Help Identifying This Lefaucheux?

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Kayak76

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Hello,
My elderly father-in-law has recently shown me a large crate of firearms left to him when his father passed away over 40 years ago. He had never opened the crate until it came up in conversation during the holidays. I am the only hunter/shooter in the family, so I have been tasked with cleaning and identifying what he has. I have no knowledge of weapons older than I am, so I am humbly asking for help from those who are wiser than I and willing to share a bit of their time. From what I have been able to find out so far, this pistol may not be a Lefaucheux, but a "knock-off" made in Belgium. I have looked through every like pinfire pistol I can find and have found some that resemble this, but none that are an absolute match. I believe it looks like a model 1854 12mm. Can anyone help shed some light on what they believe it to be and/or where I can look for more information?
I appreciate any and all input.
 

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Wow Dr. Rob,
You pretty well nailed it. The engraving looks almost identical. You've accomplished in an hour what I haven't been able to do in a week.
Thanks.
 
Not an expert on pinfires....but I spotted a FN Model 1910 on the floor in the first pic...lol
Yes sir, good eye. That was an interesting firearm to learn about. I haven't been able to put a definitive date on it. I've read that the lower case de in serif characters indicates manufacture prior to 1925.
 
Yes sir, good eye. That was an interesting firearm to learn about. I haven't been able to put a definitive date on it. I've read that the lower case de in serif characters indicates manufacture prior to 1925.
Dating FNs is notoriously hard because of the huge number of guns they have made over so many years for so many countries- not to mention disruptions at the factory due to war/occupation. Their records aren't in great shape and many of their military customers weren't keen to make the exact details of their contract orders public.
Great little gun though! A M1910 fired the shots that started WW1.
 
They can also be unlicenced copies. It is almost certainly either French or Belgian, and a lot more are the latter. Belgian firearms are seldom of top quality, but usually pretty sound. A lot of misl2eading names were applied, however, often with slight misspellings. Perhaps they used to pay a Grener or Purdy found on skid row. The word "breveté" was often applied after a patent had expired, sometimes by people who had never owned the rights. The Lefaucheux, father and son, had premises in Paris, but did most of their manufacturing in Belgium.

It is a pretty typical Lefaucheux civilian revolver, which was also built by many others. The 12mm. military size was pretty soon superseded by centrefires, but the smaller ones lingered much longer, because they were cheap - probably right up to the First World War. I have a revolver rather like yours, made by Marazzi e Fusi of Lecco, on Lake Como in northern Italy. Although it was never a pinfire, it was made for the 12mm. French Thick Rim cartridge, designed with a thick rim to strengthen it at the slots in the cylinder of converted pinfires. I would suspect that they bought in unfinished parts from Liège, but there are no markings to prove it.

The French navy introduced a centrefire Lefaucheux just before some idiot started the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, although it was of a somewhat different design, jointed at the rear rather than the front of the trigger-guard, and in 1873 was superseded by the solid-frame Chamelot-Delvigne as used by the Army.

Could the initial in your picture be "T. Lefaucheux"? I know of no such name, for it was Casimir Lefaucheux who developed the pinfire cartridge for shotguns, and his son Eugene who took out a Very Important Patent for applying it to revolvers. Smith and Wesson tied up the cartridge revolver market in the US by owning the Rollin White patent - itself murderously dangerous, as he envisaged closing off the rear of the chamber with a cardboard disc, but which established sole ownership of a cylinder bored all te way to the rear. In Europe it was Eugene Lefaucheux's patent which prevented Smith and Wesson doing the same there, and kept the cartridge revolver market open to all.

Here is an interesting site on Belgian firearms:

http://www.littlegun.be/
 
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