Unusual Pistols 1: AMT Auto Mag
Retrieved: 12/08/2013
18-11-2012
There are many pistols in current and former production, but the vast majority of them are much the same; variants of the Colt revolver, small or large FN Browning, Colt 1911, or Glock. But there have occasionally been some very unusual guns made. Usually they failed in the market, sometimes due to excessive cost, incompetence from their manufacturers, or design flaws.
The first gun I'm going to describe is the AMT Auto Mag. It was built from 1970 through the mid 1980s by thirteen different companies in at least four different American states. The Auto Mag was a short-recoil operated rotary bolt design. When fired, the upper part of the gun moved back about 7mm. A curved track twisted the bolt out of the locking lugs in the upper and the bolt and cocking piece moved back under their own inertia, then were pulled back forward to strip the next cartridge off the magazine and feed it into the chamber.
The Auto Mags were made from stainless steel, still unusual in 1970, and initially chambered in .44 AMP, or Auto Mag Pistol. The cartridge was made by cutting down a .308 rifle case to make, basically, a rimless .44 Magnum. Later, the .44 case was bottlenecked to make a .357 and .41. Somewhere along the way, a handful of Auto Mags were chambered for .45 Winchester Magnum.
The Auto Mag is a BIG gun, as large as a Desert Eagle. It was designed for big game hunting and silhouette shooting, a sport popular in California and Mexico at the time. Silhouette contestants fired at outlines of animals cut out of steel plates, set at various distances. Scoring was simple - you had to knock the steel plates down to get points. The size and weight of some of the plates meant silhouette shooting favored powerful cartridges.
The Auto Mags were rushed into production before being fully debugged, and they were sensitive to the type of ammunition used. The factory was usually reorganizing, going bankrupt, or just recovering from bankruptcy, and it wasn't until the 1980s that some of the Auto Mag's problems were addressed. The price had also gone up from $200 to over $1000 in ten years; in 1980, I made $400 a month. A few years ago another company thought they would get rich building Auto Mags and advertised them at over $5000 Real Soon Now. A few months later their phone was disconnected and their web site went 404.
Not many people even knew the Auto Mag existed. A few magazine articles, a handful of gun shops, nothing widespread. Most people first saw one in Clint Eastwood's movie "Sudden Impact" in 1983. Every previous Dirty Harry movie resulted in a sales spike for Smith & Wesson's Model 29, but not even Dirty Harry could get people to pay so much money for an Auto Mag. The company moved on to other designs, and the Auto Mag was forgotten again. There were maybe 6,000 Auto Mags made.
1) a field-stripped Auto Mag. Just flip the lever at the front of the frame and the upper receiver slides off. No further disassembly is recommended for cleaning. This is an early gun with the fully-checkered grips. The bolt is locked back in its rearmost position.
2) This is a second generation gun with the long barrel and plastic grips. The second generation guns lack the vented rib, probably for cost reasons.
3) This is a Japanese-made plastic toy from the mid-1980s. It shows the relationship of the bolt, recoil springs, and internal arrangements.
4) A rear view showing the cocking piece and hammer. The Auto Mag has a single action mechanism.
TRX
18-11-2012
The Wikipedia article is accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoMag_(pistol)
Ian's Automag page, which also covers other AMT products: http://glossover.co.uk/amt/AutoMag/
Ian's AMT Guns forum: http://www.amtguns.info/
TRX
23-11-2012
A Pasadena Auto Mag in good shape gets US$2,500-$3,500 on GunBroker nowadays.