Alright, the Llamna Llana Nominee Imini Omni Lamne.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today
we're going to take a look at a Llama Omni.
This is one of the last pistols to come out of the Llama Company,
and technically it's one of the most interesting.
Llama is, or was, one of the three primary Spanish
pistol makers, the other two being Star and Astra.
In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish government
put in some strict limitations on who could manufacture guns.
And those are the three handgun
companies that came out of the deal.
It's interesting that Llama ... didn't really have the best reputation.
Llama had never managed, at this point, to win a military
or police contract, where Star and Astra both had.
And yet interestingly, Llama was around longer than either of its two competitors.
It's gone today, but
(and by the way, I know ... in Spanish it's pronounced "yama", the name Llama is so deeply ingrained
in the American gun culture that I'm just going to stick with Llama for today's video).
So, the Omni. Where does this come from? Llama is primarily known for 1911 clones.
And they don't have that great of a reputation, and they decided, I suspect in collaboration with Stoeger,
who was the company that did their American imports. And at this point in the 1980s,
the American market was the primary market for Spanish handguns.
They decided to take a chance and try and build something a little more upmarket than what they were typically doing.
So they actually got a guy named Gary Wilhelm, who was a designer who had worked for Stoeger before.
I believe he did the .22 calibre Luger pistol for Stoeger.
They got him to do the design work on this, or he got them to accept his design work,
I'm not sure which way that negotiation went.
But as a result we have a gun with some really interesting features.
The name "Omni" kind of does it justice. Like it tried to throw a whole bunch of stuff, everything you might say, into this.
So this was originally ... a .45 calibre pistol, and then they also released it in 9mm.
And there are three versions total. There's the .45, which is just a plain single stack.
I believe it actually uses standard 1911 magazines.
There is a single-stack 9mm, and then we have this one which is a double-stack 9mm.
So the magazine on this is pretty interesting, not quite unique, but very interesting.
And you can only believe the internals once you've seen them. So let's take this apart.
Alright, this thing has a slide that is very nicely polished and finished,
and will show fingerprints at basically a loud thought.
We have Llama Omni, calibre 9mm (because this is one of the 9mm versions) there on the side.
Our rather large slide stop lever here.
We have a big ol' frame mounted safety, which doubles as a de-cocker.
So it's in the fire position here.
And you can see that this block is actually going to block the hammer when I rotate it onto safe.
And if I ... push it all the way onto safe, it de-cocks the pistol.
Note that while this is in place, the firing pin cannot be reached because the safety lever blocks it.
We have a pretty typical fixed sight here. Note that they cut away a groove in the hammer
so that you can see the sights when the hammer is down for shooting double action.
This is the 9mm version, the .45 actually came with a windage adjustable sight standard from the factory.
Probably that's a good bit of prescience on the part of the designers.
Looking at the American market in the '80s, having an adjustable sight .45
with a nice trigger and a double-action option, not a bad idea.
Sorry, there are those fingerprints I was talking about.
We have our manufacturer's mark here on the other side.
The ... official proper name of Llama was Gabilondo Y Cia, in Vitoria, España.
This is for disassembly, we'll get to that thing in a minute.
This is a double-action pistol, ... it's not the best trigger ever, but it's a pretty darn good trigger for a service pistol.
Interestingly, they gave it two separate trigger bars, Wilhelm the designer,
so that you have a really nice single action and a really nice double-action trigger.
You ... double the number of small parts off of what is already a complicated design by doing that.
But we'll get to that in a moment.
Magazine release is just a simple button. I mentioned that the magazine on this one is pretty cool.
And that's because it's this sort of weird stack-and-a-half kind of deal.
And the reason for this, I'm pretty sure, is that they originally designed the gun as a single-stack .45 and a single-stack 9.
And when they decided that, "Ah, you know, we should also have a high cap version of it",
they didn't want to try and redesign the whole upper assembly of the gun.
Especially because they've got two trigger bars, as I just mentioned, and one goes around either side of the magazine.
