The Original Pasadena Auto Mag 180

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company where we are taking a look at an Automag 180 this is one of the early of the Magnum automatic pistols and this was designed and manufactured in the very early 1970s now the origin of this thing is basically if I can take a little artistic license here it basically came down to a chat between friends which turned into a post which turned into a hold my beer sort of moment the two guys who were responsible were a gun shop owner named Harry Sanford's and a gunsmith by the name of Max and Guerra now max Guerra was actually an Italian immigrant he was born in Venice in 1945 immigrated to the United States at a relatively young age and got went to work as a gunsmith he actually spent some time working for pak meyer company that's still around today and ended up leaving pak Meyer and going to work for Harry Sandford as a general-purpose gunsmith for a gun shop doing repairs and all that sort of stuff and apparently at one point in 68 or 69 the two of them were talking and someone brought up the fact that nobody made an automatic pistol for the 44 magnum cartridge and well could you even do that and they started thinking about it and max era basically said I'm not beer yeah we could do that so one of the main fundamental problems here is 44 Magnum is a rimmed cartridge which is notoriously difficult to use in box magazines it can be done but it's difficult so if you're going to design a Magnum automatic pistol you can make your life a lot simpler by starting with a rimless cartridge and gara realized that all you had to do to get rimless 44 Magnum was taken 308 or a 30.6 cartridge and cut it to the same length as 44 Magnum because the case had is Verta the case diameter is virtually identical so that became the 44 a MP or Automag pistol cartridge basically it's the same dimension as a 44 Magnum just rimless and it was originally designed to use this tab the same ballistics as a 44 Magnum so give or take about a 2 40 grain bullet at about twelve hundred and fifty feet per second now once you have this sort of cartridge designing the gun is gonna be a little more difficult than a magnum revolver because well you have to deal you have to hold on to the recoil force somehow and use that energy to cycle the pistol with a revolver all you have to do is make sure that nothing moves with an automatic you have to make sure that things do move but they don't move too much or the gun explodes so Guerra sat down and started doing the developmental work the initial design of this and he decided that it really ought to have a rotating bolt in order to properly contain the force the magnitude of energy in a 44 Magnum and so that's what he designed now this well I'll tell you what let's take a look at how the gun works and then we'll come back and talk about what happened after that because most of the story or a lot of the story comes after these guns were introduced what we have here is a short recoil rotating bolt single action automatic pistol so we have a single stack magazine here in the grip they did actually make these in two different cartridges they made them in the 44 a MP which as I described is basically rimless 44 Magnum they also made them a small much smaller number in 357 a MP and that was the same cartridge but necked down to 357 so the magazine holds I believe seven but it is recommended that you only load five it gets a little less reliable when the mags fully loaded this was not ever intended to be like a military pistol or a defensive pistol or the sort of thing that you stake your life on this was intended for target shooting handgun hunting and just the cool factor of being a really huge pistol so reliability is kind of on par with that they're generally pretty good but they do malfunction from time to time and you know this isn't this isn't a Glock 19 this thing has some some character to it I mentioned it's single action only so you have to [ __ ] the hammer the first time or cycle the bolt it does lock open on an empty magazine and interestingly you'll notice the barrel slide assembly sliding barrel assembly or just kind of loose when the guns locked open in order to take this part you actually do exactly this you lock the bolt open and then pull the magazine out and then we have a disassembly lever here very much like a Luger just drop that down the barrel assembly comes off the front you can then take this and release the hold open catch and run tension the springs and bring the bolt forward to disassemble this further you would actually use a hex wrench and take out these two bolts these are the recoil guide rods once these are out all the rest of the parts come off but we don't need to do that because I can show you exactly how this all works in this current configuration first off it's interesting to note that this actually has an accelerator in it and that's this guy right here so when this is fully in battery this gets pushed forward like that you can see the other surface of the accelerator right there so when I move this that moves like so the purpose of this is when the slide starts to move backwards here this impinges on a piece of the frame and it kicks backward and it gives the bolt an initial shove to get the bolt moving faster to aid in extraction if we look at the front of the bolt you can see there's one very large lug right here that's the surface that the accelerator pushes on we also have locking lugs not terribly unlike an ar-15 a little difficult to see down in there but there are a matching set of recesses there you go that those lugs engage in to keep everything nice and tightly held together one the guns firing and then we have an open cam track here with a lug right in the back so when I pull the bolt back notice that it rotates right there yep right there that is done by this lug it runs crosswise through the middle of the bolt that's why there's this big open space in the center of the bolt you can see it right there with the firing pin spring going into it and at the back of the bolt right up in there underneath these grasping surfaces this track curves upward and downward on this side that is where the bolt rests when it's all the way closed so that track by curving downward forces the bolt to rotate which locks those lugs then when the accelerator starts to kick it back the first thing that has to happen well the two the bolt and the barrel travel backwards together until they can until the barrel stops moving and then the bolt is forced to rotate unlock and then it can open as far as controls go we have a couple this is your bolt hold-open lever so if you don't have a magazine you can lock the bolt open using that we have a safety here which can only be engaged when the hammer is cocked and the safety safety goes up that disconnects the trigger renders the gun safe that renders the gun ready