Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 - Dan Shideler - Страница 28

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 Submachinegun Use Only” British Sterling SMG ammo at over 1400 fps. The need for a powerful magazine spring is the reason that the WWI Luger magazines with their wooden bottoms were later replaced with extruded magazines with aluminum bottoms that could accomodate stronger springs for greater reliability. Overall cartridge length is important also. The steep angle of the magazine is only 1.070 inches front to back, which dictates a maximum overall cartridge length of 1.180 inches with very little under that acceptable.

While the Luger likes a slow push recoil, the Browning-design pistols of today like a hot primer and a sharp recoil. Consequently most of today’s ammo is made for their functioning needs, which are the exact opposite of the Luger’s. Also, their overall length does not always lie within the Luger’s operating lengths. Like the M16, the Luger is sensitve about the ammo used in it.

To keep the lock from cycling too fast, the WWI German Army Luger load was a 115-grain bullet at 1,025 fps. A slow-burning, single-base nitrocellulose powder with a high silica content that slowed ignition coupled with slightly underpowered low-flame primers gave a slower burning curve and a slower push, resulting in a slower cyclic time to allow proper feeding and reliability. WWII ammo was also slower burning but with a 124-grain bullet and, later, a 130-grain bullet. Mauser Werke altered the spring strength of the German Army’s Lugers for this ammunition. Ammunition marked for machinepistol use (MP-38, MP-40) was loaded with extra-hot primers that make the Luger cycle too fast for reliability. The best American powder for Lugers is Red Dot shotgun powder as it most closely equals the WWI powder’s burning and acceleration rate. 4.1 grains of Red Dot and a 115-grain bullet will give 997 FPS and 3.9 grains of Red Dot and a 124-grain bullet will give 1,025 FPS. Winchester primers are the best American primers for Lugers because they are the least likely to be pierced by the Luger’s long firing pin. When that happens, gas can go back through the firing pin hole, pushing the firing pin and spring back and ripping the back out of the breechblock. The extractor may also be forced up and torn out of the breechblock.

Like all Lugers, the Krieghoff has an immediately-identifiable profile.

Prior to WWII, Germany put three relief grooves in the firing pin to let the pressure from a pierced primer go past the firing pin instead of driving it as a piston backwards. The Finns drilled a hole in the bottom of the breechblock into the firing pin area to bleed gas off in their guns.

A grouping of unfinished Krieghoff Luger parts from the bench of master gunsmith Frank Kaltenpoth.

The 9mm Parabellum cartridge has always presented problems for gun designers because its tapered case can give uneven pressures in an automatic. The tapered case grips the chamber and if there is dirt in the vicinity, the tapered case wedges in it and jams instead of pushing it forward into the chamber as a straight case does. As a result, no 9mm Parabellum can function reliably with a rough or dirty chamber. The 9mm Parabellum also has a high chamber pressure of 36,000 psi, which can rise into the low 40,000 psi range if a bullet is bumped and set back into the case. This is not the sort of pressure the light Borchardt toggle liked and, remember, it was not beefed up in mass when it became the Luger.

The tapered 9mm cases also gave feeding problems in the Luger’s sharply-inclined magazine where they tend to tilt and create extra drag in addition to the side drag, resulting in a magazine that has difficulty feeding cartridges to the super-fast toggle action before the bolt rides into the top side of the cartridge instead of the cartridge base because the cartridge hasn’t had time to rise up to full feeding position. The problem was compounded by the Luger’s incredibly light weight of 30 ounces, which lets the muzzle flip up more in recoil as the cartridges in the magazine are simultaneously driven down by that flip – this on a magazine whose angle of feed dictates that it be so precisely positioned that a worn magazine catch or a magazine that hangs too low will cause feeding jams.

Georg Luger had originally designed his gun for the .30 Luger cartridge, which was well balanced to the design. Someone took the case and opened it up to 9mm for a bolt action “garden gun” cartridge, in which role its tapered case was an aid to extraction. About this time, the German police experienced several failures of the 93-grain .30 Luger to stop a determined assailant, so DWM ordered Georg Luger to chamber the Luger for the new 9mm cartridge as this would only require rebarreling. Georg pointed out the aforementioned objections plus the fact that the heavier bullet would have a larger recoil impulse than the lightweight toggle had sufficient mass to resist. Bottom line: business cost-cutting overruled the designer and Georg’s protests fell on deaf ears.

