44 AUTO MAG 180 NORTH HOLLYWOOD HISTORY

I have everybody Jeff Kelly here out of all the guns I own there is none more fascinating than the Automag the only one more fascinating than the original automatic is the North Hollywood Automag and I put together a history on it right here and I have a timeline at the end of this video on it so I hope you enjoy it first off I wanted to mention Bruce Starks book automatic the Pasadena days it's a really the definitive account of the development of the autumn egg and I encourage you to get one I will put Bruce's email at the bottom so you can contact him ok so let's take a look at these autumn AG this one here is a pasadena and i wanted to show it to you too before we get in to the north hollywood's and take a look at the grips there they're fully checkered and i wanted to particularly show you the the site on there it has that red sticker in the site notch that was cut for the pasadena barrel as you can see that notch there now the Pasadena guns came with these pieces of tape for the site and you could cut it yourself and put it in that notch you could choose either the yellow or the or the red tape now the this one here is another Pasadena and this one is brand new I was very lucky to get it and you can see that the notch does not have a piece of tape in it yet because nobody bothered the cut one and put it in there and it's never been fired other than I guess at the factory but that's how they used to come and you could cut your own tape and put it in there now this is the electro fetching that they did and that was done by hooking a positive and a negative lead to the metal putting a stencil over it and then painting it with acid and having the electric charge drag it into the metal and then reversing the charge and the electric charge would pull the acid out of the metal and it would come with that beautiful black lettering which is really nice so there's the second Pasadena one now the guns in Pasadena came with the case of course and the owner's manual and the bottle of two-cycle Castrol and the stainless steel Allen wrenches with the auto mag logo there and it also came with the plastic hammer lock the first ones came with black where the auto mag engraving is there and then later on they just made them without the black paint on them the North Hollywood changed the owner's manual simply by stamping some price increases in the back and putting a new yellow sticker on the front with the TDE logo on it and then here is the North Hollywood now this one is brand-new as well and I was really lucky to get this one but you can see they changed the grips on it the complete checkering used to bother some people's hand so they took part of the checkering off and put these types of grips on it you can see that beautiful electro act edging in there with the North Hollywood California and then the new TDE logo with the spinning arrows instead of the a inside the M which looked like a spider crawling down a drainpipe there so let's take a look at the site Bob Bob 'she wits head spaced all these North Hollywood guns and he did the barrels on them as well and he didn't think that it was necessary to put a notch on the barrel so that was one of the features that he eliminated and you can tell if it's a North Hollywood barrel because it doesn't have the notch on it but that's the beautiful North Hollywood gun that was made in Rosemead which I will get into a little bit later the serial number on this is AO 1758 which is a Pasadena number which I will get into a little later as well now they were also making with the North Hollywood guns Bob was making his own 357 a MP barrels the automatic pistol barrels and this is one of them here who was lucky enough to borrow it from a friend and the way you can tell that this is an original Baba Sheila's barrel that was made in Rosemead well let me tell you why he was making his own barrels Harry Sanford had lost one of Bob's mills in the bankruptcy and he felt bad about that so he allowed Bob to make his own barrels so he could sell them along with the North Hollywood guns and so but he wouldn't allow them to put any markings on them whatsoever you can see the receiver there is just beautifully polished but it has no markings or no markings on the other side and you can tell a Baba she whit's barrel by that pin there in the front sight the front sight is also set back leaving a nice crown on the barrel and then Bob liked Mauser sights routes or site hoods and he put in this groove here that was typical of a Mauser and the groove was deeper in the center than it was on the sides to hold in the the shroud or the hood for the site and it had the stainless steel Pasadena site on it with the with the grooves and the etch around the the site nots there has the accelerator on it and then also the barrel screws into the receiver so if you look really closely you can see some threads in there but these were just works of art and they're very very rare and very valuable so they were selling both of these units together at B&B sales if you wanted to buy the 357 barrel along with it Bob also did not put the ventilated rib on his barrels either they were just grooved that far down the receiver so those are the differences between the Pasadena's and the North Hollywood the North Hollywood's were built with Pasadena part so that's why they say that the Pasadena's are the most valuable because they were made of all the hard steel in the carpenter steel and the parts were all hand fitted and and made very nicely and the North Hollywood were assembled from Pasadena parts so this is why the North Hollywood are the second worth most valuable and I will get into the complete story coming up the North Hollywood story starts with the Thomas Oil Company on Vanowen in North Hollywood it was owned by James C Thomas the third and they sold oil properties as a business he was a friend of Harry Sanford's and in April of 1972 he bought thirty thousand dollars worth of parts and two hundred and fifty frames for the automatics from the factory in Pasadena with the idea of eventually buying the company on May 3rd 1972 the automatic corporation in Pasadena filed for bankruptcy on July 7th 1972 a notice was filed in the LA Times of the bankruptcy sale for the automat Corp in the 660 south Arroyo Parkway building on July 13th the auctioneer a milton jhay were show wound up buying all the assets himself for 81 thousand dollars which included parts to build 3000 automatics on august 2nd 1972 harry sanford leased a new factory at 11 685 McBean in almaty and he hired three employees Bob Bob washy wits Larry Grossman and Ken Boyd to work for him but he didn't want to make automatics in that factory because he didn't want the people that he owed Automag to out of Pasadena coming down there and beating on his door and demanding their guns