Fabrication Francaise Cal 6.35 Pocket Pistol

[Cougar Allen]

I mentioned this little gun on another forum and people wanted to see pix.

 

[Cougar Allen]

 

[Cougar Allen]

I bought the gun in 1993. I don't remember what I paid for it but it was cheap. I added the front sight -- it came with just a groove on the top of the slide and I couldn't hit anything with that. Once I added the front sight I discovered it had excellent accuracy. The trigger isn't as light as a target trigger (and shouldn't be) but it breaks like the proverbial glass rod.

I opened out the ejection port a little, which was unnecessary but I was just starting to learn gunsmithing. You see that hole in the frame with no pin in it? I removed the pin to deactivate the so-called magazine safety. Those things are dangerous.

It says FABRICATION FRANCAISE CAL 6.35 on the slide. (6.35mm is the same as .25ACP.) The left grip says KITU in a kind of psychedelic script (I can probably get a better picture of that if I mess around with lighting a little more.) The right grip says MFB.

I don't know how old it is. Nothing this small has been imported since the 1968 Gun Control Act (though small pistols can still be made in America). The barrel is pitted; I think it was used with corrosive ammunition.

I picked up a second magazine for it at a gun show a year or two after I got the gun. I've shot it quite a bit more than most pocket pistols ever get shot, and after a bit of messing around with it when I first bought it it's always functioned perfectly.

 

[SkinnyJoe]

Cute gun! Handled one similar to it in elementary school.

Reminds me of the little Browning:

 

[TR Graham]

I bought the gun in 1993. I don't remember what I paid for it but it was cheap. I added the front sight -- it came with just a groove on the top of the slide and I couldn't hit anything with that. Once I added the front sight I discovered it had excellent accuracy. The trigger isn't as light as a target trigger (and shouldn't be) but it breaks like the proverbial glass rod.

I opened out the ejection port a little, which was unnecessary but I was just starting to learn gunsmithing. You see that hole in the frame with no pin in it? I removed the pin to deactivate the so-called magazine safety. Those things are dangerous.

It says FABRICATION FRANCAISE CAL 6.35 on the slide. (6.35mm is the same as .25ACP.) The left grip says KITU in a kind of psychedelic script (I can probably get a better picture of that if I mess around with lighting a little more.) The right grip says MFB.

I don't know how old it is. Nothing this small has been imported since the 1968 Gun Control Act (though small pistols can still be made in America). The barrel is pitted; I think it was used with corrosive ammunition.

I picked up a second magazine for it at a gun show a year or two after I got the gun. I've shot it quite a bit more than most pocket pistols ever get shot, and after a bit of messing around with it when I first bought it it's always functioned perfectly.

According to Zhuk's "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Handguns", your little pistol was made somewhere on the French/Spanish border. The exact manufacturer and date is unknown. Many, many "cheap and cheerful" copies of the Browning .25 and .32 autos were made in Spain (and to a lesser extent France) from 1910 or so up to the the end of the 1930's. "Ruby" is the generic name for pistols of this type, and the .32 caliber guns were widely used as military pistols by France and Italy during WWI. The smaller .25 caliber pistols were sold world-wide in the 1920's and '30's, with a significant portion imported to the United States. Quality varied from absolute garbage to fair. Your pistol would seem to fall into the better class of guns of this type, as the slide pulls are milled straight, (most were cheaper curve cut on a lathe) and your pistol had a magazine safety, which was not common.

TR Graham
The Glocksmith

 

[BA_Colt]

Your gun is nifty!!! Thanks for posting it.

I still regret not buying a vest pocket 1908 that looked like it had never been fired. I just did not have the money.

 

[Frankki]

I think TR has it correct.

Eibar/Spain came to my mind very quickly. A gazillion variations and copies made there back in the day, and it could read just about anything on the gun.

(Finland was one of the countries where the "Ruby" type pistols were official issue as military sidearms since we couldn't get anything else easily. Some good and some awful. Known as Pistol m/19 here.)

 

[Cougar Allen]

Thank you, TR Graham, that's very interesting. The generally rough finish internal finish is just the way I got it -- at least I don't remember making all those rough tool marks. That's certainly consistent with the idea of some unknown off-brand made somewhere in Basque country. Where did they get the design to copy, though? Although it looks similar to a Baby Browning externally, the concealed hammer action is very different. I suppose they used an action they were familiar with and were only concerned with copying the external appearance of the Browning....

I remember now I made a new extractor for it. The original was blued and badly rusted, and so was the spring. I made a new extractor out of galvanized steel (because I happened to have a piece handy) and of course I couldn't blue that.

I think I made a new firing pin for it, or part of it -- it's a two piece firing pin. That was a while back; I don't remember everything.

I take it, then, the "Fabrication Francaise" on the slide is just put there to make suckers think it was made by the same company that made the Le Francaise, and it actually wasn't. That kind of thing is pretty common with knives, too. Copy the appearance of one brand and the trademark of another, the suckers will buy anything...

 

[Frankki]

Read the gun, not the markings, neh?

If you have time, you could go through what is at http://www.littlegun.be/, there's a huge number of "almost the same yet slightly different" pocket pistols there.

Everybody and their hamster and their hamster's brother and neighbours made versions of the popular vest pocket pistols of the time, it seems.

 

[Cougar Allen]

Read the gun, not the markings

LOL! This is very reminiscent of happenings on Bernard Levine's Knife Collecting & Identification forum. So often people come there thinking they have a rare and valuable antique, and it turns out to be junk. Often they can't believe it, and put up a big argument. Of course I've seen that too many times to make a fool of myself that way. Besides, I can see the rough tool marks.... It occurs to me, too, that although I've often bragged about how well the gun functions ... um ... that was after I did quite a bit of work on it. I don't think the trigger was that great when I first bought the thing.... I remember clearly it couldn't fire a whole magazine without a stovepipe when I first got it.

