Yesterday we took a look at a reproduction of the Winchester 1907 Self Loader made for the Dillinger gang (and others) by Hyman Lebman. Today, I’m taking it out to a 2-gun match, paired with a Tisas M1911A1. Let’s see how it’ll do!
Lebman 1907SL Conversion video:
In a last hopeful attempt to get a rifle adopted and produced for the US military, John Pedersen designed his own copy of the M1 Garand rifle in the late 1930s (approximately 1939). His toggle-locked […]
The carbine in this video is selling at auction here. Designed by Gerry Fox in the early 1970s, this carbine saw production sequentially as the Fox Carbine, the TAC-1, and the XF-7 Wasp, as it […]
The Colt Model 1903, aka Pocket Hammerless, aka Model M, was a massively successful design for Colt on the commercial market. It was chambered for the .32ACP cartridge, with a .380 model introduced in 1908. […]
© 2025 Forgotten Weapons.
Site developed by Cardinal Acres Web Development.
Effective fire beyond about 100 meters is probably asking too much of that rifle and ammunition.
As for rapid fire, you can see why the French army manufactured 20-round magazines for it.
This tends to validate the decisions made by Edwin Pugsley’s team at Winchester in developing the M1 Carbine. Smaller caliber (granted, the .30 caliber was Ordnance’s idea- one of their few good ones), gas operation instead of blowback, and an overall lighter, handier weapon.
Not to mention listing 150 yards as effective range and 300 yards as maximum practical range.
The failure of the Woodhull carbine in the trials pretty much illustrates the problems Ian experienced here.
Oh, BTW, the “gangsters” had more .45 1911s and 1911A1s than they ever had .38 Supers, as the .38 Super was only introduced in early 1929.
clear ether
eon
Actually, the Colt Super .38 was the preferred pistol of the Dillinger Gang, the Nelson Gang, the Dillinger-Nelson Gang, and some other outfits such as the Bruce Gang and the Radovich Gang. Of course, these were bank robbers, not gangsters, but the Super .38 also caught on with some of the Syndicated mobsters during the 1930s, folks like “Sam Golf Bag” Hunt (his nom de guerre derives from the fact that he carried his semiautomatic shotguns in a golf bag …) or Roger “the Terrible Touhy” Towey.
It’s always interesting to see the residual left-over in popular imagination, when you look back at history-as-it-is-remembered vs. history-as-it-actually-was.
Real history says that the Revolutionary War was fought mostly by regulars with muskets of various flavors; popular memory says “frontiersmen with Kentucky Rifles”.
Talk to the average person, and they’re certain that the Old West had gunfights on every streetcorner, every day of the week for decades. Actual history? Such things were vanishingly rare. And, the pistols used? Not necessarily Colts, either; lots of Remingtons, lots and lots of other brands. Flash forward, and everyone is certain that the US Army fought WWI with M1911 pistols and the M1903 Springfield… Reality? Tons of M1917 revolvers and rifles…
There really ought to be word that’s the equivalent of “photogenic” for these things that erroneously get stuck into popular memory. Reality is oftentimes forgotten, in favor of the spectacular, the lore-ridden fantasy.
Which makes it really hard to persuade people that they’ve gotten something wrong, like the infamous “Mattel M16” thing. I’d like to know why the hell nobody ever really studies this crap, or has bothered to even quantify it. If you were to go back and look, I wager that there’s a hell of a lot of consistency to how much gets “disremembered” over the centuries.
It’s similar to the way everyone imagines the prevalence of swords from “ye olde dayes”. Nobody gets it right, that the polearm and improvised farming implement was far more prevalent and far deadlier than the actually effete snobs wandering around with their fancy-dancy swords. Average knight wandering into a clot of peasants with billhooks was not going to prevail; he was going to be opened up like a can of lobster in very short order. Hell, towards the end of the plate armor era, the most prevalent weapon was a hammer with a huge-ass spike on the other side, in order to get through/into all that wunnerful, wunnerful armor…
This sort of misapprehension lingers on into the present day: How long did we persist with the heavy-caliber individual weapon, thinking that they somehow were essential to ground combat? How long did the massive distortions about what went on in combat persist, and are we listening to those idjit ideas still…?
