A note on moon clips: These devices are readily available, along with tools to unload the clips that make life a lot easier for the .45 ACP revolver fan. If you shoot in competition that requires a revolver speed load, these are the way to go.
TK Custom offers a demooning tool that removes spent cases from the clips, making a nasty chore much easier. Beckham produces a polymer clip for less serious use that works just fine in my revolvers.
Ranch Products offers a bewildering array of clips, including a neat two-round clip that allows the .45 ACP revolver shooter to have a box at ready in standard form but all mooned up.
Ranch Products PO 145, Malinta Ohio 43535 www.ranchproducts.com
RMZ Beckham Design 866-726-2658
Quality Cartridge www.qualitycartridge.com 888-643-8023
TK Customs 404 Fox Ridge Road, Rantour Illinois 61866 www.moonclips.com
THE RETURN OF THE KRIEGHOFF LUGER
BY JIM DICKSON
2006 marked the return of the Krieghoff Luger to production after a lapse of over 60 years. A limited edition of 200 guns was begun, built by hand to the Best Quality standards of a Dickson, Purdey, or Holland &Holland double, with the sole exception that the WWII finish is applied instead of the finish of a Best Quality double. The parts were all hand-fitted and finished by one man, master gunsmith Frank Kaltenpoth, the same way a Best Quality double is made. The enormous hours of handwork are reflected in the Best Quality price of $17,545 and the fact that production is still underway as I write this in 2009.
This is the only Best Quality production run of a pistol in history. It is fitting that this tribute to the Luger is being made by Krieghoff because they made the finest Lugers of all time during WWII. Krieghoff was the only Luger manufacturer to achieve 100% interchangeability of parts without any hand-fitting: a monumental achievement and a milestone in the history of mass production.
Krieghoff is no stranger to Best Quality guns. Their Essencia is a handmade traditional Best Quality sidelock shotgun built to be the equal of anything made by the best British makers. The Luger is the only pistol worthy of this level of treatment simply because it is the only pistol that has a service life measured in the millions of rounds. This is because it is a miniature pistol version of the Maxim machinegun, the only machinegun design that can fire 10 million rounds and still be good to go. Of course we are talking about regular barrel changes along the way here. The Luger also is one of the designs that works better if precisely fitted. The higher the quality of the fit of the parts, the better it works – just like a Best Quality double. Some designs work best with lots of slop in the parts, while others like just a !ittle and some like everything as tight as possible for the best reliability under all conditions. The Luger is one of the latter.
Krieghoff 1-of-200 Luger, action open. Note the exquisite finish and straw coloring on the trigger and safety.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
The pistol popularly known as the Luger began to take shape in 1893 when Hugo Borchardt, inspired by the success of the Maxim machinegun, built his toggle action automatic pistol. But this was not Maxim’s heavy, robust, virtually jam-proof design with plenty of places for dirt to hide. The Borchardt featured a toggle that was very lightweight and bottomed out on the bottom of the pistol, where enough dirt can jam the gun. It’s an overcentered, toggle-leveraged action, which means the toggle lock was over the centerline of the cartridge. This mechanism is an inclined plane so the action doesn’t open on itself.
The quality of the Krieghoff Essencia hand-made Best Quality sidelock shotgun rivals that of the finest British doubles. The Krieghoff Lugers are made to precisely the same standards.
The longer the cartridge and the greater the mass of the gun, the better the Borchardt worked. In a lightweight gun with a short cartridge, you get too fast a cycle time for proper feeding. The slower burning the powder, the slower the breechblock goes back, thus partially offsetting a fast action cycle. Therefore Hugo Borchardt decided to put a 7.63 bullet of 85 grains in a bottlenecked case with slow burning powders for a velocity of 1,280 fps. Mauser would later take this cartridge and increase the velocity to 1,410 fps for his M1896 Mauser military pistol. The Borchardt had a vertical grip, so there was virtually no drag on the cartridges as they were fed through the magazine, which contributed greatly to its reliability.
Reliable or not, the Borchardt was a clumsy, strange-looking gun. If it were ever to sell, something had to be done. The rights to the Borchardt pistol were owned by Ludwig Loewe of DWM (Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken). Ignoring the original designer, he turned the redesign over to Georg Luger. It was time for the ugly duckling to turn into a beautiful swan, a swan that combined ergonomic and esthetic perfection in a remarkably lightweight all-steel gun of just 30 ounces.
Georg Luger had considered well the needs of a combat shooter: the beautiful new gun had the fastest possible toggle release. The toggle stayed open on the last shot; you changed the magazine and gave the toggle a quick tap with the hand that inserted the magazine and you resumed firing. The bulge at the bottom of the front of the frame was hollowed out to facilitate loading a magazine that might be jammed in at the wrong angle by a soldier under fire with his eyes on the enemy instead of the gun. The lanyard loop is in the perfect position above the hand to steady the gun in firing. In addition, the magazine release was so perfectly designed and positioned that it was copied on the M1911 .45 automatic.
The new gun was a beauty, the belle of the ball. Everywhere people were entranced by its striking appearance and the new-found ease of hitting the target with a pistol that it offered. The Luger’s legendary handling qualities took the shooting world by storm. Switzerland was first to adopt it in 1900, with Germany adopting it in 1908 (hence the P08, or Pistole 08, nomenclature). Many more nations adopted it and still more bought large qualities. At last there was a pistol that seemed to accurately aim itself!
The transition of Borchardt to Luger without the input of Hugo Borchardt was not perfect, though. The Borchardt lock was carefully balanced to the recoil impulse of the 7.63 Borchardt cartridge. Luger used the same lock with shorter, higher-intensity rounds without adding the mass to the lock to compensate for them, which resulted in excessively fast action cycling times. This became a critical problem when the grip angle was changed from the vertical Borchardt grip to the steeply angled Luger grip, where the drag on the cartridge reduced the magazine spring’s efficiency to only 60%. A powerful magazine spring that is strong enough to require the use of a loading tool was needed on the Luger to be sure that the magazine could feed the cartridge up to the proper position before the breech closes prematurely, jamming the gun. This is the cause of almost all Luger malfunctions.
You really can’t have a Luger’s magazine spring too strong. American gun designer Max Atchisson once managed to get a spring in a Luger magazine so powerful that even with a loading tool he could only load five rounds. That gun was unjammable, cycling the hottest loads effortlessly. British Best Quality gun-maker Giles Whittome once put one coil spring inside another in a Luger magazine, resulting in a magazine that was a beast to load but effortlessly cycled the hot “For
