“Developing expertise is more important than any weapon modification” — Jim Boland
American Handgunner 1987 Annual
Master gunsmith Jim Boland customizes the Colt Government Model to hold 14 rounds called super 9MM! And that’s just the appetizer in this full feast of radical redesign.
By
Cameron Hopkins, Photos by Ichiro Nagata
(The following is the text from the magazine pictured above.)
In the Southwest Pistol League, prestigious combat shooting club pistolsmith Jim Boland claims a legion of followers. His disciples are quick to sing the song of praise for this innovative gunsmith.
Recently Boland embarked on an ambitious project to build a high-capacity pistol for IPSC competition. Working with a Colt Government Model, Boland redesigned the pistol and essentially build an entirely new gun. Chambering the 9mm Parabellum cartridge, the gun features unique design changes that enable the cartridge to be hand loaded far beyond its inherent limitations. The loads in this pistol qualify for the IPSC “major” power rating.
Commissioned by Combat Master J Bartell, the radical custom pistol is called the FK Gun by its owner to enshrine the memory of two deceased companions. The main design features are:
*Rebuilt grip frame to accommodate H&K P7 M 13 magazines (13 shot 9mm magazines). Recut slide rails, reversed onto the frame and slide. The slide rides inside the frame, opposite the conventional Colt. Raised grip safety and re-engineered thumb safety.
*Redesigned trigger linkage.
*Special barrel system to handle the pressures of 9mm major.
We met Boland in his workshop recently at 15735 Strathern, Unit # 5, Van Nuys, CA, 91406 (818-893-8972) to question him about this unique pistol. We discovered a gunsmith whose knowledge is far-flung as the discussion ranged beyond this particular weapon. We found his comments provocative:
AH: What is the design concept behind the FK Gun?
JB: When we started building this J (the client) was very interested in having a smaller, lighter gun with a greater magazine capacity. He wanted a gun that would be the same size as a stock Colt gun, or maybe a little smaller, but he wanted it compensated and he wanted the magazine capacity increased to at least 15 rounds.
Well, we ended up with a gun that holds 14 rounds and a barrel length an eighth of an inch longer than a 5-inch Colt and a grip length that’s an eighth of an inch shorter. And the gun would make major.
Right now I’m going to use the information I’ve gotten out of this gun and build a gun out of solid blocks and build it in 10mm. A gun to fill the gap between .45 and .38 Super so it’ll do the job of both.
AH: What other gun designs influenced the construction of the FK Gun?
JB: the SIG-Sauer in the CZ-75 were basic design layouts for the way the frame rails were done and the very, very small slide in order to get the hand grip up. It seems that most of the guns made in Europe now, the frame rails are at bore line so you can get your hands up higher, closer to center of bore, without hitting the slide.
What we did there was to machine the rails off of the gun completely and weld rails on the outside of the frame also, this gave us a little more width on the frame so we could blend out the extra width required for the H&K magazines.
The reason we went to the H&K magazine is that it’s staggered at the top. It’s flat on one side and bulged out on the other. This gave us room to get a trigger mechanism to run down one side. The gun doesn’t have a trigger bow, it’s got a push rod arrangement.
What I did there to generate a trigger, was I took a one-piece-all-milled-out-of-steel Colt trigger made in the early 20s and literally fabricated another trigger mechanism around the outside of it (H&K magazine). I then cut the original trigger away so we had a trigger mechanism outside the original and then I cut the frame out to accept the oversize trigger. This was a lot of work to go through on an experimental basis.
AH: Why did you pick the Colt Model O as the basis of this conversion?
JB: Because of the locking mechanism being so strong. On most nine millimeters, the locking lug area is smaller than a Colt. So far, out of all the guns I’ve measured, the Colt design has the greatest amount of locking area. By raising the front of the barrel, say 40 or 50 thousandths straight up, we get all three locking lugs engaged at the same depth, so it isn’t a progressive decline of engagement, they’re the same.
Also, on the “O” frame, you can remove the barrel out of the front of the gun so when you have a compensator on there you can take the barrel completely out. On most other designs the barrel comes out of the back and when you put on the compensator, you’re stuck. You’ve got a one piece gun.
AH: What aspects of the gun allow you to load the 9mm way beyond its original design limitations?
