Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Speaking Of Jam-O-Matics

I have owned a few (or maybe a couple more than a few) guns, other than the RG 26 I own now and the one I owned previously, that I considered true pieces of dung. I thought so if only because of how frequently they jammed. One of them may have been the gun for which the name Jam-O-Matic was first thought up; then again - that name may be a lot older than I suspect but it certainly fit one of them.

The second truly clunker of a handgun that I ever owned, after the first RG 26, was a Charter Arms Undercover 38 SPL. I bought one in the early 1980s. While I am not certain, I am fairly sure it was the second handgun I ever purchased. Live and learn and better to learn early on when it comes to gun buying I suppose. I learned from the Charter Arms Undercover 38 SPL and I sold it pretty fast. The reason I offloaded it was that when combat unloading/loading the cylinder would ride up over the small half circle of a protrusion on the side of the frame that was meant to prevent it from doing just that. I am not sure what you call that little nub so little nub will have to do! It's on the left side of frame near bottom just behind the cylinder. Damned steel of the frame and that nub were so soft for it to have worn away as the cylinder would ride up over it and get stuck there whenever unloading with any force as in a combat reload. I told the guy who bought it about that - he did not care - he wanted it to practice his engraving. He was an excellent engraver of firearms and I guess needed crap guns on which to practice his trade. All in all though, if not for that, the Charter Arms Undercover 38 would have been an okay gun as far as I was concerned. If you look closely at the nub in this video, you can see where the metal of that nub is worn to the white because it has probably failed in the same way.



Yet another Charter Arms that I owned was a dismal failure - in fact so much so that I think the name Jam-O-Matic was coined because of the piss poor performance of it. That gun was the Charter Arms Explorer II. That gun was a must have for me when I was a young agent in the Border Patrol. Not only did it look retro & cool in a sort of Art Deco way, it also looked like a throwback to the early industrial period (what did they call that not all that long ago - I think Steampunk). It was just the pistol to have at least for me and some of my buddies. I have a vague recollection that mine came with two barrels - one about 6" the other 10". Regardless of how cool it looked or how many barrels it came with, it was a piece of junk and Jam-O-Matic was the right name to wrap around it. I must have tried ten or 15 brands and various types of ammo in it, it operated dismally at best with any of them. Failures to feed and failures to eject were common. I got rid of that one pretty fast too. That's a good thing too because here, in NYistan under the Tyrant-King Cuomo, it is considered an assault weapon and lord knows how many mass shootings I might have decided to perpetrate if I still owned it.

Seems that its reputation, as a Jam-O-Matic, still stands too:



Don't get me wrong, I have no bones to pick with Charter Arms; just telling it like it was with those two particular guns. For all I know they made some great guns too. In fact, I bought a gun that used to be made by them but was made by henry repeating Arms when I got mine - The Henry Survival Rifle (used to be the Charter Arms AR7 or something like that). Nice little gun, lots off fun, does not jam a lot and is accurate enough for its purpose. Heard they were also good when made by Charter Arms.

All the best,
Glenn B