That website looks interesting. I haven't done any shooting for quite a while and I've been thinking I'd like to get back into guns again....

Anybody have any idea what KITU and MFB on the grips mean, if anything? I asked a friend who knows French but knows nothing about guns once, and he was at a loss. He said there are practically no French words that begin with K....

 

[TR Graham]

Thank you, TR Graham, that's very interesting. The generally rough finish internal finish is just the way I got it -- at least I don't remember making all those rough tool marks. That's certainly consistent with the idea of some unknown off-brand made somewhere in Basque country. Where did they get the design to copy, though? Although it looks similar to a Baby Browning externally, the concealed hammer action is very different. I suppose they used an action they were familiar with and were only concerned with copying the external appearance of the Browning....

I remember now I made a new extractor for it. The original was blued and badly rusted, and so was the spring. I made a new extractor out of galvanized steel (because I happened to have a piece handy) and of course I couldn't blue that.

I think I made a new firing pin for it, or part of it -- it's a two piece firing pin. That was a while back; I don't remember everything.

I take it, then, the "Fabrication Francaise" on the slide is just put there to make suckers think it was made by the same company that made the Le Francaise, and it actually wasn't. That kind of thing is pretty common with knives, too. Copy the appearance of one brand and the trademark of another, the suckers will buy anything...

Cougar, you are welcome. Glad I could be of help.

I have to laugh a bit though - from the pictures provided, your pistol’s internal machining is not really that bad. “Rubies” ran the gauntlet of dangerously crude to surprisingly good in their quality - as did their metallurgy. Well respected Spanish gun manufacturers such as Astra and Star got their start making “Rubies”. However, the words “fast and rough” usually apply. I have a couple of Spanish marked (Eibar-region) .25’s that the inside of the slide and frame look like they were hand-filed - with a dull rasp by a first day apprentice while the gunsmith was out. No, as I stated before, your pistol seems to be a bit earlier and a better class than is common in this type of gun. For example, after looking a bit more at your pictures I noticed that the barrel, recoil spring guide rod and trigger are nickel plated. This is not common on most Ruby types. The grips appear to be horn (I noticed the holes, which are caused by worms eating into the grip) and not hard rubber, which would also indicate early production. The fit of the slide to the frame in the back shot picture is quite good, as is the general machining of the slide, barrel and frame. This indicates to me that most of the major components were made in one factory, instead of the roughly hand fitted “piece-meal cottage industry” production later typical for this type of pistol.

The design of the Rubies came from the internal hammer-fired FN Browning M1903 and the striker-fired M1906, both very popular pistols of their time - and the fact that Spain did not recognize international patents, unless the patent holder produced the item in Spain. This gave the myriad Spanish gun makers free rein to produce (usually cheaply, undercutting the market) just about any popular handgun that was not already patented and produced in Spain. Not only was FN effected, but various copies of Colt, H&R, Savage, S&W, Mannlicher and Mauser pistols and revolvers were also made. The external shape and sometimes even the markings were made to closely resemble the item copied, but internally the gun was made as simply and as cheaply as possible. (For example, I have an “Alfa” made copy of a S&W Military & Police revolver, which is marked on the top of the barrel - “alfa revolvers work best with SMITH & WESSON .38 cgts” - all very faint and in small caps, except for the “SMITH & WESSON .38“ of course. ) Your .25 has a internal hammer-fired design for two reasons - hammer-fired pistol was far easier to make than a striker-fired mechanism, and Spanish gunmakers already had the pattern down - having made hundreds of thousands of the larger hammer-fired .32 caliber Rubies for use in the First World War. They just scaled the size of the parts down. This meant that a gun assembler did not have to relearn how to file a striker, he could just keep on filing hammers - just smaller ones. Ruby production in Spain continued until the fascist leader Francisco Franco took power and shut down all but four manufactures - Astra, Llama, Star, and Echave y Arizmendi. All are out of business now - Echave due to the Gun Control Act of 1968 (they relied almost exclusively on the American market), Astra and Star in 1998 (striking union workers drove them out of business) and Llama in 2005 (poor sales and rising production costs).

As Frankki noted, Rubies were also sold as surplus after WWI and used by a number of different countries - Finland and Yugoslavia are two examples.

(Frankki - I have a “SKY” marked .32 Astra around here somewhere….)

Even though the .25 and .32 caliber Rubies were made fast and cheap, they did introduce at least one innovation that can still be found on pistols today - the one piece captured recoil spring guide rod. Whoo-hoo.

TR Graham
The Glocksmith

 

[Cougar Allen]

Aha! I had wondered about those holes in the grips. They don't look like chips.

There is no serial number but there's a 3-digit number on several parts, for convenience in fitting at the factory. So they're not fully interchangeable parts.

That website Frankki posted is enormous. It's going to take me forever to look at all the pages, but I've already found one that looks similar.

 

[Frankki]

(Frankki - I have a “SKY” marked .32 Astra around here somewhere….)

TR Graham
The Glocksmith

Yep, the SkY marking stands for Suojeluskuntain Yleisesikunta or General Staff of the Protective Corps, a paramilitary Home Guards organisation which operated alongside the official armed forces in the 1918-1944 timeperiod. Banned after the war as "fascist" and "pro-war".. politics, you see.

Many Beretta models 1934 and 1935 still in the circulation with SkY markings, eg.

 

[BA_Colt]

These are not hard rubber grips? Wow. I learn something everyday. Thanks.