JB: The thing we had to do was to change the piece. You literally have to move the cartridge forward or the back of the barrel back a thirty-second of an inch (in order to fully support the cartridge case). Then, if you want a safety margin to compensate for a bad piece of brass, you might as well go a sixteenth of an inch and then the rim itself is inside the barrel.
What we did there was to build a barrel with a feedramp added to the rear rather than on the front. With this particular gun, the H&K magazines helped a lot because it’s impossible to nosedive (the cartridge) in an H&K magazine. Because of the way their wedge down in the bottom, the rounds feed up nose first. In a Colt they don’t, they feed up rim first.
If anyone’s interested in going “major”, what you have to do is build a few and blow em up like I did. Then you’ll find out where the weak spots are. We re-machined the locking lugs in the slide we’ve stopped trusting Colt’s machining to make sure there’s no excessive radius.
AH: So you use a Colt barrel?
JB: No, Colt barrels won’t hold the pressure.
AH: What type of barrel?
JB: We used an early Bar-Sto made out of 410 stainless to go major. Since then I’ve started using some of the later Bar-Sto’s that are made out of the free machining 416 stainless and they will make major also, but just barely.
With the early Bar-Sto barrels you could actually make a power factor of 238, but if you get much above a power factor of 180 on the new barrels, you set the locking lugs on the barrels back because the metal won’t stand the gap.
By raising the muzzle, you get all the locking lugs in deep. By extending the back of the barrel back clear to the breach face, you cover all the case head. And by filling in about half of the notch cut for the extractor, you can make it go major.
AH: Can you explain the Double D compensator?
JB: I got into making the Double D basically because of the pressure from my customers wanting me to manufacture something for them. They were dissatisfied with having to clean lead out of compensators all the time. And they would like to have someone close so if something went wrong they wouldn’t have to ship the thing halfway across the United States to get it fixed.
After the’ 82 IPSC Nationals, I started reproducing some of the original compensators I had built back in the new mid 60s when I was working for TRW. Eventually, by trial and error and finding out who liked what the most, we came up with the Double D design which is about half a compensator just one side. Of course that’s all you need because you want to divert all the gas up anyway. People weren’t much interested in blowing gas down on their feet.
The one sided compensator seem to work out real well. The basic design behind it is the exhaust port from a Husqvarna 300cc, single cylinder racing engine. They had altered the shape of the port from exactly half “round to full” round down an incline plane so the motor would not run any faster than 9,000 are rmp. It would generate a back pressure and stall at that point.
Well, I realized that you’re not talking about the speed of sound. Not quite, but almost. By using that technology on the front of the gun, you can actually trap the air in the compensator that’s ahead of the bullet.
My feeling is that the recoil and muzzle flip is imparted into a gun while the bullet is traveling down the barrel, that’s the best time to compensate the gun before the bullet exits the rifling. And the only way you can do that is by putting to use the air column that is at rest in the barrel by trapping it in a gas chamber in front of the barrel and then having the bullet force the compensated air out the top of the gun as the bullet goes by.
AH: Several other aspects of the gun deserve mention unto themselves. For example, raising the grip safety what is it? five eighths of an inch?
JB: Yeah, it’s raised 5/8 of an inch.
AH: Why and how?
JB: Normally, on my standard guns, I raise them five sixteenths by literally grinding away the back of the gun until I reach the pinhole where the thumb safety goes through. On the FK gun, I welded up the whole completely then added metal on the top of the frame behind the frame rails until I got up to the height of the slide, so the slide would just barely clear it. I then re”“drilled the safety hold higher.
The idea here is to get the web of your hand as close to the center of the bore as possible. That way, when the slide bottoms out, the muzzle flip effect is less and the direct straight-back recoil effect is greater
One of the good side of facts is that your trigger is actually lower now, so when you curl your hand around the gun, the tip of your finger touches the trigger and the body of your finger is against the side of the gun. You get better trigger control automatically, you don’t have your finger hanging out there in space.
I also cut the front of the frame up as high as I can underneath the trigger guard and then the trigger guard area where it meets the frame up in the front, I cut that out absolutely square also so all the parts of your hand are as high as I can get them.
AH: By moving the Beavertail grip safety up which in turn requires moving the thumb safety up, that completely alters the arrangement between the safety, the sear, the disconnector, the hammer and the trigger. Was that a complete redesign, or could you utilize the original relationship between these parts?
JB: I also had to move the protrusion of the Swenson safety down to match. I just literally welded up one side of it and re-machine it to a greater distance between the pivot pin and the hands on the safety itself.