So if you took this and tried to widen the whole thing, you're going to have to redesign
the whole fire control assembly to accommodate a wider magazine.
So instead they kept the magazine single stack for about three rounds,
which gives it enough space for all the mechanics up here to stay the same, then they widened it out.
This isn't the only gun to do this, there ... are a small number of double-stack Makarov pistols out there
that had magazines very much like this for the same reason.
BSW also did a prototype pistol in the late '30s that used a magazine like this.
So they're out there. It's a 12 round magazine.
I'm glad that I was able to get this version to show you,
because this is definitely more interesting than either of the single-stack guns.
One other interesting little aesthetic note here. They put the serial number and the official proof marks
on the bottom of the trigger guard where they are really not noticeable, they are very subtle down there.
Instead, presumably, of stamping them on the side of a very nicely, finely finished slide where they'd,
not look so nice next to the very nice maker and model designations. So that's a little unusual.
Disassembly starts easy here to give you a false sense of security. We're going to pull this lever back,
and then pull out this pin.
There we go. That is our bolt stop.
Take the tension off of it there. This is kind of a three handed deal. But once we take this out,
then we can pull the slide off.
So there's our frame, we'll come back to this guy in a minute.
We have sort of a typical 1911 style assembly up front here with a barrel bushing,
and a spring guide rod, and a recoil spring and all, in here.
So we rotate that around,
and then we can de-tension the spring, pull the spring out, pull the barrel bushing out,
pull the guide rod out,
slide the barrel out. You will notice that this does not have a 1911 swinging link.
It has a Browning Hi Power style of cam slot there.
This uses a typical Browning-style locking system though. We've got a big ol' locking lug here around the barrel.
And that's going to lock into this cutout lug in the top of the slide.
I apologise for this. The firing pin on this one keeps sticking forward, and I'm not entirely sure why.
... If I punch it back in there, every time I recock the gun it gets stuck again.
So I'm just going to leave it for the time being.
It should not do that, that's a problem with this particular example. But you can see the back of the firing pin there.
And when I engage the safety, it's going to prevent the hammer from hitting it.
Normally back here, the firing pin would come out just beyond that safety block.
Alright, so that's easy. The hard part is down inside here.
There's only one screw on each grip panel.
And you might be saying, "Oh my god, what is all of this nonsense? I've never seen that kind of nonsense inside a pistol before."
And you haven't, and for good reason.
There are, not counting the magazine, 13 springs in this gun. And that is nuts.
So what is all of this stuff? Well, this is our double action trigger bar over on this side.
And it's got all sorts of stuff, like this is its little tiny reset spring, with its own guide rod in it.
Then over on this side, we have another trigger bar here, underneath the bits that are E-clipped in.
And by the way, there is no way I'm taking those E-clips off. That's just asking for trouble.
So if I manually cock the hammer, now you can see that that trigger bar is moving.
And in single action, that's the one that is going to do the actual firing.
And of course, it's got its own sets of extra little springs, and detents up here.
That's actually the detent for the slide lock button, but of course it's got its own spring.
... Gary Wilhelm was unfortunately not a particularly good designer when it came to making one part do multiple roles.
He's got a separate part in here for every little piece of the gun.
Alright, when I was taking this apart before I started doing the video to familiarise myself with it again,
this turned into a mess. I will see if I can do it here for you guys so you can see what's going on.
OK, alright, I just did it. This is now off of its latch.
But it's still attached to that little spring back there, and I don't want to lose that.
But what you can see up in here is now the trigger bar, which is no longer connected to the trigger,
there is a little hole you can see ... the edge of it there, in that trigger inside the frame,
that this bar has to connect into in order to actually work.
And it needs, there we go.
But.
OK, and the hammer is cocked now.
So that's going to try and spring up out of position as I bring this back in.
This piece has to lock in a little notch.
This has all gone quite wrong now. I'm going to go ahead and turn the camera off,
and it'll probably take me about 10 minutes to get this thing back together.
Seriously, you don't need all this stuff to make a double-action pistol work.
