Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and we have a really neat hybrid pistol
to take a look at today. This is literally a combination of
the Colt Woodsman and the Walther Olympia.
Now the reason that this exists is basically because
Walther was trying to overtake Colt as the
premiere target pistol manufacturer in the 1930s.
So in the '20s, well, in fact in the 19-teens when the
Woodsman was first introduced, it became really the premier target pistol,
.22 calibre target pistol on the market. It was the gun that guys were using in
the Olympic Games, in international competition, it was the gun to have.
In 1925 Walther introduced their version of a competition .22 target pistol, the Olympia.
And it was pretty good, but it just couldn't ever quite catch Colt.
And by the early 1930s Walther was kind of tired of being continually rated number two,
and they started experimenting with some changes in the Olympia to try and
one-up Colt and the Woodsman. And one of the things, one of the main
visible and ergonomic differences between these two guns was the grip angle.
The Walther Olympia had its grip angle based on the Walther PP or PPK. It was like a 75 degree angle, fairly vertical.
The Colt Woodsman, on the other hand, had a much steeper grip angle to it or a much more acute grip angle,
a 55.5 degree angle, similar to what you might see on a Luger. And there were, you know,
this was one of those doctrinal arguments amongst shooters is which is better. Kind of like
1911 versus Luger, which grip angle is the best one? Of course there is no proper answer to that question,
the best one is whichever works best for you.
But that is, of course, not going to stop people from having the 1920 equivalent of
internet web forum flame wars about it at their local shooting clubs.
So one of the things that Walther decided to do was to experiment with trying that Colt Woodsman grip angle
on one of their Olympias. And that's exactly what we have here.
As far as I know Walther only made this one example of the gun.
And the whole top end, the slide, the mechanics, all of this is Walther Olympia. And in fact, this is marked Olympia.
Right there, Olympia pistol and then we have the Walther banner, and the Walther factory location etc information.
On the right side it's marked calibre .22 long rifle.
This has the standard cuts for Walther style pistol weights
for attaching to the slide should you want to change the balance of the gun.
And in fact we have a couple of weights that came with this gun.
So we'll go ahead and drop them into the proper spot here on the front end of the gun.
And we also have this hook which is going to
attach around the muzzle and connect into the front of said weights.
There we go, that's what this looks like with its barrel weights attached.
The serial number for this is 5,629 which is right in the range in the early '30s
when Walter was making a number of experimental versions of the Olympia,
just trying out various different features and configurations.
So that serial number is exactly where you would expect it to be.
And if we compare this to a 1936 Olympia, you can see the slide is of exactly the same design,
right down to things like the little angled section at the very front of the slide.
The sights are of the exact same pattern. The safety is the same style, a safety that flips up and down.
Now the Olympia had a magazine release button. In order to accommodate the change in the grip frame shape
the Woodsman hybrid version here has a heel release.
But other than that it is basically an Olympia magazine with feed angle changed to match the grip angle.
And the similarity is obviously very clear when we compare the hybrid gun to a nice Colt Woodsman.
I don't know exactly what testing Walther did with this hybrid gun,
but not a whole lot because, of course, they only made one or maybe two of them.
They did of course decide that they preferred the more vertical grip angle that they'd had in the '29,
or '25 Olympias. And that they would go on to use in the 1936 pattern Olympias like this one.
Really cool to see an example here of really the whole "grass is greener on the other side of the fence"
concept live in action. Walther copying Colt's grip angle just because maybe it is better.
Turns out they didn't think so. So anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Hopefully you got to see a cool new gun today. Tune back in tomorrow for another cool Forgotten Weapon,
and thank you very much for watching.