John Ross
03-20-2011, 02:32 PM
Auto Mags and New Friends
After my phone call from Lee Jurras, telling me he planned to offer my 2800+ FPS .357 Auto Mag load commercially, a package arrived at the house. It had no return address on it. Inside were 200 new manufacture .44 Auto Mag cases, packed in translucent plastic boxes with the Auto Mag logo on them. They had been made by CDM in Mexico. Also included were several pounds of non-canister ball powders with different burning rates, and some bullets unlike any available at the gun shops. They must have come from either Lee or Kent, but in those days you weren’t supposed to ship that stuff to non-dealers, so I kept my mouth shut.
In early August of 1972 the trigger stud broke on the blued 6 ˝” M29 that my uncle had given me the summer before. I sent it back to the factory and bought an 8 3/8” nickeled M29 from a local cop. I had to pay $300, which was well over retail, as S&W’s production was ramped up for 9mm autoloaders during the Vietnam war, and the 1971 movie “Dirty Harry” had driven up demand even more for these already-scarce guns.
The phone rang and it was Fran Longtin, service manager at S&W. He was concerned that there might be a problem in production, as the gun I had sent him with the broken trigger stud was only a little over a year old. He mentioned that the forcing cone looked pretty good but the top strap had evidence of flame cutting. I told him I shot cast bullets almost exclusively. He asked if I knew how many rounds had been through the gun. I told him about eighteen thousand. There was a long pause. “We’ll have it back to you within a week,” he said finally.
“I just picked up an older 29,” I told him, “made back when Carl Hellstrom ran things, before Bangor Punta bought you guys. Will it hold up better than the new guns?” There was another long pause.
“I can’t comment on that.”
Experimentation continued with the Auto Mag in both calibers, but it was the .357 that had most of my interest. It became a love/hate relationship, for although the gun was wonderfully powerful and accurate, it was never 100% reliable, with frequent jams. One common problem was the gun cycling and failing to pick up a fresh round from the magazine—the bolt would close on an empty chamber. Several different recoil springs wound by Walt Wolff in Ardmore, Pennsylvania failed to completely fix this problem. Calls to Harry Sanford resulted in several different lubes being sent to me, supposedly formulated to work with the Carpenter 455 steel the gun was made out of. They helped some, but problems persisted.
In the Spring of 1973, I noticed one of the six locking lugs on my Auto Mag’s bolt was cracked. I sent the gun back to Harry and he replaced it, but it highlighted a design flaw in the gun: Harry had modeled the Auto Mag’s rotary bolt system on that of the M16, but he hadn’t scaled up the dimensions of the M16’s locking lugs for the larger case. The Auto Mag was using a bolt with locking lugs sized for the .223 cartridge, with a head diameter of .388”, for a cartridge the size of the .308, with a .473” diameter head. If you loaded the Auto Mag down to a pressure level where bolt thrust was the same as a .223 at 55,000 PSI, the gun wouldn’t function except as a single shot.
One benefit of all this was that I typed up everything I had learned about the Auto Mag in both calibers and ran a $15 ad in Shotgun News, offering this seven-page packet for sale for $9. I got well over a hundred orders, and that let me buy plenty of components and a couple more Smith 29s.
In the summer of 1973 I got invited out to the Super Vel plant in Shelbyville, Indiana. Lee Jurras now had an Auto Mag newsletter out, and was hosting a weekend of shooting and camaraderie with other Auto Mag enthusiasts. My uncle and I drove there and had a great time. I had turned 16 a few months before, and shared in the driving chores. This was before the feds enacted the damnable 55 mile per hour speed limit, so the drive wasn’t bad.
We got to the plant just as Lee drove up in a yellow DeTomaso Pantera, and I knew it was going to be a great weekend. I finally got to meet Kent Lomont, with whom I had corresponded so much, and I met JD Jones for the first time also, and of course Lee Jurras. Lee told me he believed I was the youngest Auto Mag owner and shooter in the country and probably the world, and had done more development work with the gun than all but two other people, both of whom were there that weekend.
