Hopkins & Allen XL No. 8 Army

Monac said:

I have the Carder book, and while I do not have it in front of, I am pretty sure it does not say how to dismantle the XL 8. I do not have the Vorisek. I will make a new post if I am wrong about the Carder book.

There is a book about Allied rifle contracts of WWI, and it includes the Hopkins & Allen contract with the Belgian government for Mauser rifles. That contract WAS paid (Belgium still controlled the Belgian Congo, so they still had money) but costs had soared after H&A set the price, and they lost money on it. They could get no other work significant work, and the Marlin-Rockwell corporation wanted to buy them out. They tried to set up a new corporation to sell a Hotchkiss style light machine gun, but failed to attract any investors and sold out to Marlin.

This is the book: https://www.amazon.com/Allied-Rifle-Contracts-America-Mosin-Nagant/dp/B01L0I0KUU/ref=sr_1_1?crid=IEBQCFXWH3OQ&dchild=1&keywords=allied+rifle+contracts+in+america&qid=1609829031&sprefix=allied+rifles+contract,aps,173&sr=8-1

It is much more interesting than I thought it would be, frankly. It is well written and very well illustrated.

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Thanks Monac. I look forward to any additional information you may come upon. Is the Carder book worth the modest investment? Not sure where I got the 'not paid for'. I almost bid on one of the Belgian contract rifles a couple of months ago. It looked interesting.

Thanks Monac

It appears Cornell Publications still has the regular publication for $20. I wouldn't care about the reprint quality as long as the information was useful. From the description the photographs are low quality in the regular publication. Might be worse in a reprint.

250-3000 said:

Just a thought, the arbor may be threaded to tighten with cylinder rotation, did you try to turn in both directions?

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SUCCESS



And if I turn the arbor the right direction, reverse thread so the cylinder rotation tightens, thanks @250-3000, it wasn't difficult to remove.

I’m real happy that I can clean it normally. And slug the bore normally. With the cylinder out I can also slug the taper on the end of the cylinder as well as the forcing cone at the breach of the barrel.

I may just cerro safe the cylinders and the forcing cone.

the arbor was not stuck. The penetrating oil last night might have loosened it up a bit though.

Oh, my concern about the reinstallation of the arbor and it’s possible effect on timing was unwarranted. I bottomed out the arbor and it times perfectly. So the thread bottom was set to place the cylinder in the proper location to allow the hand to engage the ratchet correctly.

I finally found reloading components. Unfortunately they are 2 hours away. Really shouldn't be driving that long. Recovering from surgery on my left leg Christmas day to remove a blood clot. They couldn't pass through an already installed stint so they had to cut the calf open and remove the blockage manually. Walking and sitting are `fun` to say the least.

But I'm stupid and will make the drive in the morning. Will slug the barrel this evening.

Thanks to all that contributed to this thread. I'll keep monitoring this but I'm going to start a new thread in reloading to see how I'm going to face the challenges of reloading for this particular revolver.

Life is good. It's better when you share it with good people.

I need to rethink the date of manufacture for the No. 8. I had relied on the below serial number chart that obviously (at least obvious now) spread the total manufactured quantity evenly over the manufacturing period. But my No. 8, serial in the 150's, could not have been manufactured in 1877 as it carries a second patent date of 1879. Likely to never know for sure.

indy1919a4 said:

Is yours Rimfire or Centerfire?

I wonder if they originally batched the manufacture of the frames. Pulled out any number out to complete the gun for a sale? Would be nice to ask the site owner how he determined those numbers? Perhaps he is looking at sales and assuming the serial number matches.

Great little mystery.. Thanks for sharing.

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It is centerfire. Although I'm not object to owning a firearm with an obsolete cartridge, I have to be able to fire it. If it were a rimfire I would not be able to replicate the cartridge. At least not easily. To me the rim fire is safe Queen and I don't own any safe Queens.

I hadn't thought of contacting the site owner. I may give that a try. Though it is pretty apparent that the numbers were spread evenly over the time period. What these numbers indicate to me is a sort of grail gun exists. If manufacture truly started in 1877, there would be guns that did not have the 1879 patent date. And to me that makes them more desirable. Of course, we have no confirmation of the total amount of guns actually produced. The 2700 number came from that site. And there is no proof that it is correct. My assumption is that is the highest serial number observe to date.

I looked at the Forgotten Weapons video on the XL Navy and it didn't have the 1879 patent date on it. Not sure it had that improvement either though. It did have an 1875 patent date for a safety cylinder that I know the army model doesn't use.

Monac said:

For all I know, the bad rep for Hopkins & Allen quality started in the 1980's with a man named Art Phelps. Mr. Phelps loved Merwin & Hulbert revolvers, and wrote a beautifully illustrated book on them. In it, he praised them highly, and blamed the bad reputation of Hopkins & Allen for their failure on the market. How people in the 1880's knew they were made by Hoppkins & Allen he did not explain. Since his book was the only major source on Merwin & Hulberts for some time, I suppose this opinion got around. I had never heard it before, but I took his word for it.

Another reason might be the same way that Iver Johnson revolvers were rather poorly regarded until recently: the vast majority of them were quite old, fairly beat up, had been cheap to start with, and now were of low value. The fact that they may have been fine when new did not occur to people who never saw a fine one. (I think H&R suffered less from that, because they remained a significant manufacturer much longer, and people could see and judge brand new H&R revolvers.)

Both of these of just random opinions of mine, and your own are just as good.

I should also say that I cannot quote Mr. Phelp's book directly, because I sold it long ago. The pictures were excellent, but his writing was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, and I was getting tight on space for books.

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indy1919a4 said:

Came across this to just throw gas on the fire... Just one more piece.

https://unblinkingeye.com/Guns/SSs/sss.html

And another little tidbit

http://gun-data.com/suicide_specials.htm

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This is an interesting side of the H& A story. Although I'm going to order the Carder book I suspect it won't shed much light on how the shooting community saw H&A. I think the book on Merwin Hulbert will be important to understand H&A. As @Driftwood Johnson indicated the two companies were so intertwined. I read somewhere that MH saw H&A as a cash cow. But that is the business end of it and really doesn't address how the public saw H&A.

I think we can assume that H&A made most of their money from the low end of the spectrum. And I cant argue with that model. I believe, without any sales numbers to back this up, that the biggest market was for inexpensive guns. It appears that H&A wasn't concerned with its image as long as the money kept coming in. And it seems to me that being an OEM for other makers was somewhat forward thinking for that time period. As I understand it Ruger, as a leader in investment casting, provides OEM parts not only for other gun makers but for other industries as well. But that still is not the norm in the firearms business but is in other industries.

I personally believe that in the 1870's the market for firearms heavily leaned towards the H&A's and the like companies. Not the Colt, S&W, Winchester. And if I were a start up in the 1860-1870's I'm pretty sure my business model would be to compete in that market and not in the government contract market high end sporting market. Come to think of it, I bet there wasn't a sporting market until the mid-twentieth century. Basically I see three markets in the 1870's: Government contracts, Farmer/rancher/Homesteaders, Urban defense.

I think that a lot of what we perceive today is heavily influenced by what we know today. I just dont know how to understand what people percieved in 1870.

indy1919a4 said:

Is yours Rimfire or Centerfire?

I wonder if they originally batched the manufacture of the frames. Pulled out any number out to complete the gun for a sale? Would be nice to ask the site owner how he determined those numbers? Perhaps he is looking at sales and assuming the serial number matches.

Great little mystery.. Thanks for sharing.

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I was unable to find any contact information on that website.