NGSW, I’m looking at you.
We study human history and the shape of knowledge, but the “negative spaces” of history rarely get looked at, as represented by all these “false memories”.
Like with the supposed “gangster” era: Bonnie and Clyde were supposedly these “Rob from the rich” types, robbing banks. Reality? They mostly hit small businesses, stores and gas stations, murdering their small-time owners. They never targeted the banks, because while that was where all the money was, that was also where all the security was at the time.
My mother actually “met” John Dillinger and the two Bowman brothers in July 1933, just before John D. went to jail and had to break out with a “fake gun”. She was 19 at the time, it was in Pomeroy OH, her home town, and she was going in the local general store when the crooks were coming out.
Why were they in there? One of the Bowmans wanted a bottle of grape soda, and while they were getting that they decided to rob the place.
BTW, the local bank was half a block away. They didn’t go near it. Armed guards and all that.
Note that back then, business “loss insurance” was a rare thing. Yes, the store owner ate the loss.
Even in those days, smart store owners only kept about $50 in the cash register and had a timelock on their safe, if any. This store was no exception.
She told me that the store owner was probably lucky it was Dillinger & Co. The Barker gang was known to shoot up any place that they thought didn’t have enough money to suit them when they came calling.
These were seriously unbalanced people, with no “Robin Hood” attributes whatsoever.
Yes, she and I both found the movie Bonnie & Clyde (1967) to be mostly BS.
clear ether
eon
The romanticizing of villianry is something I’ve always found extremely aggravating, to the point that whenever I heard some asshole in the United States Army (emphasis, on that…) talking about how great the Spartans were, I wanted to walk up and slap the shit out of them. Not only were they not all that great, militarily speaking, but they were freakish monsters that did things that would have had the Nazis going “Hey, why can’t we get away with that…?”
Pirates? LOL… Don’t get me started. Bunch of thieving assholes. Alexander the Great? Nasty bastard that is idolized for basically taking his father’s army out and vandalizing much of the Near East, destroying entire cultures and leaving his home nation, Macedonia, damaged forever after. Not a “Great Man”, in my book. Same with Julius Caesar, another nasty bastard that delighted in destruction and death. Like Napoleon, as well… All of these “great conquering heroes” are absolutely not people to admire or look up to; most of them actually represent cautionary tales we all ought to pay close attention to, because following any of them has generally ended in disaster for the common man. France still hasn’t recovered, entirely, from Napoleon. There’s a lesson there, if only people would learn it.
Longer I live, the less respect I have for any of these sorts of people. If possible, I have even less respect for their mindless followers, who laud these assholes to the stars while suffering for their “glory”. You wonder how the men Napoleon led into Russia felt, on the way back. Before they died.
The gangster types everyone adulates? Monsters, all… And, they got away with what they did because the feckless felching morons of the media and general public thought they were “romantic”, just like the highwaymen of olde Englande.
Frankly? I’ve little time for any of it, or the people pushing this romanticized crap. Most of the folks daydreaming of piracy on the high seas or banditry in the old West would likely vomit were they faced with the actual real deal in person. You rather hope they might encounter some actual Barbary Pirates, in order for them to gain enlightenment…
The adulation of Napoleon Bonaparte has always mystified me. He may have been a decent artilleryman, but beyond that he was a military moron.
Great general? He lost more battles than he won. Usually by bad bordering on WTF-level-how-dumb-is-he “tactics”.
Great strategist? His campaigns invariably ended in him skedaddling back to France, leaving his nearly-obliterated armies to die. (Freezing to death in Russia, roasting in Egypt, mauled by the locals in Spain, etc.)
He was so busy making a “bad smell” map of Egypt and stealing every artefact he could have chiseled loose that he totally failed to keep track of what the British were getting up to. As a result, he had to get out of Egypt in the middle of the night in a sloop to avoid capture; his army wasn’t so lucky.
