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HOW TO PROFIT FROM A BUDDY’S MISFORTUNE
The Firearms International Bronco is perhaps the world’s most austere .22 rifle. However, Will says his copy is surprisingly well made.
“Will, it’s for you,” my mom shouted as she pulled together yet another fantastic meal. I was occupied in my bedroom painting a 1/35-scale plastic model of a German PzKpfw V Panther tank. I was cool like that.
The phone was the size of a brick and tethered to the wall. Ours was extra neat because it had buttons rather than a dial. The year was 198 and life was awesome.
I was in 10th grade and worked after school as a janitor in a local drug store. I made $56.26 every other week and had no expenses beyond gas. My buddy Mike was on the phone. Mike had a problem.
Mike needed girl money. Many folks don’t realize this, but there are three major types of currency in the world. Regular money pays for stuff like rent and groceries. Gun money is what it sounds like, going to guns and ammo. Girl money is used to initiate and maintain relationships with the fairer sex. These three types of currency look the same and can potentially interchange, but they are fundamentally quite disparate. It is amazing this stuff is not taught in the major Economics schools.
Mike’s girl fund was depleted, yet he had a pending date with a cheerleader. Mike desperately didn’t want to look lame in the drive-through at the local Wendy’s. He also knew I had a job.
Mike had a beat-up old .22 rifle he could live without. He described it over the phone and explained he needed $25 to get through the weekend. Could I help a brother out?
The Firearms International Bronco .22 survival rifle is admittedly not much to look at but Will says, “Like me, it’s so ugly it’s almost cute.”
Gun Bro Economics
Live in this quirky little world long enough and we will all get these calls. As a point of honor, never take advantage of anyone’s misfortune. If some widow calls you up trying to get rid of her dead husband’s German machinegun collection, pay the lady a fair price. Play this one wrong and you’ll forfeit your soul. However, when your buddy Mike reaches out in desperation wanting to sell a gun, it behooves you to hear him out.
The gun sounded delightfully weird. It was a single-shot .22 rifle with a skeletonized stock and pivoting barrel. I was certainly intrigued. We agreed to meet in the school parking lot after class the following day.
Nancy Pelosi, if you’re reading this, you might want to sit down. I was 16 years old and bought a gun out of the trunk of a friend’s car in the parking lot on my high school. I paid him cash. I didn’t undergo a background check or endure a waiting period. We didn’t do any paperwork. I just gave my pal two 10s and a five, wrapped the gun in a towel so as not to garner undue attention, and retired to a nearby cotton field to give it a whirl. And yet the world kept right on spinning …
Rotating the barrel assembly opens the action. The heart of the gun is a casting reinforced with a length of steel rod while the barrel lies underneath
The Gun
I couldn’t find much out about this quirky old rifle at the time. In 1982 Al Gore was 34 years old and hadn’t yet invented the Internet. I just knew it looked cool and the price was right. I’ve since learned a bit but not a lot.
These nifty little rifles were first built in Accokeek, Md., in 1967. Those early examples bore neither markings nor serial numbers and sported an MSRP of $9.95. That’s about $91 today. The guns were available in .22LR, weighed 2.5 lbs. and had 16.5″ barrels.
In 1968 the Gun Control Act mandated guns be serialized so the price climbed to $14.95. Dealer cost at the time was a flat $11. In 1970 a company called Garcia took over and christened the weapon the Bronco. Garcia offered the guns in .22LR, .22 WinMag, .410 and a nifty .22LR/.410 over-and-under combination. The shotgun variants had 20″ tubes.
They eventually sold under the trade name “Bauer Rabbit.” Production wrapped up in 1978 at which point the retail price had climbed to $45. I’m told the shotgun version actually packed a fearsome recoil. 
The forward trigger cocks the action and releases the barrel assembly for loading and unloading.
Technical Details
The Bronco was loosely based upon the Hamilton Number 11 Boys Rifle. Introduced in 1900, the Hamilton Number 11 was a skeletonized inexpensive .22 rifle marketed toward children. Their marketing catchphrase was “So you want to be a Real Boy?” The guns were advertised in comic books. These little rifles were also sometimes called bicycle guns.
