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I was just wondering about theme guns and how extreme they have ever gone. Since most of us have a few good reliable serious guns for self-defense, I was wondering if anyone has done anything off the wall just to be funny and for something to be cool? I always dreamed of a .22 lr pink revolver with white or pink grips. Then, it'd have lots of bling bling on it, and have a hot chick's picture engraved on the side. Wouldn't that be funny?
A 1911 has lots of room on the side of the slide for custom work and engraving. I figure it'd be pretty ideal for some cool theme guns. I've seen a Krebs custom gun once in a magazine that had a dragon mouth on the end of the gun so that when it was shot, it'd look like the dragon was breathing fire.
I understand that some of you may think that these are dumb ideas or useless. However, if you open your gun safe, chances are that most of us already have quite a few nice reliable, accurate, practical 1911s. Why not get something just for show and tell like in Kindergarten?

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My Weimaraner shoots a 1911 better than I can.

I have had one in mind for a long time, and I think I finally have a customer-in-waiting talked into it: the Boarding Pistol.

..... it was 1952 and an old deisel trawler (upgraded from a coal steamer in '34) that was in use back in the '20's and '30's had finally been turned over to the scrapper, probably a decade and a half late. It had seen service in several untamed corners of the world, performing borderline illicit or outright illegal duties involving items that were proscribed locally but in very high demand nonetheless. She was passed down through a series of owner/captains, each new one seemingly possessed of a keener thirst for adventure than the last. It was even rumored that, in the early days of WWII, wherever this unimpressive tub was operating, any Axis warships that were operating alone tended to be found adrift, their engines and guns disabled, with their crews left naked, any valuable cargo and portable weapons, vanished. Some of the unluckier ones, perhaps those who put up too much of a fight, were recovered as crewless, burned hulks, or not recovered at all.

Upon his first inspection, the scrapper found that the old tub would be a little difficult to take apart. Although she had been sitting for some years now in disuse and was well rusted, he found to his surprise that, under the wood strucuture of the pilot house, there was armor plating in key areas. It all bore the pock marks of .30 caliber machinegun bullets and more, although the larger holes had been patched, and the wood slats over the holes had been replaced and repainted. The hull, too, from the gunwales down to a foot or so beneath the waterline, had been beefed up, not with thick armor plating, which would have been awfully heavy, but with a false hull of 3/8 mild steel that had about three inches of standoff from the actual hull. The space between the two was open to seawater, and tightly stuffed with kapok, held in top and bottom by steel mesh bolted in place. He supposed that the idea here was to give a little extra flotation to try and offset the weight of the extra steel, and to make any bullets struggle that much harder to get through to the actual hull. None of this was evident at a glance; in fact, with the boat in the water, it would be practically impossible to determine what was there, and its purpose.

Fascinated by what he saw as he looked the "carcass" over, he thought of these old boats as carcasses and of his business as sort of a rendering plant, on a whim, he directed his crew to some other task that Friday afternoon and decided to come back on Saturday for an hour and take a closer look by himself, before sending the torches in.

He arrived Saturday morning at 9AM and didn't leave until after dark.

He made many interesting finds. The deisel, new in 1934 and now worn to scrap, had been the very state of the art at the time, an expensive, high-performance powerplant. This engine, and everything from the screw to the beefed-up rudder to the redundant controls told of high-performance and durability, but wherever possible this had been masked, disguised from prying eyes as everyday, mundane, scow running gear.

The find that seemed to say the most though, and that left him sitting on what was obviously the captain's bunk for hours, examining it, until he finally realised it was getting dark, came from a compartment he discovered by chance, in a medicine cabinet over a tiny sink. Or, to be more precise, behind the medicine cabinet.

Rust had taken its toll on the structure of the boat; rough seas and hard knocks had stressed the very framework over the years; but the final insult that jarred the bulkhead enough to expose a crack that invited the scrapper to explore furhter with a Johnson bar, had no doubt come in the unkind, five-foot drop onto concrete, by the crane that had lifted the hulk from the water on Thursday.

..... and having opened the medicine cabinet, whose door was already sprung ajar, whose mirror was cracked, and having found it empty, obviously empty, he turned to explore elsewhere. But wait..... he turned back. Odd that there should be a quarter-inch gap like that, in the back wall of the cabinet--- actually, there were two, horizontal gaps, the top one a quarter inch on the left tapering to nothing on the right, over the width of the cabinet. The bottom one was gapped a quarter inch on the right, tapering to nothing on the left. At the ends there were barely-discernable vertical gaps connecting the two.
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To be continued, maybe I can actually get to the part about the Boarding Pistol. Jeez, I sure did not mean to write a book about this but once I got rolling......