to fire sights are what you would expect from the 1970s sort of revolver style the ole sights like so looking at markings we have a basic made in USA here on the right and then the main marking is on the left side of the slide assembly Automag it's the 44 AMT model 180 that's I don't know where the 180 came from but that's the designation they chose Pasadena California so this marking will change as different companies came and went well we'll talk about that in a moment the serial number is engraved in the bottom of the grip frame right there and there's a cool surprise hiding under the magazine you had the option when you purchase the gun if you are a pre-order customer of having your initials engraved in the frame as well and so those are the initials of the initial purchaser of this particular gun he chose to have that done so that's kind of cool you could also choose for an additional fee you can have initials and serial number engraved in your magazines as well but this particular owner apparently opted not to do that a couple other things to point out this gun was is is made entirely of steal which brings up some potential galling and friction issues you do have to use a specialized lubricant with these a lubricant that's intended for stainless steel sometimes people don't and sometimes that results in problems also as far as handling goes it is interesting to me that while this gun is large and heavy and top-heavy you know there's a big ol space here at the top of the gun above your hand despite all of that it's one of the few Magnum automatic pistols that doesn't feel like the grip is just weirdly ridiculously huge this is actually not a problem to hold on to which is a little curious because most of these are have cartridges that are basically the same size when you look at things like this and the wildy and the desert eagle and the other Magnum automatic pistols out there so this was one of the very first of them and continues today I think to be one of the most collectible of them so that the auto mag began as a collaboration between Guerra and Sanford and the problem was the problem developed in late 1970 and Guerra ended up leaving before the guns were even finished or in production there were personal personal arguments and issues and incompatibilities between the two of them and I think a lot of this was spurred by the the arrival of investment money people who saw this idea Sanford went out looking for investors in the project because it takes a lot of money to tool up a production facility to manufacture a new gun and he couldn't do that on the cash flow of a gun shop so he went out to get investors and once you have investors Guerra describes as being like a nest of vultures and I can understand having some experience in the firearms industry it would get I suspect very stressful and unpleasant for someone who is a gunsmith who had approached this as a technical challenge and wasn't interested in all that sort of drama so Guerra left the picture his name is on the original patents but it's not on the final patents Sanford would continue with some other engineers to help finish off the design and actually make it compatible for proper Manufacturing they would start selling them in May of 1970 and nine months later I'm sorry they'd start selling them in August of 1970 and about nine months later in May of 71 they went bankrupt and out of business the problem was in order to try and drive production volume and sales volume they were selling the guns at a tremendous discount so they were selling the guns for about I think it was two hundred and forty dollars a piece and they cost multiple times that much to actually manufacture you know the hope was if you can drive enough interest you can get economy of scale and you can bring your manufacturing costs down and make the whole thing profitable it didn't work out because they didn't get enough people buying the gun fast enough and instead of of it turning into a big-time success it just fell flat on its face so they made a total of about 3,000 guns in that time period which is quite a lot but then they went under now this wouldn't be the end of the story far from it because Sandford would over and over and over managed to find new investors someone who looked at this pistol and that's just so cool yeah we should make it again it'll be a success this time and there were no less than five different companies between 1972 and 1982 that put in money started manufacture made some more guns on average about 1,200 guns per company and then went out of business themselves so in total about 9,000 of these were made by 1982 which is actually a remarkably high number given kind of the chaos involved in the design and the production and every other aspect of this story alter 82 was pretty much the end of it which is unfortunate because it was in 1983 that Clint Eastwood used one of these as Dirty Harry in the movie sudden impact and made them suddenly very popular but at that point I think they had exhausted everyone who really thought that these could be a successful business venture until actually relatively recently Harry Sandford passed away in 1996 and I believe 2015 his son or son-in-law I'm not sure which I think son sold all the intellectual property and the rights and the parts and everything to a company that has decided that today a this can be a successful venture again and they have actually reintroduced the automatic 180 shot show of just a couple years ago so they are I don't think I've seen any actually delivered yet but in theory these are going back into production now in general if you look at the automatics you will find like six different manufacturing names and locations now this particular one is from the very first batch this was made in Pasadena by the original company and so it kind of has its like the best of the bunch I would think from a collectability standpoint but there are a bunch of other variations out there know if you would like to see detailed pictures of this or rock island's catalog description of it or their value estimate take a look at their auction catalog you can get there by going to the description text below clicking the link to forgotten weapons and then from there I have a link that will take you to rock island's catalog page thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 462,130

Rating: 4.9680457 out of 5

Keywords: Forgotten Weapons, Dirty Harry, 180, automag, auto mag, pasadena, amt, arcadia, max gera, sanford, pistol, magnum, magnum pistol, sudden impact, 44 amp, 357 amp, short recoil, huge pistol, wildey, lar grizzly, survivor, clint eastwood, 45, 45 winmag, cartridge, 44 magnum, revolver, history, development, disassembly, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, collector, rare, preorder, autopistol, big gun, gun, handgun

Id: YAGuTGyYM7Y

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018