And oh yes, he sent 4000 men to Haiti to reimpose French control (and slavery), commanded by Josephine’s brother. A year later, all but 200 of them were dead from yellow fever- including Josephine’s brother. (No big loss IMHO.)
Those were just some of his f**kups. The entire list would fill an encyclopedia.
As I said, I’ve never been able to figure out how anybody ever thought that this idiot was some sort of god of war.
And PS; In the same vein, you never, ever wanted to get one of my uncles started on “Monty”. Yes, he knew him, personally, and you know what “familiarity” breeds.
Another of my uncles had a similar experience with, and a similar opinion of, MacArthur.
cheers
eon
Re “Pyrates”, I mostly blame Howard Pyle. He romanticized them in books aimed at boys under ten, and over the decades somehow his version became the “real story”.
William Kidd was a joke. An incompetent merchant captain hired by the British East India Company as a privateer to harass their competitors. His one stop near the “Spanish main” was taking on drinking water at Bermuda enroute to the Indian Ocean. In the process, he did in his XO in an argument by smacking him upside the head with a bucket. Once “on station”, he captured two fishing boats- and a merchie that was owned by his employers. He 86’d the officers before he got around to looking at the ship’s papers. When he was hanged below the high-tide line off Admiralty Dock, his former employers were doing most of the cheering.
The most genuinely dangerous “pyrate” was Bartholomew Roberts, because while l’Ollonais & etc. were mean, Roberts had an actual brain and used it. Only Henry Every was smarter (he made one big score and vanished).
Yes, I found Capt. Jack Sparrow, who was “inspired” by Roberts, tiresome. Besides, the real one would have eaten him for breakfast and picked his teeth with his bones. He wasn’t even remotely amusing.
I feel about the same way about most of the Western “gunfighters”, from the Daltons on down. Wyatt Earp’s “ride” after the Clantons? Ike & Co. didn’t get half what they deserved.
Probably the most historically-accurate “Western” ever? “The Last Day”, ABC, made for TV, 1975, about the Daltons’ “raid” on Coffeyville, KS on 5 Oct 1892. As Elmer Keith said, only a fool would try to “tree” a Western town- especially on the first day of deer season.
cheers
eon
“(…)because following any of them has generally ended in disaster for the common man(…)”
Wait, was not Lex Julia de repetundis supposed to better situation of said entity, by limiting money-sucking power of governors?
Kirk:
I saw an interesting photo the other day in Max Hastings’ book on the Vietnam War. It was of a Huey pilot posing by his helicopter with a sawn off M14. The barrel had been sawn off at the gas block, so no front sights. The photo was taken around 1968, so he should have been able to get an M16, but instead he had this odd piece. I read the references to him in the book, but sadly there was no mention of his M14. It did say that helicopter pilots were a slightly crazy brotherhood, so perhaps that is where such a non standard weapon came about. It would have been handy in a helicopter cabin, but a pig to fire I should imagine.
That’s one of those “Who the hell knows…?” things that pop up with regards to photographic evidence from years past.
You’re not going to find anything in the official records, unless there’s somehow remaining documentation from his court martial for damage to government property or the paperwork someone had to do to get that thing turned in for repair, but nonetheless, there’s the picture.
The merits of a cut-down M14 are, to my mind, questionable. The gas system should have been able to compensate for the decrease in pressure from the shortened barrel, but… I’d hate to hell to have to be the one trying to control that thing on fully-automatic.
There’s a certain degree of magical thinking going on with an awful lot of these field modifications. Does the louder noise and all the rest make the guy carrying the damn thing feel a little better, make him more likely to fight? Maybe… And, maybe those factors alone are what make these mods worthwhile.
I know I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: There’s a considerable fraction of “effect” coming from modern firearms that is strictly down to “psychological”, in that you feel better about life in general when you can open up with a big, loud boomstick, as opposed to a little itty-bitty quiet mousegun. That’s a huge factor in why the bigger caliber/louder noise crowd love them so much…
And, there’s something to be said for that school of thought. I remember hearing a talk by a former MACV/SOG guy who was describing the really crappy results he got using a silenced Swedish “K”; the VC tracking team he was firing at simply didn’t “get” that he was shooting back at them, despite him having killed several. His buddy with the CAR-15, on the other hand? Every time he fired, the VC would back off, even though he might as well have been firing into the air…
The first time I saw one of these;
https://www.springfield-armory.com/m1a-series-rifles/m1a-socom-16-rifles/
I had pretty much the same thought. “How did they rebalance the gas system?”