I'm just pulling this out as I go along so, first draft, first draft, first draft!

Hey Ned, in addition to being an excellent gunsmith you are also a first rate writer. I am waiting to hear the second half of this story.

Ya, second half. I didn't know it was a cliff hanger...

Ned-

C'mon, man, this is killing me. It's been almost four hours since you posted the first installment.

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Sic Semper Tyrannis

Ooops, dey wuz horizontal gaps. Edited fer proper gap orientation. More later.

The quarter-inch gaps were just enough to get the tip of his smallest prybar started. He wriggled it in, and hesitated. This seemed.... wrong somehow, almost irreverent. He pulled the bar out, deciding to think it through more before acting. His mind was telling him to figure it out and proceed with finesse; his curiosity was sending a scorching message to tear into it now, and find out what's in there!

Studying it told him that this was probably a drawer. Its height from the floor coincided with the floor of the pilot house, adjacent and forward of the small cabin he now stood in. This would explain how a drawer of any depth, if it were such, could be contained in an otherwise very thin wall.

He might go into the pilot house and tear up the floor over the spot where the drawer would be. He might go into the compartment below the pilot house and tear into the ceiling, or both. Niether seemd a less crude approach than forcing it from here with the Johnson bar, so that was what he did.

He reinserted the bar and started to gently pry. The face of the drawer flexed a bit as did the steel bulkhead into which it was set. He moved the bar to the opposite corner and tried again with the same level of force, with the same results. He tried harder. Then harder...... finally the drawer face had come toward him a finger's breadth and stayed there when he released the bar. He went to the opposite corner and again leaned into the bar. The drawer moved a little further, then with a dull snap, came relatively free. It still required force to withdraw it completely, due to its opening in the bulkhead having been twisted out of shape, but by putting the hooked end of the bar behind the drawer face and pulling on the bar's shaft with both work-hardened hands, he was able to pull it out to a stop. And it did not stop until it protruded from the back of the medicine cabinet a full two feet, leaving the back wall of the drawer still somewhere inside the opening.

The always wished-for, but never actually hoped-for, fantasy greeted his eyes-- gold! Odd-looking coins at first glance, rectangular on the face and crescent-shaped on the sides-- these are gold, right? he asked himself, hoping some inner authority might step forward and officially confirm the improbable. The light was not as good as it had been just 45 minutes earlier, and it took a few moments to realize what he was seeing. The rectangles were maybe 2" X 2 1/2", smooth on top and on the sides, with-- a large swastika cast or stamped into them. From the side, the pieces were a crescent of perhaps 3/8" depth, by the rectangle's 2 1/2" length. The surface of the crescent was a rough sawed surface, and the scrapper concluded that these forty pieces, laid neatly in rows two and three deep, had been hand hack-sawed sawed from gold ingots-- in order to conceal their origin? The reason for hiding the source of the gold was obvious-- but why not just melt them down? Maybe they didn't have the time, or the equipment, or-- there could be many explanations. He started off on many tangents before being pulled back to the here and now by the large object occupying the rest of the drawer.

It was wrapped in heavily oiled canvas and tied with twine. He lifted the end nearest him and pulled it from the drawer, for it was longer than the protrusion of the drawer-- a full three feet, he reckoned, as it came free. It was heavy, and he instinctively knew it was a weapon of some sort.

Suddenly the gold was gone from his mind. Whatever was inside this grimy package was going to be more interesting even than Nazi treasure!

He took it topside to get the benefit of the afternoon's waning light-- it had become dark enough below that one might not quite read a headline, the few portholes not allowing sufficient illumination. As he reached the deck, he glanced around involuntarily-- nobody around. He had to laugh at himself just a bit. After all, did he not have legal title to the boat now, and everything that might be on it or in it? He went forward of the pilot house, where he would have the best light, and be hidden by the structure from the area most likely to have any passers-by, which was not very likely in any event.

And!?! What a great story (me thinks)...

Ned,

That's the same creativity and grandeur we have come to love about your guns. You never know what's going to come next. Please, good sir, continue whenever you may.

~Jim Keeney

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"I'd rather die on my feet than keep living on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata, Mexican Revolutionary

3 ft long......
was it possibly an stg44??!!

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http://www.rogersprecision.com

metinks a boarding pistol of some kind...but I've always been master of the obvious....

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"Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came?
Why then, the war would come to you!"
(Bertolt Brecht)

Luger or broomhandle with stock.......but why store it assembled?
3ft long......3ft long...............An FG42???????

