LAST EDITED ON Jan-01-16 AT 06:57 PM (EST)
 
I was getting the photos for the next couple of Guns of the Week and had the thought that I didn't get a shot of how the Nambu's action actually works when I did its entry. (Photos for these things have become considerably more elaborate since the early ones.)

So, here you go. This is the Nambu Type 14 with its action locked open, which it does on an empty magazine:

In this shot you can see more clearly that although the barrel and bolt housing do reciprocate slightly (because it's a short-recoil action), the Nambu doesn't have a slide in the "traditional" semiautomatic pistol sense; instead, the bolt moving inside the rear housing is the main moving part. This will be important to note in a future Gun of the Week.

Here's a top view of the open action. The Nambu is also unusual in that the ejection port is on the top, not the right side as is far more customary for semiautos. That's convenient for us, because it means from here you can see the top of the magazine and magazine follower. The follower is actually the only thing holding the action open. In most (but not all) semiautos that have last-round hold-opens, the follower triggers a mechanism inside the gun that holds the slide until released, but that mechanism is not actually dependent on the follower's continued presence to keep working. This is so the shooter can replace the magazine with a loaded one and then release the action, chambering the next round; it makes reloading quicker and more efficient.

The Nambu's doesn't work that way; because the magazine follower itself is the only hold-open mechanism, when you remove the empty magazine, the bolt automatically closes on the empty chamber. Once a fresh magazine is in place, the shooter must pull back and release the cocking knob manually to charge the pistol and ready it to fire again. I'm not sure why General Nambu thought that was a useful feature; perhaps it was merely intended to alert the shooter that he'd run out of ammunition and so avoid an inadvertent dry fire, which can damage the striker.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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