I happened across this little pistol- where else?- at Pinto’s Guns in Renton, WA. It was obviously a well-made gun, but I had never heard of it before. I was intrigued.

The gun is a straight blowback, striker-fired single-action semi-auto that is almost entirely conventional in details and operation. It is all-steel construction with a rather nice blued finish and black plastic grips. It came with two seven-round magazines and instructions in the original box.
These guns were manufactured by L.Robar & Company in Liege, Belgium. It is the .22 LR. Version of their “New Model Mélior,” which was renamed the ‘Mercury’ for the sale in the United States after 1945. These were imported to the United States by Tradewinds, Inc. of Tacoma, Washington. They were available finished in Blue, Nickel and reportedly there were even engraved models. After the Gun Control Act of 1968 was enacted these guns could no longer be imported.

I’ve only ever seen two of these weapons; this one and one that was offered for sale last year, which was finished in Blue with wooden grips. There is little available about them online; numbers produced etc. The serial number is not necessarily meaningful; it is stamped rather haphazardly into the frame and slide, and was almost certainly applied by Tradewinds rather than Robar.

Field-stripping the gun reveals that, while much of the mechanism is ordinary there are some significant departures. You start by removing the magazine. The recoil spring is held in place by a screwed-in bushing in the front of the slide, for example. This is not an arrangement that inspires confidence; it’s all too easy to picture it unscrewing while you are firing the gun and spewing its guts downrange. In practice it works fine though. It didn’t budge even during a protracted range-session.

Once the recoil-spring is removed you simply pull the slide all the way to the rear and lift the back end, whereupon it shoots the firing-pin spring and retainer across the room. If you are smarter than me you cup your hand over the back of the slide so that the retainer slams painfully into your palm, but at least you don’t have to track the bloody thing down… Anyway, once you accomplish this the gun is field-stripped for cleaning.

There are some quite clever bits; the firing-pin spring is also the sear-spring. Instead of a heel-release to drop the magazine there is a Beretta-style button-release located on the left grip panel. Like a lot of Belgian guns it’s a liberal mix of features cribbed from all over and a bit of native innovation. The safety is another interesting feature; when in the ‘off’ position it is spring-assisted; start it moving and it snaps to the ‘fire’ position all on it’s own. I’m a bit ambivalent about this- on the one hand it makes it very easy to ready the gun to fire; on the other hand it seems a bit like an accident waiting to happen.

The slide does not lock back after firing the last round in the magazine, but it is possible to manually lock the slide to the rear using the safety. Honestly I am not sure why you would, but it’s an option.

I am relatively certain that this gun was carried a bit but had never been fired. A couple of reasons for this; one is that the patterns of wear and the lack thereof. There’s also the absolute lack of carbon or soot in any part of the gun’s interior. But most telling to me- it doesn’t work.

Both magazines took some fiddling to get a round to chamber, and experienced nearly constant failures to feed, and when it didn’t fail to feed it failed to go into battery. Occasionally it would fail to eject. I considered that this might be attributed to using fifty-year old Sears-brand ammo, but when I tried a box of CCI Mini-Mags (the gold standard for .22 Semi-autos) it was actually worse.

When it did go bang accuracy was quite acceptable for a pocket auto with micro-scopic sights. I had no difficulty putting rounds on-target at 3-7 yards; the gun points very naturally.

Working on the theory that the gun might need breaking-in I kept shooting, and it got better. A bit better. After a while it would chamber the first round out of the magazine pretty reliably, and it was possible to sometimes fire 2-3 rounds in a row. That was as good as it got, so I dug out the pliers and began to adjust the feed lips on the magazines. It took a bit of experimentation, but by the end of it one of the magazines was functioning quite well; I could fire all seven rounds without a bobble most of the time. The second magazine still had some small issues, which I eventually traced to the front-seam of the magazine, which was opening slightly near the top. I’ll solder that soon and try it again. In the end I put about 170-175 rounds through it.

I fired the bulk of the shots at seven yards while I fiddled with the gun; basically the target looked enough like the 5-yard target (only with more holes) so I didn’t bother photographing it.

I’m pretty sure that I will get this gun to be pretty reliable in time, which is good; it’s kind of fun to shoot these little ‘mouse-guns’ and I have plenty of .22LR on hand to run through.

I expect that painting the front sight with bright-red enamel will make it quite a bit easier to shoot accurately, and I will likely replace the plastic grips with some nice exotic hardwood. Anyway it is an interesting gun, and I’m having fun with it- which is the point after all.

Merry Christmas! I hope that your holiday season is filled with joy and togetherness.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 25 December 2018

We got an invite to meet Pat Hillyer and Courtney Miller at Champion Arms for a bit of shooting this afternoon. Linda was all for it- any opportunity to shoot her Sig 238 Legion is OK with her!

