Here’s a fairly scarce gun I picked up a few years ago for a little “side” collection I have been dabbling in. (Pre-war .22 Rimfire semi-auto pistols)
It was very reasonably priced as it was in not the nicest condition. As near as I can tell it is a Walther Model 1936 Olympia Schnellfeuer (Rapid Fire) in .22 Short with an aluminum slide and is an early variant of the model made from 1936 to 1944. This is the gun that Germany used to sweep the rapid fire stages in the 1936 Olympics.
As the following picture shows, some shooter did some pretty ugly, but, I’m sure, functional, modifications to the grips. He used a basic wood filler to build up a palm/heel rest, extended the thumb rest and recontoured the rear of the grip to fit his palm better. He then topped the whole thing off with some kind of a moleskin covering. (And then shot the gun so much that the aluminum slide became quite battered. (More on this later.)
I originally intended to just leave as it was as an example of a working gun for some previous shooter. A couple of weeks ago that ugly grip finally got to me and I started to pick at it a little to see if there was any chance of restoring it. I found that after peeling off the moleskin, Acetone somewhat softened the wood filler. Then I tried some MEK and it almost dissolved it. Here is the result:
I still wasn’t planning to shoot it because of the battered slide. Shown below is the extractor on the verge of falling out of the slide. If it popped out I would never find the various little parts that would go flying.
Then, one day I had an epiphany on how to solve the shooting problem.
I remembered that in the back of my safe was a TT Olympia. This is a Chinese copy of the Walther and was made in the 1980’s or so. I had picked it up on a whim years ago.
It turns out that the TT was a much better copy than I realized (Other than the grips….) I swapped out the slide and it fit perfectly. I wondered if the weight would cause malfunctions (the TT slide is steel) but seems to work flawlessly.
I do need to get some linseed oil on the grips as that MEK really dried them out…..