
But by far the biggest single source of sales were police departments.
They did, by the way, sell to private individuals, but probably not more than about 10% of sales.
I haven't gone through the sales lists in detail, but the vast majority were police and bank sales.
At any rate, by ... late 1928 they've only sold about 6,000 of these guns.
And if you remember from the previous video, they ... hired Colt to manufacture 15,000 of them.
So it's been 6 years since those guns were delivered,
and they've still got 9,000 of them sitting in warehouses, and that's costing money.
So they finally get a bit of a break in 1927.
Actually it was a year earlier, the Marine Corps ended up with a couple of hundred of these guns
to use in defending ... US Postal Service trains. And the Marines loved these things.
And in 1927 the US Navy did a little bit of testing,
... looking at getting more guns for the Marine Corps.
And they decided they were going to buy some guns,
but they wanted to make a couple of little changes to the guns.
You see, the original 1921 Thompson was a pretty fast-firing gun.
It had a rate of fire of about 800 rounds per minute.
And while it did have 50 round drums like this,
those drums are heavy, and clunky, and noisy, and expensive.
And the alternative was a 20 round box magazine.
And at 800 rounds a minute, a 20 round box magazine goes empty pretty darn quickly.
So after doing its testing, the Navy requested that
Thompson reduced the rate of fire to about 600 rounds per minute.
Both to help with ammo management issues
so you didn't have empty magazines quite so quickly,
and also to make the guns a little more controllable.
These things don't exactly have inline stocks, and the Thompson
is a gun that rises on you pretty quickly if you're not fairly experienced in shooting it.
So the Navy wanted to simplify that, make the guns a little easier to handle.
And the pattern that ended up resulting was called the ... Model of 1928 Thompson.
The modifications to the internals to reduce the rate of fire
were done by a guy named Oscar Payne, who had been part of the original design team.
He had actually left the Thompson Company, Auto-Ordnance, in 1922.
But he came back basically as a consultant in his spare time
to make the modifications to reduce the rate of fire on the guns.
Now, the reason that these are called 21/28 overstamps is because, well,
Auto-Ordnance wasn't going to make new guns,
they've already got 9,000 of them sitting in a warehouse.
So when the US Navy comes back in 1928, likes these modifications and orders 500 guns,
Thompson goes into the warehouse, grabs guns, they change out the internal parts,
and they take a number 8 stamp, and whack over the number 1 in 1921,
and ... presto, it's a 1928 model now.
But you can clearly see that it has been overstamped.
We'll take a look at that in just a moment.
They also add a "U.S. Navy" property line above the serial number.
So they finally made a major sale to the Marine Corps.
And this would set the stage for the Thompson being much more
widely adopted by the US military later on in the 1930s.
Alright, let's take a close-up look at this, we'll pull it apart in just a moment
and see how Payne managed to reduce the rate of fire.
But first, a quick look at the markings.
That is what Thompson did to turn this from a '21 to a '28.
You can see they've taken the 1 and they've overstamped it with an 8.
They've added this US Navy. It looks a bit crude, but that's how they did it.
Now on this particular gun, which by the way ... was a really quite early 1921 gun,
you can see that someone's added this serial number.
... When the Navy surplussed this gun it was purchased by a police department,
and they added their own inventory number to the gun.
Both here, and on the other serial numbers.
So unfortunately that was added by a police department.
The current owner of this gun is then only the third owner.
The Navy, and then a police department, and then the current private owner,
who is putting it up for consignment at Morphy's.
All of the other markings here are identical to what you would expect on a standard 1921.
Because this is in every other way a standard 1921 Thompson.
Now you can see a little bit of a difference on the back of the receiver.
If you compare this recoil spring guide plug to that one,
this is indicative of the new 1928 hardware.
So let's take it apart and see that up close.
Disassembly of the '28 is of course exactly the same as the '21.
Push the button down, I've already slid this just a little bit back which holds the button in place.
Hold the trigger down and slide the whole grip assembly
off the back of the gun.
Now we can go ahead and pull out our recoil spring, which looks substantially different.
So there's the recoil spring.
Then ... pull out our bolt body.
... Forward, pull out our Blish lock and our actuator.
Up top here we have our 1928 pattern internals,
and down here the 1921 pattern internals.
And you can clearly see what Oscar Payne did,
he added weight to the bolt assembly.
So he also changed the recoil spring. This actually is a stronger spring
despite being smaller in diameter than this guy is.
But the ... relevant change is they added a bunch of mass to this actuator.
In fact that's part, I think, of why the recoil spring size changed.
On the old actuator you've got all of this space right here for your recoil spring.
On the new one, this thing is now pretty much a solid block.
