22 revolver, what the &%^$ is it?

[Edward Tinker]

A friend of Howards has this, they'd like to know what it is... I think it is Belgium... I also think less than a $100 for it, more as a curiosity than collector value...

attached are a few pictures of a small perhaps .22 cal derringer that came into one of the shops I smith for, could you place it in perhaps "general discussions" of LF and ask if anyone could ID this and perhaps put a price to it...

[Vlim]

Hi,

If it were Belgian, it would have the Liege proof on it somewhere. I see a crown/crown V, looks German to me. The crown/V was a German storage/stock proof from before 1891.

Similar looking pistols were sold by the larger gun houses like 'Manufacture Francaise' around 1907-1908. This ad shows the 'Mignon' pistol:

[Ron Smith]

Or maybe a Proctological instrument.

[policeluger]

Ron, I can always count on you for a laugh, woke up again this AM bummed about that procto surgery on the 7th of Aug., this gave me a laff....hope the instrument are a bit more flexible...looks like Gerben has about nailed it, glad someone here is a bit serious....would this be in the "velo dog" class of guns???

[Ron Smith]

Howard,

Not a Velo Dog. They are revolvers and Belgian made. Never seen anything like this before. As Gerben said, probably German.

Good luck with the surgery.

Ron

[Dwight Gruber]

I think that is a crown/crown/U rather than a c/V. If Joop van de Kant is seeing this he might be able to shed some light on it.

--Dwight

[Vlim]

Dwight,

Looks you're right. The U got cut off a bit. It still places the pistol somewhere in Germany. If 21 is the serial number, it wasn't a huge commercial succes

[Jamka]

Dwight drew my attention to this thread. Sorry, but I cannot tell more about the origins of this small pistol - only that it is of German origin, produced after 1893, and probably before 1911.
Fact is, that it has a German commercial proof stamp that was in use during that era. The German Proof Law of 1891 regulated the mandatory test and control of all arms that were destined to the commercial market, including the arms for export. The law came into force in 1893.

Normally we would find at least two stamps on small arms: Crown/B and Crown/U. (The B stands for 'Beschuss' = test firing with a overloaded cartridge, the U stands for 'Untersuchung' = inspection after the pressure proof).
On this little pistol there is not enough space available to stamp both proof marks on the 'breechblock'. This was foreseen in the law; in that case two Crowns above a 'U' had the same value as C/B + C/U. This combination is rather rare, it has been found only on some early pistols from C. Collath & S�¶hne. But I doubt that this very simple design was made by this firm.

The Crown/V Vlim has mentioned above (V stands for Vorrat = weapons existing before 1893, not tested and stamped as such) would have had only one Crown.

Please remember that this kind of little cheap pistols was made around 1900 by hundreds of small 'home - style' armorers. Li�©ge in Belgium, and Suhl in Germany were the cities where most of them were concentrated.

[Edward Tinker]

Originally posted by G. van Vlimmeren
...If 21 is the serial number, it wasn't a huge commercial succes

Gerben, I think You are wrong! These only went to 10 and then added a "a" like lugers, so after 10,000 they started over, so I think they made about 121,000 !!