Linda happily put another couple boxes of ammo through her new love while I played with some of Pat and Courtney’s toys, including Pat’s Kel-Tec sub 2000. This is an interesting and economical pistol-caliber carbine, and this was my first chance to shoot one. The gun functioned perfectly and was quite easy to manage. I fired off a magazine at ten yards, and did several double-taps. For the most part things stayed nice and tight.

Recoil was, as you’d expect, minimal. It was easy to shoot accurately at the short range I was firing at and experienced no malfunctions. For all that I found the gun quite unpleasant to shoot. The recoil spring is in the stock (a la AR15) and some weird harmonic made it sting my cheek- surprisingly painfully. I think if I were to shoot one of these regularly I would need some kind of pad on the stock.

I also got to shoot Courtney’s 10mm Glock. This is the first time I’ve really shot a pistol with an optic sight. It was a bit odd, but I’m sure that I would get used to it. This was also the first time I fired a Glock 10mm, and despite firing loads that Courtney described as ‘hot’ it was easily the most pleasant-to-shoot 10mm I’ve fired yet. It was comparable to shooting standard loads in a 1911 .45 as far as perceived recoil went.

My hits were consistently low at 7 yards, but that could as easily be me as the gun. I actually liked it quite a bit!

Both Pat and Courtney tried the Taurus M85 Sub-Compact Custom, and there reactions were similar- they went from ‘How on Earth does this work’ to ‘Holy crap- this really works!’

The ammo of the day was 158gr. handloads on top of a book-maximum charge of Unique. Neither of the gentlemen had any difficulty controlling the gun or firing it accurately.

Both of them were surprised at the gun’s performance. After shooting it the first time Pat asked, “Would you sell this?” He was kidding. Mostly. I also did some shooting with this little revolver and performance was quite good- but not so good I figured I needed pictures of the target.

We also all shot the S&W 61-2 .22 pocket-gun. Everyone enjoyed it- Pat informs me that he has looked one up on Gunbroker and intends to buy it! Linda’s comment was, “It’s not as fun as my Sig…” When I came back from a break she was shooting it some more, so you be the judge. It’s really easy to run through a box of ammo in this little gun, and I did. Between the bunch of us we went through two boxes in total.

Just for giggles I ran a target out to twenty-five yards and blazed away. When I reeled it in I found I only hit three of the five shots. ‘That will not do,’ I told myself. I taped up the holes and ran the target back out and fired more carefully. The results were much more satisfactory this time:

We did experience two stoppages in a hundred rounds- in both cases an empty stove-piped on ejection. Given that the gun is over 45 years old and the ammo is probably 50+ years old I think I can forgive that. I like this little pistol!

I also did some shooting with the Astra Police .38, which has a new set of grips. As usual it’s fine double action trigger and recoil-absorbing mass made it very pleasant to shoot, and the new grip works just as it should. Unfortunately we’d all had so much fun shooting the Taurus that I didn’t have as much .38 Special left as I would have liked to shoot this gun.

On a less happy note I am not sold on the Federal #100 Small Pistol Primer. Last week I loaded a batch of .380 using a tried-and-true load, but I substituted the Federal primers for my usual CCI500 primers. This load (with the CCI primers) had functioned just fine in our .380s the week before. With the Federal primers neither gun would cycle- this was using the same bullets, the same lot of powder loaded into the same cases. The only difference was the primer. Not good… but the plot thickens.

At the end of the session I pulled out my S&W top-break, again using a load that functioned well using CCI primers. Loaded with the Federal primers only one shot in five achieved proper ignition. The other four would give a dispirited ‘Thump’ and sling the bullet gently downrange. I still had some of the CCI-primed loads on-hand and fired them for comparison. Every shot banged as it should. With the only variable being the primer I can only conclude that the Federal primers were not performing well.

Something to bear in mind is that both of these loads use a very small quantity of powder, and the Federal primers simply doesn’t seem to be up to the task of getting good, uniform ignition with these small charges. I also fired 100 rounds of .38 Special loaded with Federal Primers and they worked just fine, as did the .357 Magnum rounds using them. Obviously I’m going to have to restrict use of these primers to loads with a large volume of powder, and use CCI for the rest.

It was a good afternoon at the range overall- it was great to see Pat and Courtney, and we all got to shoot some different guns.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 18 December 2018

The Gun Control Act of 1968 effectively prohibited the importation of most sub-compact ‘pocket pistols,’ leaving a void in the market that Smith & Wesson was quick to try to fill. They announced the Model 61 Escort in 1969, but they did not become available until 1970. They were produced until 1973, with a total production across four variants of around 65,000 guns.

The design was based on the Pieper Bayard, a small Belgian .380 ACP gun produced in 1908, with the recoil spring and slide mounted above the barrel. The slide had an under-slung breech block to engage with the barrel, and the design was a simple blow-back gun with a concealed hammer.