I got to mess around in the Super Vel ballistics lab, and everyone got to do a bunch of shooting in a little pond on the property. Kent showed me how to speed shoot a revolver, with both elbows locked into my kidneys. Near the end of the shooting session someone put a timer on me and found I was firing 6 rounds of full strength .44 Magnum in 1.1 seconds.
Lee brought out a suppressed Ingram M11 .380 submachine gun and I got to shoot that. It was the first suppressed gun I had ever fired. I gathered it was on loan from the CIA or some other agency, which wanted Lee to load ammo for it.
We all had dinner at a nice restaurant, and it was a great time, although Lee was a bit annoyed that management wouldn’t let his 19-year-old daughter, along with her husband and their baby, into the restaurant because they weren’t 21, and here I was, sitting next to him at the ripe old age of 16.
Kent, my uncle, and I stayed up until 4AM in the motel room, talking about guns and related subjects. Kent’s dad Allen Lomont was a retired FBI agent, and my uncle had done some Army Intelligence work after WWII in Texas that involved working with the FBI, so there was plenty for them to talk about in addition to gun stuff.
We dragged ourselves out of bed at 8AM and had a nice breakfast, then bid our goodbyes. Lee asked me if I needed any powder, and we filled up the trunk and back seat of my uncle’s Cadillac with kegs of H110 that Lee sold us for 30 cents a pound. He also sold my uncle a keg of BLC-2 that didn’t have the flash suppressant coating on it and created huge fireballs when loaded in my .458. It seemed odd that a pistol ammo company would have BLC-2 on hand, but I think Lee bought it and some other powders from Amron when they went out of business.
In any event, that weekend was one of the best times I ever had, and I made some lifelong friends. Lee took a picture of all of us and published it in the Auto Mag newsletter a few months later.
http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn302/JohnRoss_07/AutoMag.jpg
After my phone call from Lee Jurras, telling me he planned to offer my 2800+ FPS .357 Auto Mag load commercially, a package arrived at the house. It had no return address on it. Inside were 200 new manufacture .44 Auto Mag cases, packed in translucent plastic boxes with the Auto Mag logo on them. They had been made by CDM in Mexico. Also included were several pounds of non-canister ball powders with different burning rates, and some bullets unlike any available at the gun shops. They must have come from either Lee or Kent, but in those days you weren’t supposed to ship that stuff to non-dealers, so I kept my mouth shut.
In early August of 1972 the trigger stud broke on the blued 6 ˝” M29 that my uncle had given me the summer before. I sent it back to the factory and bought an 8 3/8” nickeled M29 from a local cop. I had to pay $300, which was well over retail, as S&W’s production was ramped up for 9mm autoloaders during the Vietnam war, and the 1971 movie “Dirty Harry” had driven up demand even more for these already-scarce guns.
The phone rang and it was Fran Longtin, service manager at S&W. He was concerned that there might be a problem in production, as the gun I had sent him with the broken trigger stud was only a little over a year old. He mentioned that the forcing cone looked pretty good but the top strap had evidence of flame cutting. I told him I shot cast bullets almost exclusively. He asked if I knew how many rounds had been through the gun. I told him about eighteen thousand. There was a long pause. “We’ll have it back to you within a week,” he said finally.
“I just picked up an older 29,” I told him, “made back when Carl Hellstrom ran things, before Bangor Punta bought you guys. Will it hold up better than the new guns?” There was another long pause.
“I can’t comment on that.”
