[ Chinese Warlord Pistols: Luger Grip Type ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look
at my very favourite model
of domestic designed Chinese warlord pistol.
This is what I have designated the "Luger Grip" type pistol for, well, pretty obvious reasons.
These are ... significantly different from any of the other Chinese domestic designs.
They have features carried over from the C96 Mauser, a lot of them.
But also a bunch of features from the Luger,
and that's pretty unusual in the ... Warlord Era pistols.
There were a lot of Lugers around in the world, but they didn't seem to find their way to China very much.
There would have been some of them by way of the German colony at Tsingtao.
But they didn't become popular in China in the way that they became popular in Europe.
So, not only do we have a beautiful example of a Luger Grip type here,
we also have an original holster for it, and it's spare magazine.
How cool is that? Let's take a closer look at these.
Let's start off with the name. In my book, when I tried to categorise
all of the disparate Chinese designs, I tried to give them all names
that referenced features on the guns that would be kind of memorable.
And the name I gave this pattern was the Luger Grip type for kind of obvious reasons.
This has the grip angle from a Luger, very unusual in these Chinese pistols.
It also has magazines that are obviously copied from the Luger.
They have ... the wooden base plates with the round lugs, just like Luger pistols.
Now we have examples of a variety of these in the book,
and I believe this is the only one that actually has
the ... round wooden lugs on the bottom of the grip.
The others tend to have the grip angle and this style of magazine,
but without that very Luger-like floor plate.
The grip is sort of comfortable, but not entirely.
The way this ought to have been designed ergonomically,
if your trigger finger is up here, then the back of the hand should be right in here.
You can kind of see that, but instead the finger's running over the top of the safety.
And even if we assume that we were shooting this right-handed,
... This curve right here ought to be at the top of the hand,
and instead it's kind of pushed down into the meat of the hand there.
So you have to hold it a bit low, put your trigger finger up at an angle.
It's a little bit awkward for my hand.
The distance from the bottom of the trigger guard to this protrusion at the bottom of the grip
is a little bit small for three fingers, they are a little bit cramped in there.
But ... the folks who designed it
may have had slightly differently shaped hands for whom it does fit a bit better.
Mechanically speaking, these are simple blowback pistols.
So it's just the weight of this slide that holds the gun closed when it fires.
They are single action only, you have to manually cock the hammer or cycle the slide.
The firing pin is right there. This looks like a separate bolt, à la C96,
however, it is actually ... pinned in place by this cross pin.
This piece actually contains the bolt face, which you can see right down in there.
And for a full field strip you have to drive this pin out.
And this one doesn't want to come out, and I'm not going to mess with it
because this gun's in beautiful condition and I don't want to damage it in any way.
Ironically perhaps.
But simple blowback, firing pin, hammer, etc.
But chambered for the 7.63 Mauser cartridge.
Which means, I guarantee you, some of these got used with 7.62 Tokarev ammunition.
Which is a little bit terrifying in a simple blowback pistol.
I would not want to be the one firing that off myself.
Magazine capacity here is either 6 or 7 rounds, it's a little difficult to tell.
The magazines on this particular example look like they're fairly well made,
the springs are really quite stiff.
The ones that I've tried loading up look like they hold 7,
but the springs are actually at full compression at 6 rounds.
The recoil spring is located here, inside the slide wrapped around the barrel.
So it compresses right in there when you cycle the slide.
And that's all there is to it mechanically. The barrel is fixed onto the frame.
I would not want to be the one to pull the trigger on this pistol for real.
Well, it's really not a Warlord Era pistol if it doesn't have something
that comes from either an FN 1900 or a C96.
And this has a whole bunch of C96 elements to it, and they're really well done ones too.
Or at least they're well marked. So if we ... take a look at this tangent sight,
you'll see that the gradations are pretty much correct.
It starts at [50], it goes up to 800, and then jumps to 1,000 which is about what we would expect. ...
We would expect this 800 to 1,000 jump, that's something that was done on a lot of C96s.
But there are a couple of problems. So if you look at the markings on this side,
the numbers are out of order. What should be 150 is actually 105.
And the same mistake is repeated for 250 and 350.
And then, unlike some of the lesser-made Chinese pistols,
the rear sight is actually a separate part, and the slider is actually movable.
But there are no notches, so you can't actually set the sight except through just plain friction,
and you can't even lift it up high enough to go past, say, 300 metres.
... I can guarantee you this isn't actually graduated for 300 metres,
who knows where this would actually shoot? But.
That's going to be a pretty good standard of reference for this particular pistol.
Machining looks pretty good, functionality perhaps not so much.
We also have a fantastic example of the classic "Wauser" banner marking
on the top of the chamber of this particular pistol.
... That's just a really good example of a Wauser banner.
And of course, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Chinese Warlord Era pistols,
this is an era where pistols from FN and Mauser were held in very high esteem.
They were high quality, everyone knew that, they were imported from Europe.
And so a lot of the Chinese manufacturers,
while not actually able to read English, or German, or French,
would attempt to copy those markings.
Either out of outright fraud, to try and convince people this was in fact
a pistol made by one of those European companies.
Or out of an impression that the markings were part of what actually made the pistols good,
and thus copying the markings was copying
a significant element of functionality from the original gun.
