Category: All About Guns
The Blues Brothers! Gus worked over and blued by Ken Kelly of Mag-Na-Port.
Give me your rusted, your broken, most worn-out hunk of junk. Looks don’t matter — the uglier and more beat up, the better. The right person can shock life back into these misfits better than a defibrillator. After being jump started and rehabilitated, they’ll regain form and function once again.
I’ve witnessed miracles during these transformations, going from eyesore to eye candy, as once ignored shooters become a favored member of the herd again.
Close-up of Combat Mini double ball detent locking system and Fermin Garza dovetail front sight and ejector rod modification on the “Mongoose.”
The Saviors
Who are these saviors for lost souls? Why the gifted gunsmiths practicing their trade with the skills of plastic and heart surgeon. These folks routinely re-build, re-blue, and resuscitate petrified pieces while recreating classic sixguns without breaking a sweat.
Ken Kelly is one such soul, casting the Mag-Na-Port magic on cosmetically and functionally challenged guns over the years. Here’s a few of the favorites Ken applied the mythic Mag-Na-Port bluing they’re famous for, along with other skilled applications. He surely breathed life back into my tired, worn shooters.
Ejector rod modification on Skeeterito by Ken Kelly. Look at that bluing!
The “Paco” Gun
One of the first guns I ever had Ken customize saw life as a 4″ S&W model 29-2. I had it converted to Mag-Na-Ports Combat Mini (CM). The CM consists of cutting and Mag-Na-Porting the barrel to 3″ while round-butting the grip frame for easier and more comfortable concealability.
It’s finished in a high-luster, deep blue, which would give Old Colt’s a run for their money. The serrated trigger is polished smooth, and two ball-detents are added to the crane assembly assuring tighter lock-up.
Knowing his way around a S&W double-action, Ken applies his knowledge and skill as he works the action over. His work is some of the smoothest I ever feel, yet the hammer drops with authority, even detonating hard CCI primers. The single action pull is even better, if that’s at all possible!
Tank’s 4 5/8ths single six Vaquero after Ken Kelly cut it down to “Mongoose” size. Garza front sight before filing.
Skeeterito
The second gun Ken customized for me was a tired 6.5″ Ruger 3-screw Flattop in need of some serious sprucing up. Years ago, Ol “Doc” Barranti gifted this gun to me during the Christmas Holidays. Its patinaed pipe is ported the Mag-Na-Port way after being chopped to 4″, along with the ejector rod and ERH housing.
The front sight receives a See-More orange insert, milled into the original front sight blade for faster target acquisition and contrast the whole works gets the “high-luster” hot salt bath, leaving a bluing that’s deep, dark and downright beautiful. The aluminum grip frame and ERH are blacked.
A few years later I have Bobby Tyler of TGW fit ram horn stocks to the grip frame, providing the final touch complimenting this tidy package.
Family portrait of the Blues Brothers.
The Mongoose
In the wilds of Africa, the mongoose is a petite, complex critter. Honey badger mean, and having the tenacity of the Tasmanian Devil, their reflexes are faster than lightening. The mongoose eats deadly Cobra’s for lunch. Yet, they’re cute and cuddly, despite their aggressive personalities. It’s also the perfect moniker for a petite gun having the same traits.
The “Mongoose” tucked away in a Barranti Leather shuck makes a compact kit.
Mongoose Modification
I just happened to bring along a Ruger Bird’s Head .32 H&R Single-Six Vaquero on another visit to Mag-Na-Port. This gun was also gifted from a friend. I want to turn it into a compact, fire-breathing dragon capable of seduction.
It suffered from undersized cylinder throats measuring .311 inches and shot more than 2 inches left at 25 yards. I rectify this by opening the cylinder throats to .314 inches using the split-rod, emery cloth, hand drill method. This tightened groups right up, and the barrel stopped leading.
I could have turned the barrel to regulate the sights, but Fermin Garza just released a nifty dovetail front sight at the time. Windage adjustable, it provides the Vaquero with functional classic custom looks.
Here’s the “before” picture as they appeared being dropped off at Mag-Na-Port.
Metal Magic
Ken cuts the already short 4.625 inch barrel to 3.5 inches, just before the fixed blade sight. He mills a dovetail for the Garza front sight. The blade is purposely high so I can later file it, making point of impact coincide with point of aim at 25 yards.
Ken removes the factory warning from the barrel and polishes the whole works, so the bluing will have the deep, dark desirous look sixgunners love. The trigger and hammer are given the trademarked Mag-Na-Port high-polish jeweling, providing just enough “bling” to tastefully accent it.
Afterall, this is Motor City, home of chrome bumpers, high polish paint jobs and huge, shiny grills catching everyone’s attention as they gleam in the sun, and Mag-Na-Port follows suite.
Ken also trims the ejector rod housing and base-pin knob so full case extraction is possible when working the ejector rod. He mills a small fingernail notch making base pin removal easier. Lastly, he tunes and times the action, finishing the works with a creep free trigger job, breaking right at 2.5 pounds. The gun is drop dead gorgeous and deadly!
Blue Meaning
My three blued amigos from Mag-Na-Port are special to me, indeed! Gifted from friends, worked over by another friend, makes them so. Every time I reach for, or shoot one, memories can’t help but flood my mind thinking of them. That’s part of the magic of a good gun.
