Hyew rang, suh?
Sorry Sven, but I am not a Broomhandle expert. Granted, I have two, the Shansei .45 and a TIRED .30 caliber Bolo, but those things are complicated!
Direct experience is with the .45, which is brand new, and isn't even broken in yet. It's getting better, but it hasn't broken anything.
The Bolo is BEAT. Nice patina finish. Some external pitting in a couple of spots, and it acts like it needs both a hammer and recoil springs: Light hammer strikes, and failure to go into battery. But that is comparitively minor in relation to the fact that the darn thing is a SMOOTHbore. It has the faintest ghost of rifling left, albeit very evenly eroded. This thing got rode hard and put away wet about a million times too many. It needs a complete barrel re-furbish, like boring to 9mm or relining. It'll shoot, sorta. Accuracy is not it's strong point, to say the least but I've only put 50 rounds through it.
No broken parts on that either, though. I just imagine the silly thing's just waiting to fail just as soon as fix the barrel. It's ugly on the outside, but the numbers on the major components match, and the internals aren't particularly worn, just well used. That, however, says little about the springs. New ones are in the offing.
Shoulder stocks on pistols are allowed if the gun had them as original equipment and it's a C&R, I think. I seem to remember reading that you didn't need to confirm use with ATF, and I know you don't have to register it as a short rifle, but it HAS to be an originally configured gun. Inglis High Powers can have a shoulder stock also, if you could find one.
Unfortunately, my info is rather unreliable. It's been awhile since I read up on it. Further research is warranted.
Parts availibility is somewhat better than it was. Recent importation of large lots of Broomhandles from China have brought over enough wrecked-up parts guns along with the good stuff to support parts-finding from the usual sources like Numrich. There's at least two ads in the Shotgun News from folks who offer extensive re-furbishing services. They oughta know where to get parts.
I read someplace that Red Nines came about as the result of Germany's severe handgun shortage during the Great War. Broomhandles were out of production, more or less, as too expensive to make, but when the war started, Mauser still had the original tooling to build them, and simply re-started their production. They were chambered in 9mm, which has the same case head, and a mag spacer was installed.
China loved everything Reich, and ordered tens of thousands of Broomhandles in all configurations. Eventually, they started to produce their own, which ultimately culminated in the appearance of the Shansei .45. However, outside of Shansei Arsenal many of the rest of the pistols were produced by state-run arms factories that farmed out a lot of component manufacture to expedite production. These parts were built "cottage-industry" style, often by hand. As with the Spanish Ruby pistols, this meant that lots of the parts were poorly made, of poorer materials like old horseshoes, and with the completely indifferent heat treatment you can accomplish with charcoal forges and steel with very little carbon in it to promote hardening. Hence the somewhat sketchy reputation enjoyed by most Chinese Broomhandles, and mayperhaps the source of a lot of those catastrophic failure stories.
I have a little more faith in German manufacturing precision, other than the Shansei guns, which compare quite favorably to the old-world craftsmanship embodied in the original Mausers. But even the youngest Broomhandle was produced in the thirties, and that qualifies them for special handling. Be nice to them. They all qualify as creaky senior citizens. but I routinley shoot a Swedish Mauser made in 1906, and I don't think THAT's going to fail, so I figure if I keep a close eye on the failure-prone parts, I hopefully won't bounce a breechbolt off my noggin.
I also don't plan on shooting 'em too much. Musn't dance on the top of a hill in rainstorm wearing copper plate-mail while shouting "All Gods are bastards!", after all. Good luck is an unknown but finite thing.
You ask, you get. More later after I do a little research. I love Broomhandles. There are fewer guns more strange-looking, and the weird ones are inevitably my favorites. AND they cost less than Lugers, now. My dead Bolo was $275, but it was about the cheapest one I've seen that I thought might be shootable. Nicer ones run twice that.
I need some more oddities. Anyone got a Roth-Steyr lying around that they don't need?
H_R_G
Yep. You snap everything together or parts are held together by tension. Only two screws or pins. Grips & a pin for the rear sight (if adjustable).