Clarence J. Hamilton sold around half a million of his skeletonized utility rifles. Retail companies gave the weapons out as incentives to kids selling products like costume jewelry and magazines door to door. Feed companies would drop a Hamilton rifle randomly in sacks of meal as a promotional gimmick. It was obviously a different time.
The Bronco orbits around a cast receiver reinforced with a length of steel rod. What looks like a second trigger upfront actually cocks the firing pin and releases the barrel assembly to rotate for loading and unloading. There is a manual extractor for removing empties. The safety is a serrated pushbutton.
My gun is of the early unmarked solid sort. Later versions sported a rotating lever allowing the barrel assembly to be removed for easy portage or storage. The front sight is heavily fenced. The rear sight is a stamped steel V secured with a machine screw. I have read most Broncos shoot high as they were designed in the days before high velocity ammunition.
Ruminations
My Bronco represents a Spartan design exquisitely well-executed. The fit remains glassy smooth despite more than half a century of hard use. Retiring to the range with my old Bronco and a couple boxes of ammo is, and always shall be, a ton of fun.
I hope Mike got the girl. We were never really close and we lost touch afterwards. However, while teenage dalliances might come and go, guns are forever. My little Bronco is immutable proof.
Though it’s certainly possible for the items in our lives to suddenly and catastrophically give up the ghost, we often benefit from a number of clues that indicate something might go wrong. Live long enough, and you’ll probably have to deal with a phone charger that needs to be at just the right angle to supply power, a refrigerator that suddenly starts making a loud hum, or a box fan that needs a good smack to get it going.
In the same manner, it’s certainly possible for a firearm to suddenly encounter a failure state that renders it inoperable and requiring a gunsmith’s assistance. Far more often, however, your gun will give you some very strong clues that it needs attention. As such, keeping your firearm ready for serious defensive or competition use can be as simple as listening carefully to what it’s trying to tell you.
“A Little Dirty”
I can appreciate the men and women who have the discipline or interest to clean every gun after every range trip. However, it’s an open secret that most firearms don’t have to be cleaned each and every time they’re shot. A quality handgun should operate problem-free for a few hundred rounds after a cleaning, assuming proper lubrication.
Still, there’s a point at which you can absolutely push things too far, and your gun will begin to let you know it’s not happy with the deferred maintenance. On any semi-automatic firearm, you may notice bolts or slides returning to battery sluggishly, or you may find a distinctive “hitch” in the action. This may feel like the breech face noticeably slowing once it contacts a cartridge, then pushing the round into battery in what might seem like two distinctive steps rather than as a single fluid stroke.
What’s usually happening is that carbon fouling is building up in various crevices, introducing friction that inhibits the smooth motion of the firearm’s components. Though a gun might have had ample lubrication at one point to allow the points of metal contact to glide past one another, that grease or oil will be covered under a progressively denser layer of fouling as shooting continues. An oil-and-soot-based slurry works a lot worse than oil alone.
Even when it seems like frame and slide are moving past one another fairly smoothly, you might also feel the effects of grime more subtly. If trigger components or bolts are feeling gritty (and especially if you can hear grit dragging in the internals), a deep cleaning is probably in order.
The goal, of course, is to ensure that the loading cycle is easy and your controls perform their essential functions. If you feel any gunk-based resistance along the way, it will only get worse, making malfunctions progressively more common until addressed.
Weak Springs, Weak Functioning
In the same way that crud can affect the optimal interactions of a firearm’s components, so too can the springs themselves. You’ll usually be able to feel when something’s amiss.
Starting with the recoil spring of a semi-auto, I invite the reader to consider the complexity of its job. It needs to permit the bolt or slide to fully complete its rearward travel, but also needs to cushion that reciprocating mass so that the frame isn’t subjected to excessive impact stress. Then, the spring needs to return the slide or bolt home with enough force to strip off the top round of a magazine and chamber it positively. The right spring is not too weak and not too stiff in either direction.
As the recoil spring fatigues, you may notice similar feeding issues to what we discussed previously, especially if the gun feels sluggish going into battery. But, one additional telltale sign of a too-weak spring is that brass will be launched violently: since the slide is moving back at a higher velocity than it should, spent casings are going to bounce off the ejector with extra force. You may also feel like the gun is kicking harder than it used to.
