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Brought the rest of the guns I inherited many years ago from my dads gun safe to my new house. Top is a Remington speed master, middle is a Marlin Glenfield model 60, Bottom Sears and Roebuck Ted Williams Model 200.
Last one is an I have no idea. My granpa got it from a storage building someone failed to pay rent on back in the 60s or 70s. Missing a few pieces but the action does work. Its a double action. Hand made perhaps? I would just as soon chew lead slugs as try to shoot it (That and I dont know what caliber it is, .45 ACP slides through the barrel)
From google image search I think you're right. A factory actually made something this crude?
It looks more abused and neglected than crude. But even new it was uglier than anything has a right to be.
I agree, it is very abused and neglected. It doesn't have a straight line on it though. The fluting on the cylinder is crooked and every one of them different. The ridges on the barrel aren't straight. The buckhorn isn't straight. Even the fire pen is irregularly shaped. The crown... looks like it was made with a hammer and file by a 5 year old. I guess if you were about 10 foot away from someone though it would probably kill them.
Definitely looks the most like a Rast Gasser, but not exactly, which leads me to believe it is a home made attempt. I know it's missing a few parts, but even the Rast Gassers that came out of the factory weren't that asymmetrical and crooked I don't think. This may just be from years of pitting or the way the pic was taken, but the metal looks like cast iron, or something similar. I don't have it to examine, but the frame and barrel also look like one piece, and the barrel doesn't look like it has any rifling.
Maybe someone wanted to copy the gun but didn't have the experience needed to machine the parts. So he makes molds for all the parts instead, and casts them. Just a thought. That thing looks way too crude to have come out of any kind of factory.
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After looking over images at images.google.com of the Rast Gaser i think that this is indeed a Rast Gaser. But after many years of abuse. Quick and dirty grips and much rust later.
I used to spend hours at a friend's blacksmith shop out in the middle of the Sertão Maranhense. He had a lot of old hulks there that resembled the condition that pistol is in. There was an old top break Smith and Wesson, probably 44-40 caliber, but it didn't look to be in much better condition than that one is in. Years of rust and abuse do terrible things to a gun. Some of the stuff in that shop was pretty near impossible to identify because someone had stored it behind the closet in their adobe walled house for years. Adobe doesn't do a great job of keeping the humidity at bay during wet season. Still, it was interesting to see what my friend could do with a piece of abused steel. He built me a singleshot muzzle loading pistol using a piece of Willys steering column for the barrel. The rest of the gun was made right there in his shop without a watt of electricity being used. But I digress. You don't show the other side, but what I see from the side you show just looks like rust and abuse and corrosion and neglect. Even one o' them ugly french pistols don't deserve to be treated thataway...
Paul - in Pereira
"He is the best friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion." -- John Witherspoon
shooter wrote:Definitely looks the most like a Rast Gasser, but not exactly, which leads me to believe it is a home made attempt. I know it's missing a few parts, but even the Rast Gassers that came out of the factory weren't that asymmetrical and crooked I don't think. This may just be from years of pitting or the way the pic was taken, but the metal looks like cast iron, or something similar. I don't have it to examine, but the frame and barrel also look like one piece, and the barrel doesn't look like it has any rifling.
Maybe someone wanted to copy the gun but didn't have the experience needed to machine the parts. So he makes molds for all the parts instead, and casts them. Just a thought. That thing looks way too crude to have come out of any kind of factory.
I always assumed that too. It looks and feels like cast iron to me and the rust has always looked like that, never better never worse, at least not since I've been alive. As a little kid admiring all of the nice expensive guns in my grandfathers gun cabinet I was given this one to actually play with since at that point it was pretty much just a hunk of metal to go along with the carved wooden knife I had been given to play with. It was in the exact same condition then only the action was frozen. I've always been a tinkerer though, even then, so instead of running around shooting at invisible Indians I worked the action and oiled it until the trigger started to work. At first it wasn't catching the action but eventually the action caught and the gun started working. I haven't really messed with it since except to spray it down in a healthy coat of oil every few years and to occasionally wonder what it is.
It's hand made for sure. It's has a few differences from a Rast Glasser, but it shares a lot of it's looks. It reminds me of some of the Vietnamese homemade handguns I've seen.
Basic design is a Gasser or a Montenegrin equivalent, so a "homebuild" from either Serbia/Montenegro, or a "Darra Special" from the Khyber Pass is certainly a possibility.
If a .45 slides down the barrel, odds are it's an 11mm Nagant chambering or something similar.