Two different finishes were available- a nickel-plated gun with white plastic grips meant to resemble Mother of Pearl, and a blued gun with plastic grips meant to resemble wood.

The first three variants had a die-cast aluminum frame. In the first two the barrel was pressed into the frame. In the third variant the barrel was mounted in the frame with a bushing, which led to greater accuracy in the placement of the barrel.  This improved both accuracy and- more importantly- reliability. Early guns had issues with malfunctions, and many guns were returned to the factory for warranty service, eroding the meager profits from these guns.

While the early guns had issues the bulk of production was -2 and -3 guns, which did not have these issues. The gun received a boost in publicity when it was featured in the movie ‘Taxi Driver.’ While somewhat oddly proportioned they were attractive enough, had surprisingly decent sights, a good trigger and were easy to maintain. So why were these guns not a success? There were a number of reasons.

For one thing it isn’t that small; it’s noticeably larger than most of its direct competitors. It also had a five-shot magazine, where most guns in its class had 7-8 round magazines. Another problem was that it was a relatively expensive gun; it was very well constructed but that came at a price.  It also took long enough to get to market that competition was heating up. Colt and FIE had ‘on-shored’ production of their sub-compact offerings, and Raven had started manufacturing its MP25. Other companies were beginning to step up as well- and every one of them cost less and held more shots than the Model 61. Despite rectifying most of the Model 61s shortcomings the gun never gained any traction in the market, and in 1973 production shut down permanently.  

I purchased this gun from Pinto’s Guns for $130. This is quite a bit less than these guns typically go for; it was discounted because of the condition of it’s finish. The gun is mechanically sound however, and I’ve always found these little guns interesting.  As mentioned it is a straight blow-back with an internal hammer. The safety, located just behind the trigger on the left, allows the gun to be carried ‘cocked and locked.’ At the top rear of the left grip there is a tiny stud that protrudes slightly when the hammer is cocked, which is very easy to feel without looking at the gun.

Disassembly is dead simple- press in the stud at the front of the slide (actually the recoil-spring guide rod,) lift the front sight out. This releases the guide-rod and recoil spring- which will shoot out of the gun and across the room if you don’t control it. Then the slide may be drawn to the rear and lifted off, and the gun is field-stripped.

Naturally I was eager to test-fire the gun, so after setting up and decorating the Christmas tree and stringing some lights I headed for Champion Arms in Renton, Wa.

While I have some Winchester and CCI ammo on-hand I chose to take some vintage Sears-brand ammo that was produced around the same time as the gun. Seemed fair as it’s the sort of ammo the gun might have been loaded with when new. In fifty rounds I had one failure-to-fire; the primer struck true and crushed the rim adequately but the round simply didn’t ignite. Hey, this stuff is fifty years old- I can make allowances. 

So how is it to shoot? In a word- it’s fun. The sights are very good for a pocket-pistol, the trigger isn’t heavy, has short travel and breaks clean. The trigger reset is very short. The low bore-axis means your sights come back on target quickly, the safety is well-located and easy to use.  On top of that it’s ridiculously easy to shoot well.

I started at five yards, unsure what to expect, but the gun shoots to point-of-aim. Initially I was more interested in whether the gun functioned so I was firing rather quickly, so I was delighted to see all of the bullets had landed in the black.

 

Heartened by the results I backed the target up to seven yards and tried to fire at a 1-shot/second rate. At Champion Arms you can rapid-fire- if you are a member and have been checked out by the staff. If not the request that you restrict yourself to one shot per second, and I generally comply. Mostly. Sort of…

I backed it up to ten yards…

After shooting at ten yards I threw caution to the winds and rolled the target out to the maximum range, twenty-five yards. I fired carefully at this distance, and the results were impressive for a gun of this type.

I’m certain I can improve on this with practice. I’ll get that practice, too- this gun is a ball to shoot, and it’s going to be a regular on range trips for the foreseeable future.

Curiously these guns have not attracted the attention of collectors, and with the pitting and bubbling nickel this one would be unlikely to be seen as ‘collectible’ in any event. I’ll likely strip and polish the aluminum frame and strip the slide then rust-blue it. The grips I’ll replace with some custom exotic hardwood grips.

As their name indicates these were designed as a self-defense pistol, so the question is, ‘Will I carry it?’ Nope. As much as I like this gun it’s too big for a six-shot .22, and I’m not that interested in finding a second magazine for it. I might drop it in my pocket when checking the mail or going out to my workshop, but I’m afraid it’s really not suited to it’s original purpose. But as an interesting and fun range gun? That it will do, and very nicely too.

Prices on guns in good cosmetic condition are running $200-$400. If you fancy one I think you’ll find it’s worth it.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 16 December 2018