Plus “I bet that sucker has a muzzle blast like a 120 on an Abrams”.
There’s a reason Ord rejected the so-called “Tanker Garand” in 1945. The same way they didn’t go ahead with the experimental S&W revolver in .30 USC.
Either one could batter you senseless with muzzle blast. Not to mention the potential for blowing up in your hands.
Something dumber than a “chopped” M14? A similarly abbreviated M60. My one attempt to fire one some genius had cut back even with the front end of the gas cylinder assembly resulted in no hits (because no front sight) and the non-safety-wired gas cylinder extension launching itself downrange trying to race the bullet to the target. Yes, it fired one round and stopped- probably fortunately for me.
Moral; If something is too stupid for even Ordnance to attempt, don’t try it yourself.
clear ether
eon
Enough people have done that “chopped and channeled” thing to weapons that you begin to wonder if they might not be on to something…
Then, you fire one for yourself, and you’re left going “WTF?”
Like I said… If there’s anything to it, it’s got to be in the arena of the purely psychological. If you’re setting off what amounts to a hand-held Claymore in your firefight, that’s going to be intimidating on several levels, at least one of which is going to be “Those bastards are so crazy that won’t stop fighting, even with a badly-malfunctioning weapon…”
As well, the sheer noise/muzzle flash factor could make the enemy think “That’s some sort of experimental uber-weapon… Let’s back off, and think about this for a bit…”
It’s only after the fact that they realize none of them were hit, and that the most damage done was to their eardrums.
I am not going to say that this is 90% of what was going on, but not having been there to personally assess the effects of these weapons, I’m going to go with what I surmise. Anyone who wants to correct me with actual verifiable data…? I’m listening.
Eon:
The sawn off M14 looked quite like the Springfield Armory version, except of course it lacked front sights and a muzzle brake.
I think the Huey pilots were only given a .45 for protection, so it was a step up on that. The reference to him in the text explained that the Huey pilots, who were NCOs, were basically left alone by the officers to do the job as they saw fit, so if that included a sawn off M14 no-one was going to to mention it. I think it was felt that if a fellow was willing to go into battle with only a sheet of Perspex between him and the enemy, he needed to be cut a bit of slack.
I agree a sawn off M14 would have been a terrible weapon, but it did look cool. If that helps morale, then job done.
Great post! Though your calling knights ‘effete snobs’ sounds like a hang over from Disney. Noble of the Middle Ages tended to be rather rough characters themselves. Coeur de Lion mighta been a pooft but history shows he swung a mean sword.
One does not hear of many shootouts between 30’s bank robbery and the Law conducted at ranges anywhere near 100 yards. This was shoot and scout at fairly close quarters, often in towns and not across Palo Duro Canyon or some such.
“Effective fire beyond about 100 meters is probably asking too much of that rifle and ammunition.(…)”
What were distance available in sights of (stock) Winchester Model 1907?
The standard was the semi-buckhorn rear sight, which was basically the same as on Winchester lever-actions. The “notches” on it only went to 200 yards in 50-yard “steps”.
According to my reprint 1939 Stoeger catalog, only Marble made a replacement receiver-mounted rear sight for the M1907, their No. 13, plus a matching front bead. It was similar to the sights they made for Winchester and Marlin lever-actions.
They also made barrel-mounted rear sights with the then-standard notched ramps, in both regular and semi-buckhorn versions.
But whatever sight you used, you were up against the limitations of the .351 cartridge. No matter who made it, Remington, Peters, Western, Winchester, or even Eley’s in Britain (yes, they made them as well), the standard load was a 180-grain round-nosed bullet at 1,850 F/S muzzle velocity and 1,400 FPE, dropping to 1,500 and 950 at 100 yards; the RN bullet shed velocity very quickly.
