Tore’s Tuesday. Once a again a strange and quite rare pistol. A German contract Frommer Stop.
The Frommer Stop was designed and produced in Hungary and was approved for Hungarian military use in 1912. It has a few complicating features, so was rather expensive to make, but one may assume that the Hungarian army took it much because of nationalistic reasons.
The pistol is designed so that the barrel goes back because of the recoil, so the breech remains closed until the bullet has left the barrel, a feature intended to improve accuracy, but hardly makes much of a difference in the effective range of a 7,65mm pistol. The spent cartridge is ejected when the barrel is pushed forwards by the recoil spring. The complicating feature is that it requires separate recoil springs for the internal slide and the barrel. The barrel housing is of thin sheet steel, giving the pistol the feel of an old wind-up toy.
Tons of these were produced, so what makes mine so rare?
In 1916-17 about 37000 of these pistols were manufactured for the German army. To tell them apart from the ordinary ones one must look for two tiny stamps. On the left side on top of the trigger guard there is a very small German inspection stamp, crown over gothic B, and below a small commercial stamp with the letters BP.
So, a pretty rare bird, this, I did not know about this variation, and only found out long after I purchased it.