Guns Illustrated 2011. Dan ShidelerЧитать онлайн книгу.
and hat and plunk down the new Gun Digest for his two sons to devour. It was better than Christmas.
It was from one of those mid-’60s Digests that I first got bitten by the Thompson-clone bug. Its catalog section included what had to be the coolest gun ever, one that had apparently been made to appeal to a seven-year-old kid in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was called the Eagle, and it was a bastardized tom-mygun knockoff chambered in .45 ACP and 9mm Parabellum. I can close my eyes and still see the picture that appeared in the Digest four decades ago: it showed a gun with a Thompson M1 buttstock, a tubular receiver like that of an M3 Greasegun, a vertical foregrip like that of a 1921/28 Thompson and a carbine-length barrel.
The Spitfire Carbine by Spitfire Mfg. of Phoenix, one of the earliest pistol-caliber semi-auto carbines (PCSAC).
For a kid raised on comic books starring Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos, I spent untold hours fi guring out some way to get dad to buy me an Eagle carbine. Alas, the gun appeared in the Digest for only one more year and then went bubbling away down the river of time. I know now that the Eagle was actually called the Eagle Apache Carbine and that it was made by the Eagle Gun Company, Inc., of Stratford, Connecticut. Moreover, it was the first of what gunsmith J. B. Wood calls “pick-sacks”: Pistol Caliber Semi-Auto Carbines (PCSACs).
Another PCSAC appeared around the same time as the Eagle Apache. This was the .45 ACP Spitfire, made by Spitfire Mfg. of Phoenix, Arizona, and it was very similar to the Eagle Apache, at least to the untrained eye. Michael Winthrop of Hollywood, Florida, is an authority on these early PCSACs, and he summarizes the key differences between the Eagle Apache and the Spitfire thus:
“Subtle differences included the extractor (a fl at style, as opposed to the Eagle’s,which has a crescent shape clip to attach it to the bolt; the ejector, which on the Eagle is an extension of the disconnecter [whereas] on the Spitfire there is a separate tang welded to the bottom of the receiver tube which protrudes up into the channel under the bolt; the Spitfire’s front sight is cast aluminum and the end of the barrel is turned down to a smaller diameter, whereas the Eagle has a machined front sight (probably from another surplus firearm) and the barrel is untouched. Lastly, the vertical hand grips are aluminum on both models but the Spitfire’s has a smoother finish and is slightly smaller, more Thompson-looking.”
So there you had the Spitfire and the Apache Eagle, both of which today have a dedicated cult following. But there was yet another entry in the late-’60s PCSAC Sweepstakes: the Volunteer Carbine made by Volunteer Arms of Knoxville, Tennessee. Michael Winthrop notes that the Volunteer, the lineal ancestor of the Volunteer Enterprises/Commando Arms Mark 45, was “a 95-percent copy of the Spitfire.” Like the Eagle Apache and the Spitfire, the Volunteer used M1 Grease Gun magazines and shared the Apache’s and Spitfire’s tubular receiver and overall M1/Thompson appearance. Soon after the Volunteer was introduced, it was superseded by the Volunteer Mark II, which differed from its predecessor in the method by which its barrel was joined to its receiver.
The Eagle Apache, the Spitfire and the Volunteer/Volunteer Mark II had one supremely important feature in common: they fired from an open bolt. An open bolt operates just as the term suggests: when the bolt is retracted to chamber the first cartridge, it stays in the open position until the trigger is pulled. Then the bolt slams forward, scoops up a cartridge from the magazine, fires it, and returns to the open position as the fired cartridge case is extracted and ejected. Guns using an open-bolt arrangement are sometimes known as “slam-fires,” a descriptive term that usually refers to a type of malfunction, at least in genteel circles.
Over the years, quite a few commercial carbines were based on open-bolt designs, including the French Gevarm .22 of the 1960s and one or two early Marlin semi-auto rimfires. Open-bolt rifles picked up some unwanted baggage in the anti-gun late 1960s, however, and the BATF was not supportive of manufacturers who built such guns. What the BATF found so worrisome was the fact that with some minor modifi cations, most open-bolt designs could be rather easily converted to full-auto operation. Legally, such a modifi cation could be made only by a properly-licensed manufacturer, and the BATF felt that open-bolt designs were just too tempting for some home gunsmiths to resist.
A federal ruling in 1968 spelled an end to the Spitfire. To quote our friends at the BATF:
It has been determined by tests and examination that the Spitfire Carbine is a weapon which is capable of automatically firing more than one shot without manual reloading and by a single function of the trigger, and therefore is a machinegun as defi ned by section 5848(2) of the Code. . . Accordingly, it is held that the Spitfire Carbine, manufactured by the Spitfire Manufacturing Co., Phoenix, Ariz., is a weapon which comes within the purview of the National Firearms Act.
The BATF’s ruling made the Spitfire subject to all the administrative restrictions that ownership of such entails, including registration. Their market severely curtailed, Spitfire Mfg. bit the dust with only around 3,000 units produced. Probably for similar reasons, Eagle Arms also went out of businesss around the same time -- but Volunteer Enterprises did not.
One side of an original promotional brochure for the Commando Arms Mark 45 showing available accessories. Courtesy John Torelli of Jersey Small Arms Gunsmithing.
Rather, Volunteer totally redesigned the Volunteer, replacing its tubular receiver with a square design that was modeled after that of the original Thompson. The change was the brainchild of an inventive gunsmith named Lee R. Frix.
The name of Lee R. Frix is not as well-known today as that of John M. Browning or Samuel Colt. In fact, all I have been able to discover about him is that he lived in Nashville, Tennessee, and was granted patent 3,695,143 on October 3, 1972, for “a firing mechanism for semiautomatic firearms including positive disconnect means.”
Frix, who assigned the patent to Volunteer Enterprises, described his patentable invention this way: “[A] firing mechanism [in which the] disconnect comprises an elongated fl at portion disposed in a plane substantially parallel to one side wall of said trigger housing and contiguous thereto, and a lateral projection intermediate the ends of said elongated portion and extending substantially horizontally therefrom across said cavity in said trigger housing.” Well, now I get it!
Basically, Frix was saying that his patent covered a simple, semi-auto mechanism that incorporated a positive semi-auto disconnect. I would quote his patent application at length here, but there’s no humane reason for me to subject you to further passages. Patent examiner Stephen C. Bentley, who heard Brix’s application, certainly earned his pay on October 3, 1972.
Thus as early as 1972, Volunteer Enterprises owned a semi-auto design that was not likely to give the BATF any serious heartburn. Frix’s design entered production as the Mark III carbine. Chambered in .45 ACP and firing from a closed bolt, the Mark III had a 16.5-inch barrel and was loosely styled after the Thompson M1. Unlike the M1, however, the Mark III’s lower receiver incorporated an integral magazine well quite unlike that of the Thompson. As a result, the carbine could accept Thompson stick magazines but not the higher-capacity M1921/28-style drums. The overall resemblance to the Thompson was further emphasized by the Mark III’s faux compensator, modeled after the famous Cutts. (The Mark III’s barrel was not vented, so the “compensator” could haven’t have had much effect on muzzle climb except for adding a little weight.)
“For just plain plinking, it’s a blast.” Flip side of an original promotional brochure for the Commando Arms Mark 45. Courtesy John Torelli of Jersey Small Arms Gunsmithing.
Left receiver view showing the left-side bolt handle, the crossbolt safety, the funky pistol grip, the plastic lower receiver and the fi nned barrel shroud of the Mark 45.