Assuming you could somehow sight it at 300 yards (not with the standard rear sight, certainly), midrange trajectory was 20-24 inches above LoS, depending on which brand of ammunition you were using.
The .351 WSL round was ballistically close to the .32-40 Winchester High Velocity, and was somewhat better than the .44-40 WCF at 100 yards.
None of the above was of much use beyond 150. But then none of them were intended to be. The philosophy then was that they were intended for relatively short-range use on deer-sized game. which coincidentally made the .44-40 and .351 entirely reasonable anti-personnel rounds at normal CQB ranges. (I.e., under 100 meters, no matter what Army Ordnance thinks.)
If you wanted to shoot at anything beyond that range, you would likely have been told to use a .30-06 or .300 H&H Magnum. Either one of which would still be a good choice today.
The .300 H&H doesn’t have the sheer velocity of later .30 magnums, but it also doesn’t wear out barrels as quickly, either.
And a .30-06 with standard loads in the 150-grain to 220-grain bullet weight range, in terms of barrel life, might go on shooting accurately almost forever.
cheers
eon
.351 Winchester was created in period of rapid advancement in area of ballistic/external, which lead to solution being implemented being outmoded quickly. It might be useful to contract if with 345 WINCHESTER MACHINE RIFLE https://cartridgecollector.net/cartridge/345-winchester-machine-rifle/ developed decade later, which used Spitzer bullet and was rimless. That being said Winchester Model 1907 remained in demand for decades, as it was discounted in 1957 according https://www.chuckhawks.com/351_WSL.htm
Garters and rolled up sleeves are a bit of fashion overkill.
I do like the way the gun club go along with Ian’s eccentricities. Unless they all wear Fedoras and double breasted waistcoats. I pity the G man who takes him on.
I suspect the purpose of the Cutts compensator and foregrip was to make it look enough like a Thompson that terrified civilians and bank tellers would be intimidated into cooperating with the demand to hand over the money.
I think it was more likely to aid control of a full auto carbine.
Observe that .351 Winchester pressure is much higher than of .45 Auto (39,000 psi vs 21,000 psi) so I would expect former providing greater force, however that would need actual test.
JM Browning had the patent on the “normal” charging lever. That is why the rifle had the weird work around plunger thing
Actually, it was FN that held the patent, not Browning. Which was the reason that when he designed the recoil-operated Remington Model 11 “Sportsman”, instead of having a charging handle on the bolt, he had to put a knurled section on the barrel just midway between the muzzle and the front end of the forearm.
To charge the Model 11, you grasped the barrel there and pulled it back, and then released it. If you weren’t quick about it, you generally got your palm lightly sanded by the knurling.
After the patent lapsed, of course, Remington and others could legally design automatic shotguns in a reasonable way.
clear ether
eon
Eon, you are describing the patent-evading **Winchester** Model 1911, not Remington.
re; Napoleon being to blame for French misfortunes up to the present day…
arguably the blame fits much better with Louis Quatorze (reign 1643 to 1715), his first minister, Colbert, and the fashion at the time for absolutist monarchy and mercantilist policies.
Quatorze’ plans for military domination of continental Europe were ended by the first large scale culling of big tall French men at Blenheim.
It was the attempt to manage debts incurred by Quatorze’ regime that resulted in the subsequent regent listening to John Law’s ideas for a paper money anc that particularly poor decision triggered the Mississipi bubble and subsequent bust.
Louis 16, had an opportunity for Milei type reform with Turgot as his finance minister, but court intrigue, especially lead by his kaniving little bitch of a wife, Marie Antoinette, got Turgot fired.
was a zero sum British policy, partly responsible for stirring and organising the French revolution?
very possibly
but any British revolutionary seed found fertile soil, of high taxes and high restrictions, and a crippled economy.
there’s a eugenic reason why French people are generally of shorter stature than other Europeans
the tallest and fittest males have been repeatedly killed off over a period of several centuries.
I suspect generations of decent or poor diet has a little to do with the still evident tall French / short French phenomenon.