1) I was saddened to discover the other day that FN discontinued production of the Hi-Power in 2017. Yes, I just learned about this recently; shows you how much attention I've been paying.2) A new gun shop opened up here in town recently, which is nice, since there hasn't been one in the Tri-Podunk Area since the fella who runs the canoe shop over in Medway gave up his FFL a few years ago. I checked it out yesterday. It's quite small as yet (just one corner of a store otherwise dedicated to other sporting goods), with mostly modern stuff I'm not so interested in, but in one of the handgun cases, I ran across something... odd.
So odd I went back today and traded a shotgun for it (not the GotW shotgun, that was my grandfather's, I wouldn't trade that). Check this out!
OK, so... this is a service pistol-size handgun, somewhat worn but in good condition, with the well-known Mauser cartouche logo and "MAUSER-WERKE Oberndorf GmbH" roll-stamped on the left side of the slide. That's all well and good, but does the gun itself look familiar? It should...
... it's a Browning Hi-Power.
Wha?
Over on the other side:
Hm. Still a Hi-Power, but claims to be something called a Mauser Mod. 80SA. Imported by our old friends Century Arms, sometime before 1995 (when they moved from Vermont to Florida). The heck is this thing?
Well, take all this information with a grain of salt, since almost all the information I'm about to present was gleaned from archived posts on gun forums on the Web, many dating back 10 or more years. However, the story is consistent enough that, absent evidence to the contrary, I'm prepared to accept it, to wit:
This gun is in fact a FÉG PJK-9HP, the Communist-era Hungarian clone of the FN GP35 (as FN of Belgium called Hi-Powers they sold under their own name, as opposed to Browning's). It was part of a batch of them that were made in the 1980s as parts, and then shipped across the Iron Curtain to Mauser in Oberndorf to be assembled and sold in West Germany. This venture supposedly lasted only a couple of years before FN put the kibosh to it.
Weirder still, word on the 10-years-ago Gun Web is that Century got the used ones they subsequently imported to the US from the Israeli police, of all agencies. There are no government property marks I can find on mine, but it did come with a police-type holster and shows quite a bit of surface wear, consistent with having been carried for some time in service but not heavily used.
(Those grip panels are pretty nice and not as worn as the rest of the gun; I suspect they were added post-US importation by a previous owner. That's particularly obvious near the top of the lefthand one, where it looks like the original grip on that side was slightly larger.)
This is what I love about firearms collecting—out of nowhere, in tiny towns in Maine, you can randomly run across German-built Hungarian copies of Belgian pistols that were made during the Cold War and later surplused by the Israeli police to be sold in the United States.
--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
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.