To his credit, Georg Luger made the gun work with a less than perfect cartridge for it. When you consider the initial strikes against it and the final outcome, you realize that this is one of the finest triumphs of German firearms engineering.

The Luger was inspired by the Maxim Machinegun and indeed Hiram Maxim referred to it as a Maxim machinegun in pistol form. (He also considered it a patent infringement.) Like the Maxim, the Luger is an incredibly long-lived gun. According to Alfred Gallifent, a Swiss Federal Certified Armorer who was qualified to work on the Swiss Army’s Lugers, the five most common Luger repairs in order of frequency were 1) the grip screws were buggered up by someone with an ill-fitting screwdriver; 2) the L-shaped spring that retains the takedown lever would break; 3) the leaf spring on the M1900 would break; 4) the receiver forks would break when some idiot dropped it on concrete; and 5) the transfer bar from the trigger to the sear was buggered up by people tinkering with it and bending it in an attempt to get a better trigger pull.

Precision machining at its finest.

The Krieghoff Luger in its high-tech case, itself something of a work of art.

When these are the most common repairs on guns in continuous service since 1900, you have a most excellent design.

THE NEW KRIEGHOFF

An enormous amount of research went into ensuring that the new Krieghoff Lugers were absolutely perfect continuations of the WWII production run. Krieghoff’s production drawings did not all survive the war intact but the Bavarian Main State Archives, Department 4, War Archives in Munich had the “Dimension Tables” for the P08. Original Krieghoff P-code pistols were carefully studied to ensure exact duplication of the technical details unique to the Krieghoff Luger. Precise duplicates of the original marking stamps such as the Krieghoff “sword/anchor logo” were made. Molds were made to produce duplicates of the original military brown bakelite grips and tooling produced to once more make the WWII Krieghoff PO8 magazine and aluminum magazine bottom. Original gun barrels were copied to make the correct land and groove pattern on the new barrels. This is unheard-of attention to technical detail in a recreation.

The Krieghoff Luger, disassembled.

Great attention was given to getting the precise bluing colors of the original, a job complicated by new environmental laws banning some of the original ingredients in the blueing formulas. However, Krieghoff succeeded with true Teutonic precision. Every color is absolutely the same. The full attention of this German industrial giant was devoted to getting every detail exactly right. The finish has no tool marks except for the obligatory milling machine swirls in the safety area which also had to be exactly reproduced. A Luger without these would just not be an authentic Luger.

The parts all begin as precision forgings for maximum strength. The original alloys are used where they are still available and when new ones had to be substituted, careful chemical experimentation was done to be sure the bluing was exactly the same as the originals on the new alloys. Most people would not be able to tell the difference, but Krieghoff could, and only perfection was acceptable. The forgings were then sent to a modern five-axis CNC milling center to make the pieces that will be hand fitted together. The machine requires custom tools and contoured cutters.

The Krieghoff Luger’s frame has more than 600 points where measurements are taken. A 13-pound forging is milled and broached down to a half-pound semi-finished frame. It takes 7.5 hours to reduce 20 to 25 pistol frames to this stage with the most modern production equipment. The rear cuts to hold the trigger sear flat spring proved a difficult problem to solve, as did many others in the 100-year-old design. This gun was not intended for easy modern production. Specialized broaches like the one used to cut the slide guides in the side of the frame had to be made. It should be noted that it is a huge financial undertaking to tool up to make the Luger or any other gun, and Krieghoff has not done that – nor could anyone – for a mere 200 guns. What they could do was machine it to a point that a master gunsmith could take over with his hand files and hand-make it the rest of the way in the same manner that Best Quality doubles are hand-filed from forgings provided by a blacksmith. Believe me, it is a long way to go. You are paying one of the world’s greatest gunsmiths to hand-make you a pistol just as he would hand-make a Best Quality double shotgun or rifle. You are getting every cent’s worth of the price. Indeed, Krieghoff cut profits to the bone on this tribute to their old friend the Luger. The guns are only sold direct to the customer without a middleman to keep the price below $20,000. This is a true labor of love by Krieghoff.