This is usually a critical thing to address, since it means that metal parts are going to batter one another with more force than they were designed to handle. Subjected to the extra stress, and over time, it’s not uncommon for a neglected gun to see peening at the frame rails, cracks around locking blocks and barrel lugs, or deformation around slide or bolt stops.
Again, usually you’ll see signs of trouble before things catastrophically fail. Square parts will progressively begin to round over. Reliability problems will creep in insidiously as the original geometry of the gun changes. There may be weird points of friction or resistance where there didn’t used to be. (Note also that any hairline cracks detected should immediately take the gun out of any sort of use until inspected by a capable gunsmith.)
To limit the possibility of these kinds of failures and deformities, I think it’s wise to replace the spring at regular intervals; for most pistols, I believe a conservative estimate is usually about the 3,000 to 5,000 round range. When in doubt, you can always reach out to the manufacturer of any particular firearm and see what they suggest. Keep in mind that 3,000 rounds is about 60 boxes of pistol ammo and 150 boxes of rifle ammo; if you figure you’re around that count for any pieces of your gear, it might be prudent to spend the twenty bucks or so required to swap out the part.
The other spring that will need attention is inside of the magazine. While less insidious to a firearm’s wear, you’ll notice spring fatigue first through a slide stop that increasingly fails to engage after the last round. Mostly, this is an annoyance, but in a defensive context it would be pretty handy to know if your firearm is out of ammo! Over time, there is also a risk that the additional force of the slide or bolt slamming home without a round to cushion it can provide extra wear and deformity to any parts associated with lock-up.
Extraction and Ejection Issues
Here’s another area where a shooter can usually see warning signs before the gun begins to present major problems. In tandem, the extractor and ejector work to get fired cases out of your firearm. Usually, the extractor is the culprit, since it depends on both geometry and spring tension to do its job (whereas the ejector is so often just a piece of metal for the brass to ram into under recoil).
When something is amiss, you may first notice inconsistent ejection patterns and angles. If brass cases are dribbling out of the gun or coming straight back at the shooter, it often indicates that the extractor claw isn’t maintaining consistent and strong tension on the rim of the cartridge. It may only be a matter of time before the problem progresses into stovepipe malfunctions or double-feeds. These stoppages are annoyances at the range, but could be deadly serious if you need your firearm in that moment to defend yourself or your loved ones.
The easiest fix is usually to brush out any gunk. Carbon fouling can stick onto and under the extractor claw and accumulate in the recesses of the breech face. There, the detritus changes the way that cartridges are held in place. Fouling in the chamber itself can also make it harder for the extractor to maintain grip and clear fired brass. Note, however, that if your gun has to be run totally clean for it to work at all, something more serious could be at play.
While you have the gun apart, it’s prudent to look for geometry changes to the extractor and ejector. Do these parts look like they should, or are there any chips, cracks, or rounded-over edges? If everything looks fine, it could be a sign that the extractor spring is weakening and needs replacement.
The Take-Away
When it comes to the design and manufacture of firearms, we really are living in the golden age. Thirty years ago, it would have been nearly unheard of for a budget-priced firearm to digest thousands of rounds without a hiccup of some kind. The product mix of Springfield Armory, especially, is a testament to how good today’s consumer has it. I’ve never encountered a gun of theirs that wasn’t totally reliable right out of the box.
Still, even the best made firearms are machines, and we live in an imperfect world. No manufacturer on the planet earth can give its customers an ironclad guarantee that any object it makes will work perfectly in perpetuity with zero maintenance. There are times that, through no fault of the user, a gun will go down. Shoot long enough and you’ll see it happen.
By the same token, I can say this with total honesty: if you want to keep malfunctions to an absolute minimum, trust your eyes and your hands. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a savvy user will be able to detect minor issues with his or her firearm before they turn into serious ones—including the kinds that induce failures.
Armed with the diagnostic indicators above, I believe you’ll stand head and shoulders above most gun owners when it comes to keeping your firearm running and ready for serious use.
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