I haven't, although that has more to do with ammunition costing more than a dollar a round when you can find it at all than because I'm concerned about the safety of the gun itself. I mainly bought it because I find it interesting, and because that particular example was inexpensive on account of the poor condition of its finish.

One thing I forgot to mention in the original post was that the Type 14 is also the indirect ancestor of the Ruger Standard/Mk II/Mk III family of .22-caliber pistols, which debuted in 1949. Bill Ruger's original idea was to make and sell reproduction Nambus, having acquired one from a returning GI after WWII, but after making a couple of copies in his garage, he decided to simplify the design and make a straight-blowback rimfire pistol instead. You can still see the resemblance, particularly in the grip geometry and the way the bolt is configured.

>If memory serves, didn't the 94 also have a nasty habit of the
>chambers blowing out, just to add additional hazard for the truly
>hardy?

As far as I know, that's not one of the Type 94's specific problems, though the build quality of the last-ditch versions was so ropy that anything is possible. It's not an inherently sturdy design, that's for sure, although the structural failure it was most prone to - firing pin breakage - would just make it stop working, not blow it up. Of greater concern is that exposed sear, and also the fact that the magazine release was so positioned that it could be actuated by holstering or unholstering the weapon. Again, that won't hurt you directly, but it's embarrassing to draw your sidearm and have the magazine fall out.

>Still, nifty bit of history to have.

Much of my collection is like that; there isn't much in there which is of a great deal of practical use. I'm generally more interested in the history, the engineering, and/or the aesthetics. I certainly don't collect for the investment value. (Or as my grandfather not unkindly put it once, "You inherited my taste in junk." :)

--G.
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Which is odd, since the Nambu/Ruger/Luger (coincidence) grip angle is routinely cited as near-ideal for a single-stack auto, but there you are. Empirical evidence that mileages may vary. :)

(For you, there is the Ruger 22/45, which is a Mk III action on top of a grip frame designed to mimic the M1911A1 for training purposes.)

--G.
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Belatedly occurred to me as I was getting the pictures for this week's that I have one of these in the cabinet, so you can see the resemblance for yourselves.

Nambu Type 14:

Ruger Standard (retroactively the Mk I):

Of note is the fact that, although the Ruger is a simple blowback and not a short-recoil-operated semiauto like the Nambu, and therefore the barrel does not move when firing, the barrel and bolt shroud assembly is still a separate piece that can be removed for cleaning.

Later Ruger Standard marks would move to a button-activated magazine release (also like the Nambu's, and indeed most modern auto pistols), but the Mk I had its magazine catch at the heel of the grip instead. Heel releases were pretty common on smaller-caliber auto pistols right through WWII, though you don't see them much on new-made guns nowadays.

--G.
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Well, whether it's a downgrade depends on how you look at it. .380 ACP is more powerful than .32 ACP, but it's still not a particularly potent cartridge - it's not like the comparison between, say, .32 and 9mm Parabellum. And I'll tell you what, having handled PPKs in both calibers, I would much rather have the .32 version. I'm not entirely sure why, but I find .380 an extremely unpleasant round to shoot, in the PPK or anything else I've encountered it in. There's something about its recoil - not particularly forceful, but it always makes my hand sting. The increased performance of the cartridge is so marginal that I personally would take the .32's greater shootability and call it a win.

(I'm also not a big fan of the 9mm Makarov cartridge, for the same reason. I've had both an actual Makarov and a CZ 82, and they both had exactly the same problem. Shame, too, I really liked the CZ 82 as an artifact - the Czechs do good work - but I couldn't hang with that bitey ammo. I should have kept it anyway, but money was tight that month and I sold it.)

--G.
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Well, true, it isn't. But at the same time, it is more powerful than the .32 ACP, and it is fairly clear that the scene is taken straight from the book, where it makes a LOT more sense what with the original gun being a .25.
As for the gun, the .32/7.65 wasn't, and isn't, a bad round, and when Bond GOT it, it was certainly VERY easy to get more ammo if needed. Still, I have to say that, what with the immense amount of tech that showed up in the movies, of all SORTS of sci-fi flavor, it is a bit surprising that they hung onto the PP/K so desperately. Hell, they even traded back after he, briefly, carried the P99.

>Shame, too, I really liked the CZ 82 as
>an artifact - the Czechs do good work - but I couldn't hang with that
>bitey ammo. I should have kept it anyway, but money was tight that
>month and I sold it.)

Ouch. That sucks. There is a certain series of CZ75s I would love to get my hand on one of(convoluted sentence, there). Supposedly, they made an entire run of it with the national emblem of Sweden, the three crowns. Ordered for the Swedish military, and then never delivered for, you know, reasons.
Rare, and 'spensive as hell apperently, but...

