The man who made those videos strongly advised against taking the barrel out, so I haven't, but looking at it, I might have to steel myself and attempt it.

Keep in mind that I've never shot this pistol; I bought it on a "does not work, at your own risk" basis because it didn't have a magazine in it, and is one of those pistols that don't work at all without a magazine, and though I bought an aftermarket magazine for it, I hadn't researched how to get it apart and check to see if everything in there was working.

As such, everything you see in these photos was already like that when I got the gun, which... well, look at it. Whoever shot it last certainly didn't clean it before putting it away, nor did the person who sold it before passing it along. I'm not sure how often it was ever cleaned.

The filth doesn't show up very well in the photos, because under the flash it's more or less the same color that the pieces would be anyway. This is a problem I also ran into with the "before cleaning" photos of the M1 carbine.

Anyway, this picture shows details of the firing pin, its spring, and... well, for brevity's sake we'll call that bit at the top of the photo the bolt, I guess, even though strictly speaking it kind of is and isn't one. It doesn't come out of the gun at any time like a traditional semiauto pistol bolt (compare the Nambu or Ruger), but it does move semi-independently of both the slide and the barrel inside the gun when the action is working. (The videos do a good job of explaining how that works. The Pedersen system is really not much like anything else.)

On the plus side, the bolt looks to be in good condition apart from how dirty it is. The bolt is the weak point of the Pedersen system, as it takes the biggest beating in the course of normal operations (apart from the shoulder in the frame it interacts with, anyway) and they have been known to break. I gather people feeding the pistols hot modern "defensive" .380 ammo is the usual cause for that, and that it's less of a problem with the (rarer, more valuable) .32 version.

You can see the fouling better in this shot up into the interior of the slide. HINT: That's not supposed to be black in there.

(This is why I say I may need to grit my teeth and try to take the barrel/spring/sleeve assembly apart; the spring is kind of grunged up too, I think less from powder fouling than from just lying around un-oiled for a long time, and I'm not sure how clean I can get it from outside.)

Likewise, the interior of the frame is pretty grungy, not exclusively with burnt powder residue. The whole thing needs a good scrubbing. It's time to go to the drug store and buy a couple of cheap toothbrushes...

(Also in this last photo, you can see that the R51 is an internal-hammer-fired design, like the Colt 1903 Hammerless.)

--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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