Daniel Watters

US Patent Application 20090178322: Modular fire control assembly for a handgun

From what I can determine, the inventor wants to make an en-bloc fire control system for the M1911 in the same spirit as the Tokarev or SIG P210. The tension of the sear spring can be tuned by a set screw. One of the obvious problems I see is that you will still have to disassemble the pistol to get the darned thing in place. Another one will be dealing with buyers who have frames with improperly drilled pin holes.

Joe Forte

May be an attempt to show that JMB didn't really know what he was doing. <BG>

Snake45

"An ingenious solution to a nonexistant problem, an answer to a question no one asked."

"If it ain't broke, fix it till it is."

SpecialEd

Ah but didn't Dieudonné Saive do this back in the 20's for the HP?

us019255

Disclaimer: I have been retired for awhile so I am not completely sure what is and is not included in the referenced data base. It did not exist in this form when I was working.

I did not see any assignment to a corporation. The address listed looks like a patent attorney in private practice.

This would indicate that the inventor is a private individual with an idea, that may be an invention. It is very common for private inventors to patent things that solve nonexistant problems. It is also very common for them to then try to sell them to corporations. When the corporation tells them that they do not want to purchase the invention, they rant and rave about the stupidity of the corporations.

During my 30 years in research I saw many examples of this. By the way, I also saw a few that were good inventions. One of which I convinced my company to purchase, but that is another story.

spwenger

Actually, the modular firing group of the BHP is one of the few parts that was not conceived by Dieudonné Saive - it, along with the cam block to replace the swinging link, were the two major design contributions of Browning.

SpecialEd

I wasn't referring to the breech bolt assembly of the patent of 1927 (which was never used by the way) but it turns out it wasn't quite an HP and I was off by a decade. It was a blowback 7.5mm cross between an HP and a 1911 submitted for the French trials of 1933, that had Saive's en bloc removable lockplate system.

Snake45

Yeah, I was wonderin'. The P35 is a nightmare to detail strip and reassemble (compared to a 1911), and there's nothing in it I'd consider "modular."

SpecialEd

Yeah, that trigger lever can be a bear for a normal human with only two hands! I didn't mean that it was part of the production HP but that Saive had conceived it during the development of the HP.

Daniel Watters

If I remember correctly, the en bloc lockwork was a requirement set by the French. Saive's locked-breech 7.65mm prototype could have been quite interesting if had been chambered for a serious cartridge. The French pistols that followed, and even the SIG P210, owe a debt to Saive.

Daniel Watters

It is common not to see an assignee listed in the application. For instance, Heckler & Koch patent applications rarely show them as being assigned to HK. However, the final patent will.

WaltGraham

Watch someone build a gun around \ incorporating this new "feature"...

Daniel Watters

The GP35's sear, sear spring, sear pin, ejector, hammer assembly, and thumb safety are really a bear to get back into place. You are fighting spring tension the whole time you are trying to align pin holes. I did it once and will never do it again unless large sums of money are offered. Reassembling detail stripped S&W 1st-3rd Gen. pistols and Series 80 Colt Gold Cups are less of a pain.

Snake45

Yeah, ideally it takes three hands and a bench vise.
I've had mine apart maybe a half-dozen times and I've dreaded it and put it off as long as possible every time. I can do it but I do NOT enjoy it in the least. I've built both 1G and 3G S&Ws up from parts, as well as a P.38, and they're all easier to work with.

SpecialEd

Did it twice to remove that dammed infernal magazine trigger release. Hope to never do it again.

SpecialEd

The French played FN for years until lo and behold a French company comes up with a pistol that meets their demands. It was a Petter design wasn't it? Precursor to the Sig Sauer P210?

Daniel Watters

Actually you can leave the pistol assembled for this operation. Just punch out the pin for the magazine safety plunger. With the pin out, you then maneuver the trigger lever out of its slot in the frame, and rotate it backward. This should give clearance for the safety plunger and its spring to be removed the trigger. I prefer to reinstall the safety plunger without its spring. This eliminates the excessive overtravel of the trigger created by the complete elimination of the part. Once the plunger is back in place, reposition the trigger lever back into its frame slot. Then reinsert the retention pin for the safety plunger.

Daniel Watters

Yep, the French basically let FN/Saive do all of their design and development work on their own dime, and then handed the FN model over to Petter, et al. to see what they could copy. The French actually had the Gallic gall to license Petter's "design" to SIG.

Kevin Gibson

Well, I’ll add a bit to that. Few, if any of the parts on the Hi Power were conceived by Doudione Saive. Browning held the patent for nearly every invention on the Hi Power. The genius of Dieudonné Saive was knowing how to combine all of those patented inventions into one pistol.

spwenger

I guess that may be similar to saying that the genius of a great chef is in knowing how to combine all those ingredients provided by Nature. Those of you who own a copy of Ezell's Handguns of the World can see very graphically just how far Dieudonné [sic] Saive took Browning's initial prototype. Browning, by the way, did not believe that a staggered-column magazine was a feasible proposition. The reason that FN marketed the High Power as a Browning design was because the Browning name commanded such high respect in Europe that, in some countries, it was synonymous with an autoloading pistol.