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

True, although despite Major Boothroyd's snide remark about the Beretta's suitability for a lady's handbag, the matter at issue was not actually its stopping power anyway - it's the Beretta's perceived unreliability. Bond protests that he's never missed with it, and M snaps that it jammed on him in the last job and he spent an inconveniently long time on the DL in consequence. "You're licensed to kill, not be killed." (In the novel this is a direct reference to the end of the previous volume, From Russia, With Love, where the gun didn't actually jam but got hung up on its holster so that Bond couldn't get it into action in time. In the movies, FRWL happened after Doctor No, so who knows what M is referring to. :)

At any rate, reliability might still have been an issue with the .380 Beretta - which makes it kind of ironic that the real British secret services abandoned the PPK after some high-profile malfunctions in the '70s. :)

And speaking of which:

>Still, I have to say that, what with the immense amount of tech that
>showed up in the movies, of all SORTS of sci-fi flavor, it is a bit
>surprising that they hung onto the PP/K so desperately. Hell, they
>even traded back after he, briefly, carried the P99.

Well, that's an artifact of movieland. The PPK is visually distinctive, and its silhouette is part of the 007 brand. Bit like Aston Martin cars. Remember during the Pierce Brosnan era when they got a better marketing deal from BMW? Remember how weird that seemed? Same kind of thing. :) The PPK is part of the brand, that brand puts butts in seats, and most of those butts' owners neither know nor would care that the PPK has been obsolete as a service weapon for decades.

A lot of the "continuation" novels, where the visuals are less important, have played around with 007's armament, occasionally with hilariously ill-researched results. In the '80s, particularly, you had John Gardner arming Bond with stuff he had plainly seen in Shooter's Bible without actually having any idea what it was or did; my personal favorite was the one where Bond carried a Heckler & Koch VP70Z, because cool German polymer-framed wonder pistol, and despite being portrayed as a firearms snob of a fairly high order, never once makes mention of the fact that it made a man carrying one in a shoulder holster look like he was shoplifting a fridge-freezer, or that it had a trigger pull like a construction staple gun. :) (Or that its design deliberately reduces muzzle velocity - a strange design decision on H&K's part, one might argue. But then it was originally conceived as a very small submachine gun, and only got repurposed into a Service Pistol when it became obvious that that wasn't going to sell.)

>Supposedly, they
>made an entire run of [CZ 75s] with the national emblem of Sweden, the three
>crowns. Ordered for the Swedish military, and then never delivered
>for, you know, reasons.

I've read a few different versions of the CZ 75/Sweden story; in most, the Swedish Army showed enough of an interest in placing an order that CZ made major design changes to the pistol at their request, and then they didn't order any - which is why we don't have the original version with the elegant-looking short slide rails any more. I wouldn't doubt that there was a prototype or test production run with Swedish markings as well, but I've never seen one. Then again, I'm not a Serious CZ Collector. Most of what I know about it comes from that one issue of Gunsmith Cats. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, military. The Swedish armed forces weren't nearly large enough that there would be different service pistols for different branches, even before they went stupid in the ministry of defense. But sorta kinda. Having served, and having aquaintances that do to this day, at fairly respectable positions, there was, as I understand it, a full-on run of some 10 thousand pieces(which isn't enough for what was, then, ALL the people that would likely carry one, but at least a fairly respectable number). And then they weren't paid for, and so, of course, not delivered. Which means they went on the market, because reworking 10k guns was a bit excessive.

Personally, I would want it because it's apparently a good gun, more so than the average CZ 75, which is as I understand it a very good gun as is, if perhaps not to the level of GC claims(I've read them too. :)) and, hey, royal proof marks.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

OK, yeah, that's pretty substantial. Substantial enough that I'm surprised CZ didn't insist on getting paid for them up front, but then, that was presumably back when Czechoslovakia was still a Communist country, so the people who ran the company may not have had the firmest grasp of how that kind of thing is supposed to work. :) (Particularly since hard-currency transactions of that kind were often technically illegal in those countries, meaning the state-run industries engaging in them had to do all sorts of weird legal/financial maneuvering to get away with them. Zastava in Yugoslavia had a similar problem trying to sell cars in the West, occasionally leading to delirious levels of overproduction.)

>And then they weren't paid for, and so, of
>course, not delivered. Which means they went on the market, because
>reworking 10k guns was a bit excessive.