That said, being not really intimately familiar with Latin characters,
it was not uncommon for some of these Chinese artisans
to occasionally put letters in the wrong orientation.
And so "Mauser" gets flipped and becomes "Wauser" from time to time, like here.
This is a really interesting feature, like I'm really nerding out here.
But if you look at the side of a C96 Mauser there's a panel milled out
that ... eventually in Mauser production was used for markings.
But it's actually milled out, and you can usually see round machining marks inside it.
Well, on this particular gun they have made a purely decorative milled out panel,
complete with laboriously created fake machine marks,
on both sides of the slide.
And that's there solely to mimic a functional panel on a C96 Mauser.
We also have a really interesting serial number here.
... There's a small subset of the Chinese ... Warlord Era pistols
that have numbers on them that could be serial numbers or could be dates.
And virtually all of those are World War Two period dates.
And in this case we have, it takes a little bit of imagination,
but we have a date potentially of 1944 here,
with an "8" thrown in at the end. But the letters are out of order.
This is kind of at the far end of how these serial numbers/dates
(because we really don't know which it's intended to be),
it's kind of at the extreme end of how these appear.
Because normally you would get a straight up date looking number,
1, 9, 4, 3, or something like that.
And occasionally you'll get them with the [numerals] out of order.
In this case the [numerals] are out of order, ...
and we have an extra one thrown in there for good measure.
Now there's an argument to be made that this is intended to be a serial number,
because it appears on the frame, and the slide, and the barrel up here.
And at the top of the bolt, just like you would get on a C96.
And at the back of the frame like you would have on a C96.
So it's actually serialised twice on the same part,
because this is the same physical part ... as this.
The safety on here is a push lever. So this is in the fire position.
You push it in, you can see the notch in the grips,
push it in, and that will be the ... safe position. It doesn't actually work.
Now you have to cock the hammer, but it still doesn't actually work.
So let me grab a screwdriver and let's pull off the side panel,
and let's take a look at the internal pieces and see if we can understand why.
So if we take ... the grip panel off,
we can see what's going on with the safety in particular.
So in theory ... like this piece
ought to be really snugly connected between the trigger bar here and the top of the [frame].
The reason ... the safety doesn't work is ... it doesn't properly meet with this cutout.
So the safety will engage if this piece is down there, and it snaps nicely into place.
... The safety lever itself works great, it's this transfer bar in it that doesn't.
So what that's normally going to do is hold (there we go),
hold the trigger bar down here where it won't push on the sear.
But it just doesn't function.
So did it not function in the first place? It seems kind of odd.
Someone actually went to the time to ... manufacture this part.
That's not just totally thrown together, maybe it was a replacement.
But I really don't have a good explanation for that.
The one other interesting thing I will point out while we have the grip panel off
is that on this side we have this really significant casting flaw.
... A hollow point in the casting of the [frame], so that's kind of interesting to see.
Certainly something that on a production line gun
this would get that pistol thrown right out of the stack.
That ... frame would be absolutely immediately scrapped.
Another neat kind of stereotypical Chinese design element here
are these two little lugs on the left and right side of the front sight.
So the front sight is very nicely serrated to reduce glare.
And these side lugs are copied because, well, those show up on real Lugers and other real pistols.
However, on a real Luger those lugs are there because the front sight blade
is actually a separate piece that can be drift adjusted left and right to adjust your windage.
Whoever designed this either didn't realise that, or didn't want to put in the extra work.
And frankly considering the amount of work that did go into making this pistol,
which is a lot of work, it's a really, really nicely made pistol as far as the craftsmanship goes.
They made this a ... single solid piece, so those lugs are totally vestigial and useless.
Which you see on actually a significant number of Warlord Era pistols.
... That's a neat feature to point out.
And one last really cool thing about this pistol is that we actually have its original Chinese holster.
These are all obviously handmade, ... if the pistols are handmade, you can bet the holsters are too.
So the pistol is going to slide ... there we go,
pistol slides nicely in there. It's got a retention strap on it, a little snap.
We've got a pocket for the spare magazine,
complete with a round cutout there for the magazine floor plate.
And then it originally had a second ... retention strap for the magazine,
but the front end of that has broken off.
So got a belt loop on the back.
You've got this little flap of leather there to nicely protect the pistol from you
or you from the pistol, either way.
And that's pretty typical of the craftsmanship and the design
that you would see of the indigenous domestic Chinese holsters.
Unfortunately, as is pretty much standard for these Warlord Era pistols,
we have no idea exactly when this was made, we don't know what arsenal made it,
or what province it was made in, we don't know who it was made for.
But we do know that this is a standardised pattern of pistol
because ... we have several of them in "Pistols of the Warlords".
They are a recognisable pattern in so far as
the standard configuration is the same across a bunch of different examples.
But again, as is typical of the Warlord Era pistols, every little detail is a little bit different.
In fact in the book I have pictures of two
sequentially serial numbered examples of Luger Grip types.
And even with back to back serial numbers some of the features are different.
So very typical, a perfect example of how these guns tend to show up.
Anyway, this is my very favourite type. It's beautifully made.
Someday I'll have one of my own, I hope. Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.