Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
We're here at Rock Island Auction, taking a look at the guns for their September of 2014 Premier Auction.
And I figured this would be a good chance, in addition to the military stuff I normally look at,
to find myself a concealed carry pistol with some cool historical provenance.
So I went looking through, see what they have, what's out there.
And the first thing I came across was a Walther PPK.
They're good, and they got the James Bond thing going. Cool Walther history there.
But it's a little bit big, nyah, ... you can't necessarily just stick that in a pocket.
So, kept looking, see what else I could find. And lo and behold I found a Walther Model 9.
Now that's pretty small, .25 Auto, still Walther, still cool, but you know what?
This still wouldn't always conceal well enough, so I kept looking.
And I think I found the answer, lot 1587 is a 2.7mm Kolibri, now that is small.
So the Kolibri here is actually the world's smallest centrefire pistol.
It is in fact a centrefire cartridge, 2.7mm.
These were designed and made by a gentleman named Franz Pfannl.
He was a professional watchmaker originally, which kind of explains some things.
And he developed a series of automatic pistols, this 2.7mm Kolibri is the smallest of them.
He did also have a 3mm design, and then a few things that got a little bigger.
He did a 4.25mm was I believe the largest that he ever worked on.
This is a straight blowback pistol.
Believe it or not this isn't, you know, a replica or a miniature, this is a real full-sized gun.
It actually has a detachable magazine.
In order to remove it we pull down
(it's really tiny), we pull down on the magazine catch,
then we can pull out the magazine.
It looks just like a normal magazine, except it is absolutely tiny.
And that feeds into the gun just like that,
you can see the magazine catch right there on the back.
Little click when it goes in.
As I said, it's a blowback pistol, so you can see the ejection port there. Slide comes back.
There is a spring on top of the barrel.
That's the spring guide rod, and then there's a ... coil spring in here getting tightened when you pull the slide back.
... The cocking piece, so that indicates that it is cocked.
No trigger guard.
So these were actually manufactured as legitimate self-defence pistols, although obviously,
... I mean these were considered under-powered, way under-powered, ludicrously under-powered even for the time.
This fired a 3 grain projectile at about 650 feet per second,
that's a total of 3 foot pounds of energy, or 4 Joules for European folks,
There were about 1,000 of these manufactured, they were made shortly before World War One.
And it was World War One that ended production, because of course facilities started going towards military arms.
You can see on the grips, ... the grips have an "FP", that's Franz Pfannl,
And the word "Kolibri", that's the name of this pistol which is German for hummingbird.
... Which is an appropriate name for this thing.
Total loaded weight is about 7.7 ounces.
I'll show you some of the cartridges here too.
... This comes in its own presentation case.
Open it up, we have the pistol, we actually have a little tiny cleaning rod for it.
And this is a metal box of cartridges.
Carefully open it here, and there you go, let me bring this up.
These are the world's smallest ever centrefire cartridges.
See if I can pull one out.
It does have a little projectile there.
And if we look at the back
you can see it is a centrefire primer.
So there are witness marks, in theory, for 7 cartridges on the magazine there.
In fact it only really likes to load five, you can kind of get a sixth in, and it's not happy with seven.
... This functions just like any other semi-auto pistol magazine, just really tiny.
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