Heh, reminds me of a thing I saw (probably in a Forgotten Weapons video) about the huge glut of US-manufactured Mosin-Nagant rifles that flooded the market in the 1920s. They were made by various US companies under contract to the Russian government before and during WWI, and then the 1917 revolutions happened and the Communists wouldn't pay for them. (In this case it wasn't 10,000, it was boxcarloads of the damn things.) "Well, shit," said the US gun companies, who were the bailed out by the War Department, which bought all the guns but had absolutely no use for them, and so dumped them on the surplus market almost instantaneously. :)

As it turned out, the Red Army could really have used all those guns when Operation Barbarossa came along, and something like a third of the army had to wait around for the guy next to them to get killed so they could have his rifle, but hey. :)

>Personally, I would want it because it's apparently a good gun, more
>so than the average CZ 75, which is as I understand it a very good gun
>as is, if perhaps not to the level of GC claims(I've read them too.
>:)) and, hey, royal proof marks.

I don't have one myself, but they do seem to be very highly regarded. Mechanically they're basically a double-action Browning Hi-Power, and that's one of my favorite 9mms, so I'd probably like them too.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

having made use of both a construction staple gun and a variety of mid-caliber pistols (9mm, .380, .357), i have to say that the trigger pull on the stapler isn't much different (for likely much the same reason: if you're going to be pulling this thing a thousand times a day, you want to still have a working finger in the morning). now, a staple-gun of they type you used in school to hang flyers is a very different beast indeed, and those things will kill your hand after a few dozen in a row, but you don't really see them a lot on a construction site... it's either staple-hammers or pneumatic guns there.

this has been, construction trivia...

-Z

---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart.

By "construction staple gun", I mean the kind used in residential construction - such as the classic Arrow T50, which has probably put up a billion acoustic ceiling tiles over the years. Got one of those myself, and boy howdy. It's a quality product, but if you find a gun with a trigger pull like that, either there's something wrong with it or it's an 1895 Nagant revolver. Or a VP70Z. :)

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Or BOTH. Wrong and, that is, not Nagant and VP70Z. Though that'd be an interesting-looking thing. But, anyway, anything that goes KE-THUNK when you pull the trigger is just plain wrong. And, well, ow. And also, not aimable.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

yeah, that's the kind of thing that'll give you a wrist like an aikidoka and a grip like a bench vise after a week... if you still have a wrist. a trigger pull like that and you probably won't even make it through the magazine!

-Z

---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart.

I knew there was something that I had in mind to add to this, and since I'm off to see Spectre later today, I realized what it was. To wit, that Bond, in the previous one, Skyfall, is issued with a variant of the PPK, the US-market-developed PPK/S, chambered for, you guessed it, the 9mmShort/.380 ACP. Which, essentially, brings him back to the Beretta that he left behind in Dr. No, calibre-wise.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

Which is weird, because the only reason the PPK/S exists has to do with arcane size-and-weight requirements on imported handguns in the 1968 U.S. Gun Control Act, and there is no earthly reason for anyone in Europe - particularly any government agency in Europe - to have or want one. I guess it's because they wanted to promote a product that is still in actual new production, and the proper PPK no longer is. (Doubly strange is that the non-rimfire PPK/S is only made in the US now... and for domestic production they don't actually need to make the /S version, the restrictions it was designed to get around only apply to imports. So they could be making the proper PPK and they aren't. I don't get Walther sometimes. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Japanese military hardware numbering was pretty inconsistent. Some items are numbered with the regnal year they were introduced (like the Type 14), others with the "imperial" year (there are quite a few WWII Japanese weapons that are called "Type 99", for instance, such as the Type 99 aerial cannon commonly used by Fusō witches in Strike Witches/Our Witches at War), mostly along the chronological lines you note. You see this in naval hardware, as well - most breechloading naval artillery pieces were guns of the "Third Year" type (referring to Taishō 3, 1914), where the front-line torpedo during the war was the Type 93.

Confusing the matter further, still other items are just numbered in sequence. Naval aircraft, in particular, got sequential numbers starting right around the time of the transition from biplanes to monoplanes, which is why the Zero is called the Zero. The first models of many naval aircraft were called "Type 0", including the Mitsubishi A6M ("Type Zero Naval Carrier Fighter"), and for some reason the A6M came to be known as the Zero by Western forces (where, for instance, the entirely unrelated Aichi E13A Type Zero Reconnaissance Seaplane didn't).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, according to Wikipedia (so take this for what it's worth, but pedantic issues about military hardware tends to be the sort of thing it's good at), the Mitsubishi Zero was also named for the Imperial Year it went into service, 2600 (i.e. 1940).

I gather from Osamu Tezuka's Adolf that Imperial Year 2600 was a big deal in Japan, combining a turn of the century with nationalism. So a lot of stuff got named after it, much like our wave of "millennium" stuff 15 years ago.

Huh. I thought the A6M debuted earlier than that (for some reason 1938 was on my mind), but that would make sense.

--G.
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, the trigger assembly and magazine catch appear to have been removed, so I'm guessing no.

On the other hand, it's a Baby Nambu, so it probably has superior range and stopping power as a sword.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.