They drilled out a smaller hole inside it into which the recoil spring can fit.
But you need to add metal.
Payne understood how these guns worked, all Blish lock issues aside,
the more mass you have in the bolt, the slower it's going to open,
and the more slowly it's going to cycle.
So, put this together.
What's actually interesting about this is some of them, including this one,
are actually modified from the original 1921 parts.
If you look at this up close here, you can actually see the seam right there,
and ... a couple of little voids from where this extra block was welded onto one of these components.
So this one's obviously in the white or polished, and this one's been blued,
but this piece started out as one of these that has had a block of weight added to it.
And that brought the rate of fire down to about 600 rounds per minute,
which is just what the Navy wanted.
So just like they modified existing receivers by changing the markings,
they modified existing internal parts because,
hey, they already had Colt manufacture 15,000 of these things.
Why make new ones when you can just fix the ones you've already got?
There's the difference looking at them from the rear,
the '21 here on the left, and the ... '28 on the right.
One other thing I want to point out that didn't make it into the previous video,
is that the Thompson doesn't have a fixed firing pin, it actually has a hammer right here.
So when the bolt hits the front of the receiver
... the front receiver wall pushes this back in, it's spring-loaded,
that pushes the firing pin out of the bolt face.
So a bit of an extra safety mechanism in that there's no way a protruding firing pin
can set off a primer before the bolt is all the way in battery.
Just a little design detail,
and just one of the other little features that led to the expense of the Thompson gun.
So touching a little bit more on some of the other developments besides this one Navy contract.
The US cavalry actually tested the Thompson in 1924.
At that point they found it, nyah, not really what they wanted.
But they tested it again in 1928, and they liked it a bit better at that point.
And they adopted it as basically a limited service gun for use primarily in armoured cars.
That makes sense, the equivalent of a tank crewman's gun.
Give the armoured car guy a little hand-held machine gun
in case his armoured car gets overwhelmed by the enemy.
So they bought a very small number of those.
The FBI started buying Thompsons as well, but not until 1935.
The Thompson didn't have as much FBI use as popular culture might lead one to believe.
In total the FBI only bought 115 of these.
And ... you have to remember that in those times, as in today,
media exaggeration can often shape people's perception of what's actually happening in society.
And of course there was this perception of ... the rise of the motorised gangster bandits.
And this was a real thing, but it was perhaps not quite as common
as newsreel reports might lead one to believe.
And so a substantial amount of the police interest in Thompson guns
was probably spurred by maybe a not entirely accurate understanding
of just how much crime there really was going on,
and just how essential it might be for a small rural police department
to have a bunch of machine guns.
Nonetheless, ... this did continue to help sell guns for the Thompson Company.
And by 1938 they were finally making some progress.
They had sold 10,300 of the guns, they'd sold like 4,100 of them in export.
But they were finally down to less than 5,000 in stock by 1938.
... Hopefully that puts in perspective how slow of sellers these guns were.
They made 15,000, and like 1922 they were delivered.
Here, 16 years later, they've still got a third of them around.
So this was, as I mentioned in the previous video, we'll add a little bit more detail to this,
this was basically a $200 gun at retail if you wanted to buy it.
The ... bell curve of American income at that time
was centred on this range of like 1,000 to 5,000 dollars a year.
That's what typical middle-class America was making, the bulk of the income bell curve.
If you were sitting right in the middle of that, if you're making like $2,500 a year,
this gun, if you want to buy one, is going to account for something like a month,
a little more than a month, of your [gross] salary.
So you take all the money you make for a month,
and you're going to get a Thompson submachine gun.
And that's not the case for really any of the other guns out there on the market.
You'd see something like that from Maxim guns, especially earlier on than the Thompson.
The Maxim was a very expensive gun,
and it wasn't the sort of thing that private individuals were typically in a position to buy.
And for police departments this is a big expense to try and justify.
And so a lot of these police departments would order just a couple.
You might have a whole bunch of officers, but you get one Thompson gun, or two, or maybe three.
Unless you're a really major police organisation, because they're just so darned expensive.
So anyway, we are going to continue this series,
the next iteration is going to be the 1928A1 guns.
... That will pick up when Thompson finally sells off the last of its original Colt production guns.
So make sure to stick around for that. In the meantime of course,
this very cool 21/28 overstamp gun is being sold here by Morphys.
So if you're interested in picking up an awesome ... NFA registered Thompson submachine gun,
check out the link in the description text below.
That will take you to ForgottenWeapons.com.
And from there I have links over to Morphy's catalogue page
where you can take a look at their high-res pictures,
their description, their price estimate.
Everything you need to know about this one, and also about all
of the other Thompsons that are coming up in their fall Firearms Auction.
Thanks for watching.