Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at RIA taking a look
at a pair of Colt Model of 1903 Pocket Hammer pistols.
Now, the Pocket Hammerless was a substantially more popular pistol,
but this one that we need to give a little bit of a closer look to.
Now the basic story is that in 1897 John Browning
patented a number of different mechanisms
for designing a semi-automatic pistol.
One of these patents would lead to the Colt Model of 1900,
(I should say, he then ... sold them to the Colt Company,
FN would also end up with use of them, but that's a separate issue that's not quite relevant for this design).
Anyway, one of these was a tilting barrel short recoil system that would lead to the Colt Model of 1900,
and eventually all the way to the 1911.
There was a separate patent for a simple blowback pistol that would become the Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless.
Which did have a hammer, but it was a hidden hammer. But.
Where we get this gun from is the Colt 1900 Military pistol, evolved into the Colt Model of 1902 Military pistol.
This having a rather long 6 inch barrel. So not exactly the sort of thing you can stuff in a coat pocket.
Chambered for the .38 Automatic cartridge, or .38 ACP: Automatic Colt Pistol.
And ... Colt thought there would be some interest in this as a civilian arm as well as a military arm.
So they had a 1902 Sporting model which, where the Military pattern had a squared off butt with a lanyard loop,
the Sporting model had kind of a rounded butt, there weren't a whole lot of other differences between the two.
But what they decided was, to really get civilian sales they needed something that was a little bit smaller.
And so in effect they chopped the 6 inch barrel down to 4.5 inches,
and that was the 1903 Pocket Hammer.
There isn't that much difference throughout the 26 years that the 1903 Pocket Hammer was manufactured.
... Really the difference in hammer styles is about the only substantial change that they underwent during production.
But, let me show you these up close and we'll give you a little refresher on how to take them apart.
Just to show you a quick comparison, here we have a Colt 1902 Sporting,
and here's our 1903 Pocket Hammer.
And these are essentially the exact same gun, just with the barrel cut down.
So, a couple of other minor changes, the slide serrations moved to the back.
There was a difference between the 1902 Sporting and Military in the length of the grip and the magazine capacity.
The 1903 went with the grip style of the 1902 ... Sporting, with the rounded back of the grip here,
and a 7 round magazine.
We have the old style Colt markings here. So Automatic Colt,
Calibre (spelled "re", which is how they did it at this point)
38 Rimless Smokeless. That is .38 ACP, or Automatic Colt Pistol.
And then we have the Colt information, Hartford, Connecticut, and the two relevant Browning patents.
We have our serial number here on the frame.
And of course the prancing pony Colt logo there on the back of the slide.
Now I think it's relevant to point out that, like the 1902, the 1903 is missing all of the bits
that we would consider to be standard on a semi-automatic pistol.
So this is entirely slick sided, there is no manual safety,
there is no slide stop, there is no slide release, you don't get any of that.
Frankly, you're lucky that there's a magazine release ... lever
which you pull forward, and then you can pull out the magazine.
Like I said, 7 rounds, .38 calibre. This is 9x23mm semi-rimmed.
Browning was a big fan of semi-rimmed cartridges. The .25, .32, .38,
and there was actually a 9mm Browning long cartridge, were all semi-rimmed cartridges.
Now we have an exposed hammer here, hence the name, Pocket Hammer.
Don't cock it until you are ready to fire, because
... the trigger is the only thing that stands between you and that thing firing.
This started out as a rounded hammer like that.
At about serial number 22,000, which was approximately 1908,
they transitioned to a spur style of hammer, like that guy.
So this is actually an example in really, really nice condition.
You'll see that this is serial number 33,000 and change. So substantially later.
As originally designed, the .38 Automatic, or .38 ACP cartridge fired a 130 grain bullet
at right about 1,200 feet per second. This was a pretty potent round that is in fact
basically equivalent to standard .38 Super today.
The problem was they found after a little while that these pistols, because of their locking method,
weren't really quite up to that cartridge for a long duration.
And so ammunition would be downloaded 10-15%
until it was more like a 130 grain bullet at 1,050 feet per second.
So that's important to recognise with old guns like these, if you have one and if you shoot it,
don't use .38 Super because these guns really aren't able to handle that effectively.
You want to use the older style .38 ACP.
Now, part of the reason for that is they used the older version of Colt's locking system.
Which has two pins, one there and one there
to allow the entire barrel to drop down and backwards without actually pivoting.
To take this apart we are going to depress this little plunger at the front,
and then we can slide out this locking ... bar.
That comes out. And this is the only piece that holds the slide onto the gun in this design.
