Today on Forgotten Weapons, it's Repairman Jack's pistol.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company taking a look at a little tiny pistol that's going to
be in their upcoming April of 2020 Premiere Auction.
This is a Semmerling LM-4 and I actually did a video on one of
these quite some time ago, but it was a pretty terrible quality video
and you never got a good chance to see the gun in it.
So we're gonna redo that today. Now unfortunately, I don't have the chance to go out and do some firing with it,
but we're gonna take a closer look at this. So if you didn't see the previous video,
the Semmerling is a manually operated .45 calibre pistol, it has a 4 plus 1 magazine capacity.
And it was patented by a guy named Philip Lichtman in 1979.
Came out onto the market in '79, was sold in the 1980s through his own company, Semmerling.
And then in the 1990s the gun and the patent, the licence, the tools, everything,
the whole kit and kaboodle was sold to American Derringer. They produced them until 2003.
Now fundamentally this was a design that existed because at the time there wasn't
a really good option for a subcompact .45 calibre semi-auto pistol that was reliable.
Even today, you're not gonna find a semi-auto .45 that's as small as the LM-4. And so it really had two
particular claims to fame. And one was it was the smallest .45 you could possibly get,
and the other was it was about the highest-quality pistol you could get.
Semmerling took a tremendous amount of pride (and a tremendous amount of advertising and marketing space),
in their quality, so they used S7 tool steel. It's a good steel. All of the guns were completely hand-built.
They were X-rayed multiple times after being proof fired.
Really this was intended as a boutique, very high-end pistol for the very discriminating clientele.
Just to put it in context, when this was released in 1979 it cost $645.
At that same time you could get yourself a Detonics .45,
which was basically the smallest .45 semi-auto on the market, for $418.
You could get an HK P9S for $384, you could get a Star PD for 255 bucks.
Like you'd ... be hard pressed to spend more money on a pistol than ... an LM-4.
In fact, ... this particular one
comes with a whole bunch of paper material and marketing, and includes the original receipt.
This was purchased with a full-on hand polishing finish, to add an extra 125 bucks.
The guy also ordered a holster for it, and a mag pouch, a spare magazine, and all told his bill came to $887 in 1981.
That was a tremendous amount of money. So what did that money get you? Let's take a look.
So just to give you a size comparison,
here is your LM-4 alongside ... a Colt 1910, which is the same size as an 1911.
And you can see that in the hand this is a pretty darn compact pistol.
Now part of the reason that they're able to make it very small is because
they don't have to leave any space for a recoil spring or a recoil system.
This is manually operated, as I have said now a couple times I think, and the slide actually moves forward.
So the barrel's integral to the slide. It's actually not really a slide so much
because it doesn't have a recoil spring, it's just a barrel there.
And you pull it forward. The extractor here holds your empty fired case on the breech face.
And at the very end of travel, there's a lug right on the side of the slide back there
that's going to kick that empty case out off to the right.
It also has a lug down there that is going to pull the next cartridge out of the magazine feed lips,
pull it forward just a bit.
At this point the nose of that cartridge will have been lifted up here, and when you pull the barrel back
it's going to pull the bullet up into the chamber.
It's going to pop the rim up into this area, it will pop the extractor hook over the rim
and locks over the next round, rendering it ready to fire a second time.
Now there are a couple considerations here.
The slide has no spring, and it just has a little kind of an intentionally weak detent that holds it in place
so that the slide doesn't like open if you hold the pistol pointing downward.
When you pull the trigger, however, the slide locks. So this can't fire out of battery
because as soon as the trigger starts moving backwards the slide locks in place.
Once you fire it remains locked until you release the trigger, and then it can cycle.
One of the concerns with this system is ... if you have the pistol in a holster with any decent bit of tension on the slide,
when you go to draw the pistol, ooh, it opens up and ejects the round that you've got in the chamber.
That's a problem and their solution to that is this little lever right here.
This is a manual slide lock. And what you do is you pull the trigger just a little bit,
pull this down, and then release the trigger. The lever is locked in the lower position and that locks the slide.
That's ... what they call their holster lock. As soon as you start to pull the trigger again,
that lever is released and the gun can fire and operate as normal.
So that prevents you from having a whoopsy in the holster.
