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Greetings Liberty Lovers,
I was prepared to write about the Japanese Nambu pistol this week, but you will have to wait until next week.
This weekend I went to a friend’s house and he showed me two old pistols he had. Both pistols had significant family ties to my friend. While I’m not a weapon expert, I have seen a lot of guns, I have never seen either of these before.
To understand the story a bit, as I was looking over the one pistol, single shot .22 in which the bolt pivoted to the side. You put a .22 round in the chamber then twisted the bolt in to place. Kind of crude, but very cool. The first thing I do when looking at a firearm is inspect it for markings, serial numbers, etc. I could faintly make out the manufacturer and we looked it up on the internet.
This pistol belonged to my buddy’s ex-father-in-law. He has a picture of the him carrying the pistol in Korea. We did a little research on the pistol and below is a copy of the email he sent to his kids about Cleve’s gun. Cleve must have been an interesting man. Grew up dirt poor but became a civil engineer which was his job in the military. Very creative guy as you will read below.
Big Mullet
Gentlemen,
When you found Cleve’s gun and holster at your grandmother’s house when she moved to the nursing home, along with a picture of him wearing it in Korea, we all thought that was pretty cool. A friend was at the house yesterday and gave me some insights to the history of the gun. After doing some research, I have concluded that this may be the greatest “Cleveism” of all time.
I have included pictures, but don’t look at them just yet. Look at them as you read this letter.
We all knew that the holster was clearly not made for that gun. See pic 291. He undid the stitching to allow the gun to fit in. The handle just didn’t make any sense to me though.
(Picture 291)
Next let’s look at the gun again, see pic 295 It is a single shot 22 caliber. On the gun it says H. M. Quackenbush Herkimer NY USA. See pic 285.
(Picture 295)
(Picture 285)
Now let’s look at the handle. You can see on the bottom it looks like it was wood that was then covered in some malleable metal. See pic 273. You can even make out what I think is a phillips head screw that is holding the metal to the wood.
(Picture 273)
Moving up the handle, there is a faint bronzish colored part of a circle showing through the gray metal. Pic 272 My best guess is that it is a finishing washer and another wood screw, again holding the outer metal to the wood.
(Picture 272)
OK, now for the revelation. Check out this picture on the Quackenbush website. http://www.quackenbush.com/hmq/hmq.html The lower picture is their 22 caliber rifle!
(From http://www.quackenbush.com/)
Remember that in the engineer corps of the Army, they did not give the officers or enlisted men arms. Apparently Cleve decided he needed to carry something, but decided that a rifle would be too unhandy. So, true to what we would expect, he took an old rifle and redid it. First he cut the barrel off. You can see that the end of the barrel never had the nickel plating on it that the rest of the gun did. Then he knocked the back sight off the remaining barrel. You can see the notch where it had been located.
Now he cut the stock off and probably sawed off some of the metal too. The wood you can see on the end looks to me to be some sort of Asian hardwood. At first I thought it was walnut but then when I figured out what was going on it looked more like some of the weird woods I have been buying to make pens out of. Not sure what it is for sure, but relatively certain it is not North American.
The bronzish fastener at the top is probably some sort of through bolt holding the wood onto the original gun metal. I suspect that if we took the covering metal off the handle we would find another one on the other side of the handle.
The covering metal on the handle appears to be lead, but it seems a little too hard to be lead. He might have found (or made) some alloy that would have worked better.
This is absolutely classic Cleve.
Love,
Dad