The artist doing all the hand work on the Krieghoff Luger is Frank Kaltenpoth. While the English gun trade has tended to keep their gunmakers at the bench and away from the fame they are due as individual artists, this attitude has actually worked against them, as today most people imagine “Best Quality” guns to be mostly machine-made. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that mistake is not to be repeated with the Krieghoff P08.

Frank Kaltenpoth was born on October 20, 1963, the son of a lockmaker. He started his apprenticeship as a gunsmith at Ferlach in 1980, graduating with honors in 1984. He then spent four years in military service as armorer in charge of all hand-held weapons and the main gun of the Leopard 1 tank in Panzer Battalion 134 of the German Army stationed in Wetzlar, Germany. He began working as a gunsmith at Kettner in Augsberg in October of 1988. After four years, he was eligible for the two-year master gunsmith course in Ulm, where he graduated with honors in June of 1993. He then worked for Kirstein, remodeling and custom-building M1911-A1 pistols. There he learned to use CNC machines to rough out a part to a point where he could hand-file and hand-fit a gun to Best Quality standards. Combining the latest machining techniques with traditional Best Quality handwork is a great skill and one that few men have. As befitting a great master, Kaltenpoth is technically self-employed but since 1999 has done work only for Krieghoff.

Krieghoff’s production of the Luger pistol dates back to 1934, when they were awarded a Luftwaffe contract for 10,000 pistols. The last of these were delivered in 1937. Most significantly, they delivered on the Luftwaffe’s contract clause that required interchangeability of parts. Previously all Lugers were hand-fitted. Furthermore, they did this with a massive reduction in rejected parts during production, reducing Mauser’s 40% rejection rate to a more acceptable 10% rejection rate. This heightened standard of machine production raised the bar for Mauser and the other German firms. For Krieghoff, it resulted in lucrative contracts to make the MG 15 and other weapons.

Both Mauser and Krieghoff remedied a problem found in the 1920s-vintage Lugers made by Simson. The top rear of the ear on either side of the Luger’s frame must be of sufficient thickness to prevent the head of the rear toggle link axle being completely exposed as the toggle cycles. If fully exposed, the axle (or pin, if you prefer) can drift out during recoil and prevent the toggle from returning to battery. This was found to occur only on Simson Lugers, which had the most metal removed from this area. Mauser and Krieghoff both increased the thickness here beyond even that of the DWM Lugers to make sure this would not happen to a German soldier in combat. To draw attention to their fix, Mauser added an extra machining cut to produce a slight bulge over the area needing more thickness, a sight that many former Simson users found comforting.

The Luger is a natural pointer. Fully extend your arm, lock your eyes on the target, nestle your chin on your shoulder, and squeeze. Chances are you’ll hit what you’re aiming at.

Holsters for the Luger, left to right: Strong Leather pancake with thumb-break snap, post-war East German military, and fast-draw pancake without safety strap from El Paso Saddlery.

The Luger is a gun well worthy of such attention to detail. It is the easiest pistol of all to hit with; nothing points faster or more accurately. It is the most accurate service pistol ever issued. Most Lugers will shoot 10mm groups or less at 25 meters, and the only repeating pistols that I know of that have shot a 1-inch minute of angle group at 100 yards are the Luger and the 8-3/4-inch-barreled S&W .44 Magnum, although the latter hardly qualifies as a service pistol because of its huge size, recoil, and inability to fire rapid fire. Despite the many slanders leaped on it by gun writers over the years, when given the correct ammo and a magazine with a powerful spring, the Luger is also one of the most reliable pistols in the world – the number one spot being held, of course, by the M1911-A1 .45 automatic.