This has a double action trigger, and I got to be honest, it's actually a really nice trigger.
It's actually this little plunger right there that ultimately fires the gun,
so when you pull the trigger, you've got a very clear stop, a break, in the trigger right there.
And
only after that does it fire.
So it's actually really easy to stage the trigger to this point, and then you have a relatively short and crisp trigger.
Almost a single action trigger pull.
Right there, fire. Or you can just pull through the whole thing.
But ... they actually put some real thought and effort into the trigger design, and they got a good trigger out of it.
They also have pretty darn good sights. That's certainly a precise enough sight.
This isn't intended to be a little pocket derringer that's only used at, you know, bad breath distance.
This was intended to be, as the expense would sort of require,
this was intended to be an accurate, functional, very capable pistol.
I should show you the markings on it here. We have "standard military spec cartridge only". This is serial number 504.
(Wipe my fingerprints off of it.) My understanding is that
Semmerling made about 600 of them in total before the project moved to American Derringer.
It is calibre .45 ACP. That "standard cartridge only" is basically their liability way of saying,
"If you use hand loads and blow something up, you're on your own."
We've got Semmerling's markings here on the left side, Model LM-4. Semmerling Corp out of Boston.
The magazine is a rather interesting one.
It's held in place by two little sheet spring detents that are integral to the magazine.
So squeeze those in, and then you can pull the magazine out.
This holds 4 rounds, kind of an unusual style of feed lips, but that's because it is a forward acting slide.
This is numbered to our gun, 504A,
because as I mentioned the original buyer of this specified a spare magazine, which is 504B.
One of the other neat things that Semmerling did, they recognised that in a gun that's designed
to be as concealable as possible, these grips add a substantial amount of width
to the gun and not everyone might want that. So they actually offered like a slimline kit,
they called it a skeleton model, here. Which is a little side plate that goes on in place of a grip panel.
Now I actually have that kit, because this pistol's owner went ahead and purchased it. So let's take a look.
What we would do to slimline the gun is remove, we actually remove both of the grip panels.
So this comes off. There's a hole there that's required for manufacturing processes and a spring.
And you don't want that spring to get full of pocket lint.
So,
You put that little cover plate over it.
On the other side there is no special plate,
you just take the grip panel off.
And these holes are less critical. You're still going to have access
through to the magazine there, so I suppose in a way that actually lets you see your ... remaining magazine capacity.
But that is the slimline configuration of the Semmerling.
Alright, there's a practical matter we should cover, which is how do you actually shoot this thing?
Like it's easy to fire it, but then what's the process for cycling it?
Because obviously you can like grab it with both hands here and cycle like so,
but that doesn't seem to be very fast.
Well Semmerling had a specific recommended method which was you shoot with a two-handed grip,
and they put a set of serrations on the top of the slide right in front of the rear sight.
And what you're supposed to do is after you fire roll your support thumb up here,
use that to pull the slide forward and then back.
Now it's very easy to do here unloaded, it would ... take a little more force when you actually
have an empty case in the chamber and you're trying to pull this back onto another live round.
But that's the method that they recommended. Now, you can also do it in theory one-handed.
So the manual says to only do this under actual duress,
because it does potentially involve waving the gun around in unexpected directions.
But you can basically snap the thing open and closed
with one hand.
Again how well that would actually work when you've got rounds in it that you're cycling through,
... I'm not sure.
I wish I had another opportunity to take one of these out to shoot to find out.
Hopefully we'll have a chance to do that someday.
So I think the niche target audience of the Semmerling has dropped today to basically nil.
It's a very cool collector's pistol today, but as a practical self-defence carry piece
I think pretty much everyone would agree that you're better off with a semi-auto 9mm
with a higher capacity, which you can get today in about this size.
... We've really had a renaissance in subcompact or ultra-compact 9mm pistols.
And they really obviate the need for something like a Semmerling where you have to actually
manually run the gun in between every shot. That said, it's still extremely cool.
And it's neat that this one comes with all sorts of factory extras and accessories and original paperwork.
So, for the collector this is a really cool package. If you'd like to have it, if you are that collector,
you can check out all of Rock Island's pictures, their description, and all the little
accessory bits that come with this gun in their catalogue.
You can also, of course, check out everything else that they've got in the upcoming auction.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]