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http://www.rogersprecision.com

Ned, you're killing me! A 1928 Thompson?
Am I going to have to drive to Michigan to get the rest of the story?
Lou

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Alessi Holsters, Inc.
You'll never know it's there, until you need it...

He sat upon a cleat and set the package on his lap. It was apparent from the feel of it that whatever was in there rested on or was fastened to a thin bit of board. He untied the twine, a simple bow towards the end that had come out first, with several wraps around the outside. This freed an end flap in the oiled canvas. He tilted the package slightly to try and peer in, and heard a metal-to-metal clunk. Something had moved and slid into something else, making him realize that the tightly wrapped twine had been keeping things in place. He move the package back to horizontal and reached into the open end, slowly, as if he were reaching into a sack of scorpions. He felt for and found the board's end and carefully started pulling it and its passengers out.

He felt a little let down as he recognized the emerging back end of an American pistol, their military gun, the .45 automatic. He asked himself what he'd been expecting, and didn't have an answer. So, then, he asked again, why be disappointed? Well, it was not..... particularly valuable. Although it was a storied weapon, well known for its reliability and effectiveness, it was not very exotic, after all this. He picked it up and turned it over a few times, looking for something that might set it apart or tell something of its history. The only odd thing about it was that the thumb safety had been ground off so that there would be no way to apply the safety or take it off without, maybe, moving it with a small screwdriver or something. Other than that, it said Colt, it said US Navy Model of 1911, and it was in not especially good condition, looks-wise, at least. It was well oiled and he was certain that the condition he saw it in now had been the condition it had been in when hidden away behind the tiny medicine cabinet. It had seen plenty of use in a maritime environment, he surmised, and much of the bluing had long since turned to an even brown tone, except in certain areas that were closer to bare steel; these areas he recognized as holster wear.

He set the pistol down and continued pulling the board from the stiff wrapping. Now the point of a knife emerged--- a big knife, a long knife, and several loaded magazines for the pistol came along. This knife was extraordinarliy large, he thought-- no, it was too long and curved-- it was a cutlass blade! But the package was too short to contain-- then the muzzle of another .45 emerged. He gathered the magazines, and set them on the deck, the better to see what came next. He rested what was exposed of the board on his knees and pulled the wrapping the rest of the way off.

Indeed, it was a cutlass, of sorts, and another 1911 pistol, joined together. The last eighteen inches or so of a cutlass blade had been forge-welded to what appeared to be part of the head of a small axe or hatchet. The hatchet head had been cut away about three inches behind its cutting edge, and this portion of it had been welded underneath the back end of the abbreviated cutlass blade. The resulting piece had then been carefully filed, contoured, and fitted to match the profile of the pistol, following the shape of the front underside of the frame, down the front of the trigger guard and then back along the underside of it; and then down again along the front of the handle. To these areas, it had then been expertly silver soldered, joining the three weapons into one. A large slot had been opened through the hatchet head in front of the pistol's handle, permitting a normal grasp on it. Where this slot was closed at the bottom, and about an inch forward of the front of the magazine opening, a sharp poker was welded in place, pointing down and slightly forward. It was about an inch long. The junction of the hatchet head's cutting edge and the bottom surface of the hatchet had been recontoured to give another skull-cruncher, an inch forward of the first. On each side of the hatchet blade were two spikes, facing forward and outward at about forty-five degrees. These were made from two pieces of flat stock, formed into the double-spike shape and then bent outward, and were held in place by two rivets which passed through the left spike plate, the hatchet blade, and then the right spike plate.

On the right side of the hatchet blade, and higher up on the back of the cutlass blade on the same side, metal rods of about three-sixteenths diameter had been fastened by welding or brazing, and formed to come back over the user's hand, affording it a fair amount ot protection, in the fashion of a rapier's basket hilt. The rods were anchored to the pistol frame above the right-side grip panel, and to the hatchet blade on the right side of the rear skull-cruncher.

The safety on this pistol, another Colt, had not been ground off. It showed more wear, exposure to sea spray, and extreme hard use-- the cutlass blade was good and sharp, but bore a dozen or more deep notches, top and bottom. There was no shine to the blade but neither was it deeply pitted. One of the side spikes had its point partially rolled over. The hatchet blade was keen and bore only a few nicks.

The pistol's slide, and the basket hilt, showed evidence of having absorbed more than a few blows from blunt instruments as well as edged ones. The bluing was gone in several spots in well-defined but random shapes, and generally worn all over. The odd combination weapon had obviously been reblued after the joining, but the cutlass blade had none left forward of the pistol, due to having been sharpened and polished several times since, and he realized, probably because bluing does not hold up well to.... blood.