These virtues enabled the Luger to become one of the top three gunfighting pistols of all time based on the number of kills made. The other two are the M1873 Colt Single Action Army revolver and the sainted M1911-A1. The latter is the gun I carry but the fact remains that the Luger points better and is more accurate. It’s the pistol I use for varmints and trick and fancy shooting.

The Luger was one of the most popular military pistols in the world in the first part of the 20th century. Many nations adopted it and used it in far-flung corners of the world, but its greatest combat use was by the German Army. The German soldier was not a pistoleer and did not know about instinct shooting without sights. In the rough and tumble brawl of trench raiding and close-quarters fighting, the P08’s handling qualities gave him all the lessons he needed. It was quickly found that if you looked at the target and pointed the Luger at it, you usually hit exactly where you were looking. In the close confines of a trench, the Luger was a far more deadly weapon than the bolt action rifle and bayonet of his adversaries. The Luger continued to rack up its score through WWII, where German officers who intended to actually shoot someone with their pistol went for the Luger and those who wanted a pistol as a badge of rank opted for .32s. A good example was the SS officer who, as legend has it, was presented one of the first Walther P38s but continued to carry his Luger because he could hit better with it.

The Luger was often slandered by contemporary American gunwriters, perhaps out of an admirable sense of national pride or perhaps because they could do so without offending an advertiser. They attacked “the enemy’s gun,” the Luger, calling it unreliable and saying things such as, “If your Luger jams, use hot ammo. Lugers like hot ammo” and “The Luger’s magazine spring is unnecessarily strong and makes it too hard to load. Clip a few coils off to make it easier.” The truth is that Lugers don’t like hot loads and they won’t work with a weak magazine spring. Today, perhaps as many as nine out of 10 Luger magazines in the country have been shortened, causing jams.

As previously noted, the Luger is very ammo-sensitive and requires the strongest magazine spring possible. Give it this and it is reliable. As for its not working in the dirt, it performed perfectly in the maelstrom of flying mud and dirt of WWI while the vaunted S&W Triple Lock revolvers jammed in the mud. So much for revolver vs. automatic reliability! WWI settled that issue quite nicely. After WWI, the Luger was rather popular with the American cowboys. It perfectly fit the chaps pocket, a notorious dirt and sand trap infamous for tying up revolvers with sand in their guts. When WWII came along, the Luger continued to shine.

The Luger was always carried in a holster designed for maximum protection from the elements. The German officer was expected to have the pistol in prime operating condition instead of trying to do a fast draw every time an enemy popped up. For modern civilian carry, I have never found anything better than the pancake holster design. It offers the best combination of concealability, comfort, and fast draw available. I have used this design ever since it first appeared many years ago. Here are two companies’ versions:

Strong Leather Co. makes a classic molded thumb break pancake holster of the very highest quality for the Luger pistol that will meet any civilian or police needs. I have never been able to find fault with their work. Contact Strong Leather Co., P.O. Box 1195, 39 Grove St., Gloucester, Massachusetts, 01930.

A quick-draw pancake holster without a retaining strap is offered by El Paso Saddlery Co., 2025 East Yandell Dr., EI Paso, Texas, 79903. This company began in the days of the Wild West and made holsters for the deadliest old West gun-fighter of them all, John Wesley Hardin. They have the longest history of making fast-draw holsters of anyone. This is the holster to wear when action is imminent. It may not have a securing top strap for normal duty use, but, man, it is fast!

As we have seen, the Luger is one of the finest pistols ever made, and the new Krieghoff is the finest Luger ever made. As the late great Col. George Chinn, whose monumental five-volume series The Machinegun is the definitive work on machinegun mechanisms, once told me, “As long as nitrocellulose is our propellent, all possible mechanisms have already been invented. All that remains is to reconfigure existing systems into different guns.” Pistols don’t offer as many different tactical design configuration possibilities as shoulder arms, so the pistol got perfected early. Once you reach the summit, all roads lead downhill regardless of how new they are. So if you want the ultimate pistol, you get a M1911-A1 .45 automatic. If you want the best pointing, easiest to hit with, and most accurate pistol, you get a Luger.

And if you want the finest Luger, you get a new Krieghoff.