So once that's out, ... (take out the magazine) we can take the slide right off the back of the frame.
So the deal here is that that little wedge sits in front of the recoil spring down here, and connects it to the slide.
Now on a 1911 there is a single pivot point on the barrel, and the barrel actually tips, like this.
On the earlier patterns of Colt automatic pistols, the barrel is held in place by two pins, and it drops
but it remains pointing in the exact same direction, ... the axis does not change.
So, if you are interested in the development of how they got from this to the new stuff,
I have a whole video on the evolution of the 1911, and you can check that out.
But that is fundamentally what's going on with the ... Colt 1900, 1902, and 1903 pistols.
So when it's in the upward position these lugs lock into matching recesses in the slide there, and that's what keeps it locked.
Once the slide starts moving backwards, the barrel pivots down, disconnects from the slide,
then the slide can reciprocate and eject the empty shell.
Compared to a 1911, I think this is actually a simpler
disassembly system, and there are some other nice elements about it as well.
It has a captive recoil spring that you don't have to deal with.
You don't have a barrel bushing that you have to deal with.
However, the downside here is that this has a single potential point of failure in that connecting bar.
And should that break, the pistol can fail catastrophically.
And the 1911 solves that. So on a 1911 the front of the slide is solid,
and it cannot come off the back, ... basically no matter what happens, unless the entire slide explodes.
Which can't happen.
So there is a significant improved margin of safety on the 1911 compared to these early patterns.
So there is some weirdness to the serial numbers on the 1903 Pocket Hammer.
And this is in part because Colt had blocked off certain serial number ranges
for specific batches of pistols.
Effectively what they did was in 1903 when they started production on these,
they started with serial number 19,999 and for the next couple of years they would actually
run the serial numbers backwards. So the numbers decreased.
Until in 1906 they hit number 16,000.
They'd already produced other Colt pistols up to 16,000. So at that point they jumped back to the beginning of the range,
they go to 20,000, and then start going up from 20,000.
Until in ... 1913 they get to 30,200
where they basically meet up with the Colt 1902 Military serial number range.
And in 1913 ... they combine the two pistols, so from there on
you have a single serial number range for both 1902 Militaries and 1903 Pocket Hammers.
That would run until 1929 when the ... highest serial number they had hit 47,227.
Keeping in mind that between 30,000 and the end of production you have a mix of 1902s and 1903s.
In total they made about 31,000, just under 31,000, of the 1903 Pocket Hammers.
It wasn't really one of the more popular Colt pistols.
Frankly, it had a lot of internal competition with the 1908 Pocket Hammerless.
Which was the 1903 Pocket Hammerless, but chambered for .380, 3-8-0 ACP.
For a lot of people, a lot of people didn't necessarily look that closely into the exact ballistics of a cartridge.
They looked at the calibre. And they looked at it and said,
"Well, I can get this .38 Colt or that .38 Colt, and, well, this one is smaller, and it's got a safety,
and it doesn't have a hammer, and it's a lot better as a pocket pistol. I'll get that one."
The .380 Pocket Hammerless proved to be a much more popular pistol than this guy.
On the other side if you wanted a service automatic sort of pistol, something that would be open carried,
well, this is missing a lot of the critical modern features you would expect.
It doesn't have a slide stop, it doesn't have any safety mechanism whatsoever.
It has the old fashioned style of locking system that, well, it doesn't exactly have a track record of breaking,
but should that cross ... piece at the front break, well yeah, the slide can come right off
into your face, and that's not a good thing.
Colt recognised this of course, and as long as they had the tooling ... in production,
it made sense to keep making the gun.
They didn't have a lot of extra overhead, so even if you don't sell that many, still better than selling none.
However, by 1929 they had decided to introduce the 1911 in .38 ACP.
And so when they brought that on line, they shut down production of these guys.
At that point ... they were anticipating that all of the sales of these would go into either
the Pocket Hammerless or the 1911. And I think they were completely correct in that.
So, there's a little bit of an interesting thing. In the 1911 the cartridge became known as .38 Super,
but I've seen some interesting suggestion that, and frankly this makes the whole story make a lot more sense to me,
they ... introduced the pistol as the "Super .38", chambered for .38 ACP.
The exact same cartridge as this, just in a pistol that was capable of actually withstanding that cartridge
at its original loading of something like 130 grains at 1,200 feet per second.
So, you then have people loading the ammunition up to the standard of the 1911,
which becomes a problem if they stick it back in these older pistols that just aren't really capable of handling that.
Anyway, I am straying off from the story of the Colt 1903 Pocket Hammer,
which I have in fact pretty well finished, I think. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]