Experimentation continued with the Auto Mag in both calibers, but it was the .357 that had most of my interest. It became a love/hate relationship, for although the gun was wonderfully powerful and accurate, it was never 100% reliable, with frequent jams. One common problem was the gun cycling and failing to pick up a fresh round from the magazine—the bolt would close on an empty chamber. Several different recoil springs wound by Walt Wolff in Ardmore, Pennsylvania failed to completely fix this problem. Calls to Harry Sanford resulted in several different lubes being sent to me, supposedly formulated to work with the Carpenter 455 steel the gun was made out of. They helped some, but problems persisted.
In the Spring of 1973, I noticed one of the six locking lugs on my Auto Mag’s bolt was cracked. I sent the gun back to Harry and he replaced it, but it highlighted a design flaw in the gun: Harry had modeled the Auto Mag’s rotary bolt system on that of the M16, but he hadn’t scaled up the dimensions of the M16’s locking lugs for the larger case. The Auto Mag was using a bolt with locking lugs sized for the .223 cartridge, with a head diameter of .388”, for a cartridge the size of the .308, with a .473” diameter head. If you loaded the Auto Mag down to a pressure level where bolt thrust was the same as a .223 at 55,000 PSI, the gun wouldn’t function except as a single shot.
One benefit of all this was that I typed up everything I had learned about the Auto Mag in both calibers and ran a $15 ad in Shotgun News, offering this seven-page packet for sale for $9. I got well over a hundred orders, and that let me buy plenty of components and a couple more Smith 29s.
In the summer of 1973 I got invited out to the Super Vel plant in Shelbyville, Indiana. Lee Jurras now had an Auto Mag newsletter out, and was hosting a weekend of shooting and camaraderie with other Auto Mag enthusiasts. My uncle and I drove there and had a great time. I had turned 16 a few months before, and shared in the driving chores. This was before the feds enacted the damnable 55 mile per hour speed limit, so the drive wasn’t bad.
We got to the plant just as Lee drove up in a yellow DeTomaso Pantera, and I knew it was going to be a great weekend. I finally got to meet Kent Lomont, with whom I had corresponded so much, and I met JD Jones for the first time also, and of course Lee Jurras. Lee told me he believed I was the youngest Auto Mag owner and shooter in the country and probably the world, and had done more development work with the gun than all but two other people, both of whom were there that weekend.
I got to mess around in the Super Vel ballistics lab, and everyone got to do a bunch of shooting in a little pond on the property. Kent showed me how to speed shoot a revolver, with both elbows locked into my kidneys. Near the end of the shooting session someone put a timer on me and found I was firing 6 rounds of full strength .44 Magnum in 1.1 seconds.
Lee brought out a suppressed Ingram M11 .380 submachine gun and I got to shoot that. It was the first suppressed gun I had ever fired. I gathered it was on loan from the CIA or some other agency, which wanted Lee to load ammo for it.
We all had dinner at a nice restaurant, and it was a great time, although Lee was a bit annoyed that management wouldn’t let his 19-year-old daughter, along with her husband and their baby, into the restaurant because they weren’t 21, and here I was, sitting next to him at the ripe old age of 16.
Kent, my uncle, and I stayed up until 4AM in the motel room, talking about guns and related subjects. Kent’s dad Allen Lomont was a retired FBI agent, and my uncle had done some Army Intelligence work after WWII in Texas that involved working with the FBI, so there was plenty for them to talk about in addition to gun stuff.
We dragged ourselves out of bed at 8AM and had a nice breakfast, then bid our goodbyes. Lee asked me if I needed any powder, and we filled up the trunk and back seat of my uncle’s Cadillac with kegs of H110 that Lee sold us for 30 cents a pound. He also sold my uncle a keg of BLC-2 that didn’t have the flash suppressant coating on it and created huge fireballs when loaded in my .458. It seemed odd that a pistol ammo company would have BLC-2 on hand, but I think Lee bought it and some other powders from Amron when they went out of business.
In any event, that weekend was one of the best times I ever had, and I made some lifelong friends. Lee took a picture of all of us and published it in the Auto Mag newsletter a few months later.
http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn302/JohnRoss_07/AutoMag.jpg