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Parker Bros. AAH Grade 7 SXS 20GA
Its a Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless in caliber 32 ACP Pistol / .32 Auto (7.65 Browning)
At least 33 countries produced AK rifles, but none of them had an origin history as strange as Yugoslavian AKs. Some say that Zastava is the best license-produced Kalashnikovs ever, but the truth is – Yugo AKs were not “license-produced”. Those guns had their own unique path that we will explore in this series of articles.
AK History @ TFB:
- AKs from Finland. Part 4: RK 95, The Last of the Clan
- Egyptian AKs (Misr, Maadi). Part 2: Quality, Problems and Modernization Projects
- East Germany AKs – The Best In The World? Part 3: Less Known Variants
- Hungarian AKs (Part 4): From Wonderfully Weird to Plain and Reliable
After the WW2, Yugoslavia found itself in a very peculiar political situation. Technically, it was a socialist country, but the leader, Iosif Broz Tito was too smart to follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union and outsource all major political decisions to Moscow.
Stalin did not tolerate this kind of independent thinking, and the “brotherly” relationship turned into burning hatred between the two political regimes. The Soviet press called Tito the “bloody dog”, and all Soviet advisors left Yugoslavia. Stalin demanded that Tito must repent for his deadly sin of insubordination.
Soviet propaganda depicted Tito as a bloody fascist. The caption reads “His way”.
In 1944, Red Army helped Yugoslav partisans to liberate their country from Nazi invaders, and in 1948, just four years later, the same Soviet generals were drafting up plans for the Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia.
In this situation, Yugoslavia could not possibly expect to receive a transfer of technology for weapon manufacturing from the USSR. At the same time, it remained to be a socialist country, so Western powers weren’t eager to help it with the creation of manufacturing capabilities. Yugoslavia was preparing to repel invasion from both NATO and the Soviet Union and had to build its own defense industry with minimal reliance on outside help.
Right after the war, Yugoslavia factories still produced bolt-action Mauser 98 rifles, but Yugoslavian weapons design engineers understood that the times had changed. In the early 50s, they analyzed the German STG 44 and began research to develop their own intermediate-caliber assault rifle.
Two main service rifles of the Yugoslavian Army before AK: Mauser 98 and locally made SKS
In 1959, two Albanian border guards escaped to Yugoslavia. They had two newly issued Soviet-made AK rifles, which ended up at the Zastava factory in Kraguevac, the city in Central Serbia with the oldest and most well-known Serbian weapon factory.
Engineers analyzed the Soviet rifles and came up with the ambitious concept called FAZ (Familija Automatika Zastava) – the family of automatic weapons from Zastava. Coincidentally, Mihail Kalashnikov was working on the same idea at the same time, just 2000 miles away.
The development of the FAZ concept was a team effort: Božidar Blagojević (later on he developed a pistol called CZ99), major Miloš Ostojić, Miodrag Lukovac, Milutin Milivojević, Milan Ćirić, Stevan Tomašević, Predrag Mirčić, and Mika Mudrić.
First Yugoslavian AKs – early M64 prototypes. Credit: Oleg Valetsky
Initially, they studied the system and copied some parts using sulfur castings. However, the two guns did not give the factory enough information about the tolerances of every part. They needed more AKs, and the solution came from an unexpected source.
Iosif Broz Tito was visiting one of the African countries and made a deal with local statesmen. Yugoslavia secretly bought 2000 AK rifles from the batch of guns sent as military aid by the Soviet Union to this particular African state.
The first Zastava AK – M64
Zastava M64. Credit: Oleg Valetsky
The first prototype the factory created was designated M64. The letter “A” was used for guns with fixed wooden stock and the letter “B” for guns with a folding stock. Later on, the naming system changed. Early prototypes had rear sight on the receiver cover, but later on, engineers decided that conventional AK rear sight would do well enough.
Even at this very early stage, engineers wanted to use as many existing parts as possible, so M64 had a hollow cylindrical charging handle taken from the M59, the Yugoslavian version of SKS. The folding stock version called M64B uses mass-produced under folding stock from the M56 submachine gun.
From the beginning, Yugoslavian AKs were designed to be used with rifle grenades and had grenade sights and shut-off mechanisms for the gas system.
Zastava engineers also developed an M65A light machine gun with a quick-detach barrel that never went into mass production.
Zastava M65A LMG prototypes. Credit: Oleg Valetsky
The guns were ready, but the Yugoslav generals were not. Some brass still thought that giving every soldier an automatic weapon was excessive. They changed their mind after 1968, when during the invasion of Czechoslovakia every Soviet soldier wielded an AK of some sort.
Yugoslavian Ministry of Defense began a discussion about the procurement of AKs for special forces from the Soviet Union since the relations became much better in the 60s. Zastava engineers were not happy. They developed an innovative rifle with additional capabilities and generals wanted to import guns from a recent geopolitical rival.
Common sense prevailed, and the Military-Technical Institute of Belgrade prepared technical documentation for the production of new rifles. However, the first mass-produced Yugoslavian AKs were different from the M64 prototypes. We will talk about it in part 2 of this article.