Auto Mag build.

[TRX]

Back around 1982 or 1983 I bought one of those thick gun annuals that had an article, "Whatever Happened to the Auto Mag?", half a dozen pages that described the AMT Auto Mag. Grainy black and white images on coarse newsprint, basically... but such images! A BIG stainless steel automatic, chambered for .357 and .44 caliber cartridges pumped up to psychotic pressures and velocities. Hubba-hubba!

Alas, far too expensive for me, and rare. 30 years later I've still never even SEEN an Auto Mag other than in pictures. During the dot-com boom of the '90s I was making enough money to buy one, though they were seriously expensive collectors' items by then, but the three or four I'd found in Shotgun News' classifieds were broken or had other problems. No parts available, manufacturer long out of business. I passed, which was probably best, all things considered. But I still wanted one, in that way you still want things you'll probably never have.

A year ago I encountered the original designer of the Auto Mag on a forum dedicated to Auto Mags. He was offering to sell a partial set of blueprints - frame, barrel, receiver, bolt, some other stuff. I PM'd him, met his price, and eventually a cardboard mailing tube showed up with nine D and E sized photocopies of blueprints dated mostly 1971 and 1972. Autographed, too.

A few weeks later my wife caught me bent over the unrolled prints.

"Go on, you know you want to."

"What?"

"Go ahead and build it. You should do it now, while you can still talk to those guys. They're not going to be around forever." (some of the Auto Mag principals are getting right on up there...)

"I don't have the kind of equipment I'd need to go most of this. Plus, these are just the big parts; I don't have drawings for all the fiddly bits."

"Can you buy them somewhere?"

"Most of them, but they're crazy expensive. And the tooling wouldn't be cheap, either."

"That's okay, I'll help pay for it."

Every now and then, I'm reminded of why I love my wife...

So, officially all the other gun projects are parked while I build the Auto Mag. I've spent an entirely indefensible amount of money - enough to buy a couple of Auto Mags off Gunbroker - and discovered my machining skills aren't as extensive as I thought. At least one part is probably going to have to be investment cast like the original. And all that I'm learning about heat treating is, frankly, making my brain hurt. But I'm plugging along steadily, working on making a functioning copy of a gun I've still never actually seen...

Hey, it could be worse, like the guys who spend ten or twenty years building working scale models of steam locomotives. At least I'll be able to shoot the Auto Mag when I get done!

.44 barrel from Green Mountain Rifle Barrels, cheap 1025 alloy steel for prototyping the receiver, expensive 4140 steel for the real thing. Brass bar is for backing up some welds on the prototype.

Several hundred dollars' worth of rare "collectible" Auto Mag parts, from the son of the owner of the former company.

The little zigaggy part to the right is the sear, about the size of a sugar cube. It was $179.00 all by itself...

[TRX]

More tiny, expensive bits.

Shiny new expensive bits. I got a plastic tackle box to keep all the Auto Mag cutters separate from my regular shop tooling.

More bits. I keep all the parts in little plastic bags to keep them from escaping.

Starline Brass makes .44 AMP brass, which is way better than having to saw down .308 brass like in the old days. I was also able to buy loading dies.


Some of the parts, I have blueprints for. But I figured I'd just buy whatever was I could so I could concentrate on the other parts that aren't available anywhere.

[TRX]

I'll be making my bolt from bar stock, but this one popped up on eBay at an only mildly extortionate price... it only cost as much as some whole, brand new pistols. <sigh> That's the problem when dealing with exotics.

Materials to make "machineable wax." I have a desktop CNC machine I'll be using to make most of the milling cuts after I finish the lathe work for making the bolt. All wax is machineable; "machineable" means it has a high enough melting point and enough strength not to melt or gum things up.

The CNC thing is new to me; and I'll be programming the mill by entering G-code into a text editor. "Crash" has a slightly different meaning on a machine tool than on a PC...