In fact, nobody else needs this much crap in there to make the gun work.
This is why we can't have nice things if we are Llama, in the '80s, attempting to sell guns to the American market.
[ Several minutes later... ]
All right, so I took the double-action trigger bar off, this is the trigger bar itself.
This is its spring, and there's a guide rod in there.
This is the cover for the double-action trigger bar, as well as being the little locking piece to secure the take-down plug.
That has its own spring, right here, that has to go inside this little slot.
And then it locks against this pin,
which I have rotated down so that I could disassemble it, because it goes on like that.
Now what's interesting here, you can see the hole that the
pin at the end of this is supposed to lock into. ... That is the double-action trigger bar.
So without it there's nothing going on there.
However, I can still cock the gun and fire it, because I still have the single-action trigger bar over on this side.
You can see it just moving a little bit.
You know what? Like, yes, that gives you a good trigger pull, but there are much, much better ways to get good trigger pulls.
Notice that little wire thing there, that's another spring.
We've got our two E-clips here. We've got that coiled up spring right there.
This is why we cannot have nice things if we are Llama trying to sell overly-complicated pistols to the American market.
So, I'm going to go ahead ...
Let's wrap this video up, it'll take me a few minutes to put this thing back together,
and then we'll be back with some conclusion about how long this stayed on the market.
[ Many more minutes later... ]
Alright, success. I actually got this thing back together, thank goodness.
By the way, I didn't even mention: there's ball bearings inside there. Who puts ball bearings in their pistol?
It's like man, if you take it apart far enough that those come out
it's like letting the blue smoke out of your electronics, just forget about it.
Ugh. OK, let's wrap this up.
The Omni first went on the market in 1982, and it lasted until 1986.
This was by all real standards a commercial flop. And there were two problems.
Well, ... actually there were like four problems now that I think about it.
Problem number one is a lot of people just don't like the way it looks. A few do, most people think it's kind of ugly.
Number two is it's ludicrously complicated inside. And it's a disaster to try and take apart in detail.
Number three is Llama's reputation.
And number four is the cost. So this was about a $600 pistol when it came out.
And for purposes of comparison you could get a Smith & Wesson 39,
which is also a single-stack 9mm service pistol sort of deal, for like 370 bucks.
If you put this into today's money, this would be about a $1,200 pistol.
... And we've seen what happens to $1,200 service pistols
if they don't have a particularly good reputation going in, they just don't work.
If this had been a pistol marketed by someone like Walther, or H&K, or another big
well-respected name in the firearms market, and had some neat features to it to justify the price, it might have sold.
The problem was when you combine the sub-par looks with the high price and the sub-par reputation of Llama,
you get not really anyone interested in buying it.
Now all reports that I have seen on people who actually own these and shoot them, they really like them.
It's a very good gun. As long as you don't have to take the 14 springs out.
It's got a really nice trigger pull to it. It's very accurate.
The .45 calibre version, as I think I mentioned, has adjustable sights from the factory.
It's a good gun. It was just over-priced and under-marketed. So by 1986 it was long gone.
Interestingly, Llama ... clearly didn't see potential in it for a service pistol, because just after the demise of this
Llama was dealing with the Spanish military trying to win their procurement trials
to replace the Star pistols that were then in Spanish Army service.
And Llama ended up winning it with their M82 pistol, which is actually mechanically
like a knockoff of the Beretta with a locking block like a P38 or a Beretta.
So even though they had this pistol designed at the time, and presumably ready to go,
they knew better than to try and submit this to a military trial.
So, these guns are still around today because Llama still doesn't have that great of a reputation.
So if you're interested in one they are around to be found, and they are actually a darned good gun.
So a lot of the things that you see about them like, "Oh, soft Spanish steels."
That's nonsense applied to the Omni.
This is a good gun that will shoot accurately and shoot well, until the time comes
that you decide to take it apart and you lose some little fiddly bit that goes flying off and lost in the carpet.
So anyway, a big thanks to our patron who sent this over on loan for me to film. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]