that they lost in the bankruptcy there was still quite a few vendors out there that have been making parts for the automatic corporation that still had parts on hand and Bob Babaji wits and Ed O'Neill went out to all these vendors who had bolts and unfinished frames unfinished magazines receivers and also frames that Harry had used for collateral on on other parts and bought them all back and eventually sold them back to Harry to start making automatics again on March 6 1973 they had a hearing on the leftover assets of the automatic Corp which were the trademarks the copyrights and the pass JMC Thomas the third and mark love and Dale were the only two bidders on those assets and James see Thomas won the bid with $4,000 bid and another $29,000 owed to the creditors on the first thousand guns that were produced so now James see Thomas the third has won the rights to the automatic named trademarks intellectual property he has purchased the eighty one thousand dollars worth of machinery that came out of the automatic factory in Pasadena from the auctioneer and the rights to build three thousand guns that came along with that he's got the two hundred and fifty frames that he purchased for the thirty thousand dollars that he'd spent back in april of 72 and harry has got the factory least in El Monte mr. Thomas has hired Harry to run the whole operation and now we're at the point where James see Thomas the third is going to form TDE corporation or trade deed estates and use the address of his Thomas Oil Company on then Owen in North Hollywood for that DBA so the North Hollywood guns are about to be made it's back to Rosemead and ba ba ba she whips house Harry didn't want the automatics to be made at the amani factory because of the people that he had stiffed in the bankruptcy so he set Bob and Larry up with equipment at Bob's house to make the North Hollywood auto mags there you're looking at an aerial view of Bob's house in Rosemead the back yard where the shade trees are were where the barrels were heads faced and the garage is where the frames were put together for the North Hollywood Auto mags and they made about a thousand of them in the backyard of a house in Rosemead James C Thomas the third was good friends with the Kahn brothers Bob and Barry Kahn that owned B & B sales that's a picture of Bob Kahn right there with the two-way ours and they struck a deal to market the North Hollywood auto mags along with Bob Bob mushy wits 357 Magnum highly polished barrels that did not have the Automag name electro etched on them because of liability reasons to TDE but they were all marketed together you could either buy that separately or buy them as a package but they were located in North Hollywood and they were the ones who sold the North Hollywood guns now here's no lad I found with the address for B&B sales back in July of 1974 but I understand that they originally started out in an apartment on Riverside Drive and rented the apartment next door knocked the wall out between them and set up a gun shop until the landlord kicked them out so here's a picture of the Cumpston address the building is no longer there but that's what's left B&B sales later moved to an Oxnard street address where they became the largest gun shop in Southern California and up until 2000 and then went out of business because of personal problems and other things but they became highly successful the North Hollywood guns came with a special owner's manual that was identical to the Pasadena owners manner except it came with the yellow TDE sticker on the cover and there were some price changes that you can see there that they didn't want to print up a whole new manual to illustrate the new prices Walter Sanford made a notation on the original serial number list that number 38 75 was the first North Hollywood gun my North Hollywood automatic they're the 1758 listed in the Pasadena serial number log these are all past the in serial numbers by the way and then I've reached researched on the internet all the Hollywood automatics that have been sold that I can find and all of those numbers in red with the dates by them are Pasadena numbers yet they are North Hollywood automatics and those were a result of Harry giving guns without bolts or without receivers or frames or whatever to people that he was getting loans from and then those the ones that these guys bought back and then reissued as North Hollywood guns but with Pasadena numbers I think it's really telling how many January 72 numbers there are there you could probably infer that that was a time where he grabbed up a bunch of frames and handed them to a guy for a fifteen thousand dollar loan but that's how the North Hollywood guns gets sometimes those very low serial numbers this is a letter in a picture of a North Hollywood gun at a friend of mine Larry Allen sent me his father used to be a Automag dealer and at one time had over 300 automatics in the Midwest if you notice the picture of the autumn egg that is in the case it has a very dark frame and evidently there was three frame makers that were making frames for these back in the 70s and one of them used Graf right to release the frame from the mold which gave it that dark color and most of those frames were rejected for the Pasadena guns but when they bought all the parts back and the collateral parts a lot of those frames were in there as well and they made North Hollywood guns with them so occasionally you will find the North Hollywood gun with that dark frame on it this one happens to be pretty close to the time where they regained the rights to the automatic name on March 6 1973 this one is dated March 26 1973 so it's a pretty early early automatic so after the North Hollywood chapter was closed in the Automag story James Thomas closed the building he had in North Hollywood and moved everything down to El Monte where it was just TDE incorporated and the almaty guns were born after watching a few videos on the YouTube there seems to be a misconception on where some of these guns were made a lot of the time they think they were all made at different places and this is a list of where they were made and you can see that Pasadena and then of course Rosemead but the Omani guns the high standard guns Lee juris guns Kent Lamont guns and the om C's were all made in almaty at this factory right here so most of them came out of the same place I also wanted to post a written timeline for you on everything that was discussed so it would be easier to get straight I know that come the story is pretty complicated but here it is and I hope you enjoyed the video and will like it and share it and subscribe oh thanks very much and I will see you on the next one you

Channel: Jeffrey Kelley

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Id: QV26wxEZVH8

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020