Okay, I said I was going to shoot it and post about it. Well, I shot it. But not enough to post about it, because the pistol suffers from what many semi-auto pistols suffer from, especially old ones - bad lips.
Yep, bad lips.
Just to refresh, the Dreyse is a smallish, .32 ACP (7.65mm) semi-auto that weighs in at 24 oz and is 6.25 inches long. It was designed by Louis Schmeisser, and it was named after Nikolaus von Dreyse, inventor of the needle gun. The holdings of the Arsenal of Argghhh! include a needle gun, though in our case it is a French Chassepot, developed in response to Herr Dreyse's weapon. The pistols were built from 1907 until 1915 by Rheinische Metallwaren und Maschinenfabrik, Sömmerda, Germany. They made over 250,000 of them for the private, military, and police markets.
[Update: Realizing I've not really given you any size cues, unless you're a gun geek already - the two bullets in the picture above are the .32 ACP and .45ACP. I know, that doesn't really help, either, unless you're a gun geek. So... click here and you get a picture with some size cues, complete with a US Quarter coin for those not into visual caliber-gauging. From top to bottom, with a bullet for each (except the .25ACP Webley on the bottom) are a Desert Eagle in .357 Magnum, a Remington-Rand M1911A1 in .45ACP, the Dreyse, in .32ACP, and the itty-bitty Webley, in .25ACP.]
The pistol is well made, and bears a resemblance to the 1900 Browning - though internally it is very different in it's mode of operation - one of the reasons it is in the Castle holdings. It has what I think is a needlessly complex trigger mechanism, and it operates differently from Browning designs in that the barrel is fixed in the receiver, and the bolt recoils out of the receiver, vice the recoiling slide and pivoting link of more conventional (and longer-lived, more widespread) designs. One can't help but think this *feature* didn't really serve well in the dirt of the trenches. Unlike most semi-auto pistols, which you grasp at the rear to pull back to load and cock the weapon, on the Dreyse you grasped the front at those serrations and pulled back - to me, that is *not* an optimal approach. And generations of subsequent designers and users agree with me, I think. Overall it's a fairly simple pistol, (excepting that trigger) though getting the spring out can result in launching the bushing 50 feet if you're not careful (said the voice of experience).
So, get to the "lips" bit, screams the peanut gallery. Simple. The magazine has bad lips. They're damaged and misshapen enough that it won't hold more than one round. The spring (another Usual Suspect in magazine failures) is in fine fettle however. When I took my thumb off the second round I'd loaded, it promptly launched both rounds at my face, hitting apogee about two inches away...
You put more than one round in the magazine, and they all just pop right out. It will hold exactly one round. This doesn't lend itself to a fun day of shooting, either. The magazine lips are curse of semi-auto pistols, and the source of many reliability problems associated with them. This type of pistol is also picky about what kind of ammunition you shoot - wrong bullet shape, they won't feed. Wrong bullet weight/powder charge or improper grip of the pistol by the shooter, and they won't cycle fully. Problems revolvers don't suffer. But people like the magazine capacity of the semi-auto... and if you know what you're doing, they work pretty well.
Back to the magazine. With so little lip left to work with, the only reason that magazine isn't going into the metal recycling bin is because it's an original magazine, with all the markings that European makers like to put on the bits and pieces of their work, and tossing it would reduce the value of the pistol. But the Triple-K Company specializes in making magazines for obsolete weapons - so we'll get the old girl shooting again, just as we ordered a magazine from them for the Castle's Webley in .25 ACP.
And *that* will be another post. So, in a sense, I got two posts out of this malfunction.
13 Comments