...so ya see, Chuck, it couldna been a STG44 'cause then it wouldn't be a boarding pistol, it would be a boarding sturmgewher, and it couldn't be an FG42 'cause then it woulda been a boarding fallschirmjaegergewher......

Ah, Lou, I know you're busy but I'm gonna need some really wierd leather for a little project coming up......

so im trying to understand this. its a 1911 with a welded on bayonet?? or similiar?

It looked something like this...

I am sure reloads are a real blast with that rig, so much so I wonder why anyone would even bother. Interesting looking though.

Kevin, my man, I'm speechless! Where the hell did you find that pic? It is indeed very similar to what I had in mind and what I have mocked up, although I'm picturing it a little less fancy, something that is done in a craftsman-like manner but, say, a craftsman who perhaps was more of a blacksmith and less of a refined gunsmith or swordsmith, in some backwater Mediterrenian port. Someone who could put something like this together according to the specs of a customer who didn't care to be seen too much nor to have his ususual request become a topic of conversation in the local cafes and taverns.

In your pic it is totally blended into the frame at the grip safety tang, and apparently at the bottom of the frame. Do you know anything about this gun, at all? I mean, like is/was it functional and take-apartable, or was it just a flight of fancy? Any more pics, like showing the whole thing? From where? from when? I'm not at all suprised to find that I am not the first to have the idea, but I sure as hell did not expect a photo of it this morning!

PS, any speculation as to what the rods out the back are? Are they maybe just what's holding it up for display or do you think they're part of the rig?

This was a prototype made up at Springfield Armory using a M1913 (Patton) saber and a M1911 pistol. The rods out the back are a shoulder stock. I'll email you a picture of the whole rig. Does that qualify me to get your prototype #2?

hey ned, have you talked to alessi about making some custom leather for it!!!

preferably an iwb... lol

crod, yes.

Kevin, is that gun known to exist anywhere? And, yes. But I think a cutlass is more appropriate, stark keepin' your eyes peeled.....

question about the "story". is this a true/based on true story??

or fiction?

not sure if i can link this here, if i cant delete it for me....

but anyway, i think the folks over at cz beat ya to it..
http://www.custom-glock.com/shotshow05/ ... age56.html

C.Rod, I believe it was a dream... a daydream.

Ned, the package that Kevin has posted there was likely crafted by your great great grandsomething during one of the World Wars. He was a crafty, ahead-of-his-time, utilitarian kind of fella, and he also happened to be a pretty sharp fella. Upon breathing his final breath, he uttered the words, "There shall be another..." and faded off. Until now, no one knew what the "another" was. But, between you and your ulra-bespoke 1911, I think we have it narrowed down to two possibilities.

That was some fine story telling. I greatly enjoyed it. Now, if you can do another in Dr. Seuss fashion, I'd be thrilled beyond recovery.

~Jim Keeney

PS - Ned, you have a PM.

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"I'd rather die on my feet than keep living on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata, Mexican Revolutionary

no wonder his waiting list is so long.................

For some strange reason I think he's likely quite capable of multi-tasking... maybe even too smart NOT to. With a mind like that, it's hard to imagine him being satisfied with only doing one thing. So, Ned, are you able to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time? Maybe even swing a key chain while you're at it?

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"I'd rather die on my feet than keep living on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata, Mexican Revolutionary

Yep, and I'm still waiting for the rest of the story,... like did he find a leather rig of some sort for Lou to use as a pattern?

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Sic Semper Tyrannis

I used ta be able to walk and chew gum and swing a chain saw at the same time.... but, ah, nowadays I limit myself to limping and chewing gum only

Your PM Jim, no prob.

I'm doing a major upgrade around here in the next couple of days. Won't be getting my internet through clogged sewer pipes any more and the old computer is going to be blindfolded and.... taken out of service. You know how these things go, it's liable to be a few days before all the bugs are out of the new stuff.

I sure's hell would like to know more about that gun, and yes, whodunnit. Boy would I die if it did turn out to be a relative (but not very likely I'm afraid). The basket on that one must be offset to the right, hard to tell-- but if it isn't, looks like the slide would hit it.

I might finish up that story and give a little background on the old timer who wielded the boarding pistol, some day. Last couple o' days in my mind I'm hearing nothing but shouting, cutlasses clanging, and pistol shots. An' lovin' it ! Might not be Dr. Seuss style though.....

Ned I don't know my way around a mill machine but, I can sure tune up a computer and make it sing. If you need any help let me know.

Gary