Earlier this month while making the rounds of the local gun shops, I encountered this earlier piece of American History. It’s an EIG Gun. They were rather infamous back in the 60’s and dubbed as Saturday Night Specials.
It’s a 6 shot 22 Short, revolver with German proof marks. She’s 6 inches in total length, with a 2 1/4in barrel. As usual the polymer front sight was missing as was missing and the loading Cylinder Ejection Pin. Bob’s Gun Shop out in Arizona was happy to sell me the parts. I’m going to have to get 7/64’s of an inch off the pin to get it to screw in flush.
It’s a double action/single action revolver. Double action has a trigger pull in excess of 12 lbs. Single action is around 4 lbs. This one hasn’t been fire a lot. With the trigger depressed the cylinder doesn’t budge and it lines up the cylinder and the barrel which is rare.
These old gals were notorious for misalignments and when you fired off a round, bits of copper would get shaved off and come flying out the sides along with other bits of residue. It has a loading gate that fits flush against the rear part of the frame at the top in the blast shield area and hinges in at the bottom. But in the middle there is a gap that adds to some concerns.
I popped off the grip covers when I got her home and there as expected was the R flanked on both side by diamonds which identified the manufacturer as Rohm Gesontheim in Germany. It’s a Rohm RG-10 also sold as the, CDM, Thalco Plinker, Rosco, Valor, Vestpocket, Western Style, Zephyr, and a bunch of other private labels. Rohm started out making inexpensive cutlery, pots, pans, starter and flare pistols.
This one is made out of pot metal but Rohm actually made some heavier caliber revolvers and pistols that were reputed to be quite reliable.
Eig Cutlery, was owned by Saul Eig. Down in Miami, Florida in the 50’s he started importing Rohm’s products plus stuff from Italy and Japan. Saul found that his imported firearm sales were real money maker. He had folks driving down from Northern States (Not that there weren’t other importers doing the same up north, Saul could just do it cheaper) and buying truck loads of products. He even had a distribution center out in California.
But…….. In our larger cities in certain states, the police and politicians had a problem. In the early 60’s the inner cities have loads of crime, drugs and gangs activities. There were some financial recessions and things were really bad over in certain parts of the cities were the main inhabitants were under privileged citizens. College kids and other folks looking for a handgun for protection didn’t want to spend the big bucks for a Colt, S&W or High Standard firearm bought these.
JFK gets killed with a cheap, mail ordered, foreign made rifle and the politicians drum up enough support to pass the Gun Control Act of 1968, which bans loads of foreign imports. Colt, S&W and High Standard support this.
Down in Florida Saul Eig has expanded his volume of imports. He buys hundreds of thousands of Rohm’s firearms and parts. He buys a vacant church next door, hires some Cubans and a couple of German to do assemblies under the “EIG” brand name. The politicians and Media are outraged.
They make Eig the Poster Boy for manufacturers circumventing the 1968 Law. The Federal Law gets amended and in 1969 Eig Cutlery becomes F.I.E., which later morphed into European American Armory, as well as Heritage Arms, Excam, and eventually R.G. Industries.
Out in California and in other states manufacturers see an opening in the firearms industry. So Raven Arms starts manufacturing a .25 Caliber pistol. Business takes off and they start manufacturing other calibers including .32s and .380s. So Saturday Night Specials never really went away. They just became home made. Here is the Eig Gun, the Raven M25 and the Cobra 380 that I have sitting around. After all she did play a role in their getting manufactured.