A Christmas present from my wife - an upper built by Auto Mag for High Standard in the early 1970s, when HS briefly marketed the Auto Mag under their own name. It's not just "like new", somewhere along the way it was polished and Mag-Na-Ported too. I won't be getting any more Christmas or birthday presents until my beard is long enough to trip over.

[TRX]

A lot of what I've been doing are machine upgrades and accessories - a big ball bearing steady rest for the lathe, and a through-the-headstock rotary coupler and oil feed to oil through the barrel when chambering, an oiling system and catch tray, a kit to put a T-slot cross slide on my old Atlas lathe, a big gantry crane over the mill so I can do some repairs on it and move the vise and rotary table around without killing my back, variable-frequency speed controllers on the lathe and mill, building a long-stroke hydraulic broaching press to do the locking lugs in the receiver, building a heat treat oven and closed loop controller, modifying a 4" rotary table into a 4th axis for the mini-mill, et cetera.

An Auto Mag - what I'm going to finish up with. Eventually.

Flip the takedown lever and the upper slides off. Other than dropping the magazine, that's as far as it goes for field stripping. You can interchange uppers in different calibers or barrel lengths if you want; since the sights are on the upper, there's no change in sighting.

An Auto Mag next to a 1911. Yes, it's a big gun. Single action, and only seven shots, just like the 1911. Of course, if it takes more than seven .44 AMPs to do the job, my recommendation is to take off and nuke it from orbit...

[pe4king]

Fantastic article TRX, you are indeed a brave man this is an awesome project, please keep posting updates on the build.
The Automag was always on my fantasy pistol list, and that is as far as it ever got :goodjob:

[TRX]

Och! I got a request for feelthy peekchurs and got carried away. Dromia moved the message out of the newguys area to over here.

To me the Auto Mag is freakin' gorgeous, and its looks alone justify its existence. However, Auto Mag has its faults. It's finicky about ammunition, and even the wrong type of oil can make it unreliable. Part of it is the basic design - it has a lot of heavy bits moving around, and the tipping point between "not enough oomph to cycle" and "cycles to hard it stovepipes" is quite narrow. Production problems ("quality control"? what's that?) and not ever having an official standard ammunition were two big problems there.

[Gun Pimp]

Och! I got a request for feelthy peekchurs and got carried away. Dromia moved the message out of the newguys area to over here.

To me the Auto Mag is freakin' gorgeous, and its looks alone justify its existence. However, Auto Mag has its faults. It's finicky about ammunition, and even the wrong type of oil can make it unreliable. Part of it is the basic design - it has a lot of heavy bits moving around, and the tipping point between "not enough oomph to cycle" and "cycles to hard it stovepipes" is quite narrow. Production problems ("quality control"? what's that?) and not ever having an official standard ammunition were two big problems there.

TRX - I agree with you about Auto Mag - always wanted one - a rifle shooter's pistol! Got to handle one - but it was just a few months before we 'lost' pistols in the UK. Tempted though.

If you ever feel like seeing your work featured in our magazine (www.targetshooteronline.com) we'd love to run it. E-mail me on vinceb@targetshooteronline.com

[knewmans]

I remember as a rather younger person having a copy of Guns&Ammo with an article on the Auto Mag. Even then knowing nothing about guns I drooled. Not even sure why I would have bought the mag.

[Sim G]

Stone Lodge ranges, 25th of September 1997, my last shoot before surrender of my pistols. Big bangs on the other range....

A TDE AutoMag, a Wildley, an LAR Grizzly, a Coonan and a couple of AMT autos that had never been fired, were getting fired!!! The owner kindly gave me five rounds through each!

The whole debacle of the UK handgun ban hit home for so many reasons that day....

Ba$tards!!

[telshe49]

Was this gun used by Clint Eastwood in one of his Dirty Harry themed films. l believe it was Sudden Impact. l may be wrong. l also droiled over it in the 80s. Keep up the good work. love to see it in action. By the way are the cases cut down 308 win?
Telshe49