Old Auto Ordnance

[charlesb]

Many years ago, two decades or so, I bought a new Auto Ordnance 45 for my father, who carried a 45 auto along with a Thompson smg in WWII. He was in the 112th cavalry, but when they shipped out to New Guinea, they lost the horses and became a Regimental Combat Team instead. In training in the south Texas desert, he had qualified as expert with the 45 on horseback.

He never tried to shoot the pistol I bought for him for several years but when he did, it would drop the magazine upon firing, tying up the gun. - So he had a nice 45 single-shot. He took it to the local gunsmith on my advice but the guy said he couldn't fix it.

It was several years after that before I got back into my Dad's part of the world and could take a look at it myself. The local gunsmith had told my Dad that it was bad magazines, so he had bought several, but it didn't fix the problem. One magazine would let him fire several rounds before dropping, though. I had a feeling that it must have been the magazine catch, and ordered a new one from Brownells.

The new magazine catch fixed the problem, but that was when I noticed how cruddy the trigger was, and the action of the safety. I took the gun apart and was impressed with how crude and cheap looking all of the internal parts were. Maybe I'm a snot because I am used to target guns, but it all seemed excessively cheap to me.

So I replaced all of the internal parts except the barrel, extractor and firing pin, which looked OK... I also put in a week polishing some inner areas of the frame, and radiusing the back of the frame for a beavertail safety. I got a Dwyer 'group gripper' for it, since I had always been curious about those things and wasn't trying to make a target gun out it.

Now the trigger is OK and it shoots reliably. It looks nicer with the match trigger, beavertail safety and some grips I had in my junk box.

I figured that we had had it too long to complain to auto ordnance, so I just fixed it myself.

Sadly, my Dad passed away not long after I got it straightened out. Still, he did finally get to pop it off a few times. I think he mainly just liked to take it out and look at it every once in a while, remembering all those nights in the jungle with his 45 stuck under his pillow.

I'm not real crazy about the gun as a shooter, though it shoots OK now... I'll hang onto it though because it reminds me of some of Dad's better war stories.

Did I get a lemon way back when, or were all of the Auto Ordnance pistols like that?

[Brian D.]

Hello and welcome. I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here, but it's fair to say that the short answer to that final question of yours is you're describing typical Auto Ordnance quality of the time.

AO has since been purchased by Kahr firearms, presumably the guns are better these days. However the new company is probably still using some of the old operation's manufacturing equipment, so it'll likely be awhile before anybody confuses an Auto Ordnance with a Wilson, Baer, or Brown 1911.

[charlesb]

I am sorry to hear that, I was hoping it was just a bit of individual bad luck on my end.

I appreciate your friendly welcome. I hope to learn something about revolvers here, most of my experience is with autos.

In any case, the frame, slide, barrel and slide parts on the old Auto Ordnance I have look to be pretty good, and a few replacement parts in the frame soon had the pistol functioning just fine.

One thing that I noticed is that the Dwyer group-gripper makes it a bit harder to work the slide and chamber the first round. On the plus side, there was an immediate and significant improvement in accuracy, without having to fit a barrel, link and bushing. I just dropped the group-gripper and its new link in, and there was no fitting involved. As I work the gun it is getting a little easier to cycle, so it may just be a matter of breaking in new parts.

I don't think I will put much more work into the gun, I'll probably do like my father did and put in a lot more time looking it it and remembering than actually shooting it. I have other pistols that get a workout in the field and at the range.

[Brian D.]

Charles, it sounds like you know your way around the innards of a 1911. Could be that you've now replaced enough parts in that AO to get it running right. If so, you shouldn't worry about running some rounds through it, the gun is made from good quality steel as far as I know.

[charlesb]

I've taken it out in the yard a couple of times with two rounds in the clip, test firing it, and one time I ran several clips through it to see how accurate it was, and give it a good chance to mess up. The only malfunction was that once it did not go completely into battery, and I had to give the back of the slide a smack with the butt of my palm to get it ready to fire the next round. - I wrote that off to tightness with all of the new parts. The group-gripper forces the barrel lugs up tightly into the slide and for all of its age, the gun has less than 100 rounds through it, so it's still breaking in.

Probably the best thing I could do for it at this point would be to do as you suggest, and run a lot more rounds through it, get it broken in and smoothed up.

I've been reading up on the early Auto-Ordnance guns this week and see where some of the frames were not always drilled right, back then. Mine is OK so in the long run, I guess I was lucky with this gun. I guess if the frame was not drilled right, the only thing to do would be to weld up the holes, clean it up and re-drill it. That would have been quite a job! I read about somebody cutting the hammer and sear at an angle to compensate for mislocated holes, but I don't think I would be up to that. - I'd have to fire up the TIG welder and find a good drawing with the proper dimensions so I could re-drill the thing.

[charlesb]

Here is the old Auto Ordnance having a few rounds cycled through it.



On the third clip it got to where it wasn't going fully into battery, and I'd have to give the back of the slide a smack with the heel of my hand to get it ready for the next shot... Still a bit tight, I suppose. The trigger is very good though. There's a little bit of takeup, but I can live with that on a plinker.

[Brian D.]

Alright, thanks for the update, carry on!

[Dane Burns]

Welcome Charles and what a great story!

"In training in the south Texas desert, he had qualified as expert with the 45 on horseback."

Easy to forget these things were first designed as horse pistols. Bet your Dad really appreciated the gift. Good on ya.

A decent frame and slide can be made in to a mighty fine pistol no matter who the original manufacture is. Sounds like you have most of it. Replace the barrel and ditch the DGG and I bet your AO thing falls right along those lines.
Keep up the good work.

I'm always amazed at some of the old beater guns I see in my shop and with very little work end up shooting like a house a fire.

'68 Colt frame and pretty beat up '39 Colt slide, new Colt barrel...parts gun. 16 rounds @ 20 yards with a 6 O'clock hold. Still have to find one of the old small rear sights to get it to shoot POA. Good enough for gov'ment work!

[charlesb]

My Dad said that the reason he shot expert on the horseback combat course was that he drew the right horse... On the course, he had to shoot at targets about ten or fifteen feet away one one side, and then on the other while steering the horse through the twists and turns of the course at a lope. He said the horse he drew knew the course and didn't need much management, and it didn't flinch at the gunfire which was another plus.

When I was a kid and first heard that story, I guessed that the horse didn't flinch because it must have been deaf from having all that gunfire right behind its head on the course... - But later on I rode a Missouri foxtrotter that would sit still while you fired a high-powered rifle from the saddle, and she could hear just fine. The owner of the foxtrotter said that she had been trained to tolerate gunfire, but he never said how they did it.

I probably will end up storing the DGG in the junk box sooner or later, but right now I'm learning to Parkerize and the old Auto-Ordnance will be my first victim. The finish it has now is OK, but I like a dull finish a little bit better. I have to learn to do dark parkerizing anyway, as I have an idea for an AR15 accessory that nobody else has thought of yet, and all the AR15 folks like the parts to be dark and dull.