AH: So really just the thumb lever itself is moved up?
JB: Yeah, the internal parts were built up and read-machined so they would work in the original positions. These are actually moved down to the original positions.
AH: How did you go about widening the grip to accept the HK magazine?
JB: What I did was to mount (in a vice) the frame itself by the area of the frame that holds the mainspring housing and I milled away everything up to the frame rails and build a new front grip and new side panels out of a solid block of steel and welded it into place.
The FK Gun is rather unique because it will take either a standard Colt magazine or a H&K staggered magazine. Both work.
AH: What was the most difficult aspect of building the gun?
JB: The first time we ever blew a primer! With the frame rails on the outside, there’s no gas relief. And with an H&K magazine if you blow a primer there’s no place for the gas pressure to go. Everything was locked in.
So the first thing that gave were the frame rails. Blew them right off the gun. J accomplish this by seeing how many times he could fire the same piece of brass. He got 13 reloads on one piece of brass and it let go. That was it. We blew the whole gun up and had to rebuild it. That was the hardest part to overcome because nothing was straight anymore.
AH: Is 9mm Major safe, then?
JB: Well, yeah, sure. Try loading a .38 super 13 times to that velocity, 1,200 fps and a 160 grain bullet. And see what happens to the primer pocket.
AH: Have you done any pressure studies on the 9mm major?
JB: Yes, reaching major we’re around 31,000 pounds depending on the gun. Some guns will make major around 30,000 and some have to go to 34,000. But we were not above 35,000.
AH: And yet .38 super is hovering around 34,000 to make major.
JB: Yeah. It’s slightly more efficient because it has a better gas seal. The tapered case and the tapered chamber seal the gas better than a straight case and a tapered chamber.
AH: How many man hours do you have in the FK Gun?
JB: Over 200.
AH: Would you build another one?
JB: No. Absolutely not. I’m going to build better ones, but not another one like that. The disadvantage we ran into was cost. J’s found that all but 2 matches in 1986, he could shoot better with a standard gun than with that fat frame. A lot of IPSC matches now are designed to be equally competitive between a revolver and an automatic, so they’re basing the matches on 6 shots. The 13 or 14 rounds is not that much of an advantage.
AH: You mentioned earlier you’re going to be building “block guns for 10mm.” Could you explain that?
JB: In 1978 I started a project to try to build a handgun that would lock up like a Belgium made rifle (the FN) where you actually have a locking block inside the slide where the solid mounted barrel mounts to the frame. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
AH: What’s your opinion of the 10mm?
JB: The .40 caliber bore is the ideal bullet diameter for a handgun. I’ve done an awful lot of research on this all the way back to the invention of the metallic cartridge. Everybody who seemed to be in any position to be a gun designer base their gun development on a .40 caliber bullet. Like the original Remington Derringer was a .40 caliber or 10mm. The original single action colt was in .38 40, the first ones that were made. That is a .40 caliber bullet. The original Browning Hi-Power was in 10mm and they reduce the size of the slide and changed it to the 9mm 08 to increase the magazine capacity from 12 to 13, which I don’t think is any advantage.
The original Auto-Mag which was produced by Mars Gun Company in England, which stripped and fed like a machine gun, backwards out of the magazine, that was originally in 10mm. They called it the .401 Mars.
If you work it out ballistically, the greatest amount of muzzle energy with the least amount of recoil comes from a 400 thousands diameter bullet out of a handgun. And that’s it.
AH: Do you think the 10mm will take off?
JB: There’s always been a 10mm gun on the market ever since centerfire was invented. It’s just that people forget. I would like to see people standardized on the 10mm because it gives you the power of a .45 with the recoil of a .38. That’s it! (Laughs). Why bother with anything else?
AH: What is the most popular conversion you offer, from a basic street gun to a full house competition gun?
JB: The most popular thing I do is framework. People send me frames from all over the world to give me to do the checkering, the mag well and the high hand grip. They’re not interested in having a trigger job done or a barrel installed because they want to have someone local so when the trigger takes a flop, they can say, “Hey John, or Bill or what ever, the trigger job you did needs a little touch-up.”. They don’t want to send it all the way back here. All the things that are permanent on a gun, the things that don’t break, that’s my most popular work.
AH: Do you have anything you would like to add before we close this interview?
JB: Yeah, in my opinion developing expertise is more important than any modification.