Absalom
SWCA Member, Absent Comrade
I recently moved, and due to that ended up fishing guns out of the back of the safe I hadn't held in years. In some cases I realized I had no decent photos either. So I decided to remedy that, and will occasionally show some random historically interesting guns here. One of them is this Spanish-French Ruby-type pistol, ca. 1917.
A quirk of early 20th century Spanish law invalidated patents unless the patented invention was actually produced in Spain within a specified number of years. This allowed Spanish gunmakers, for centuries concentrated in the Basque country around the town of Eibar, to happily produce unlicensed copies of foreign designs. Since they could not legally sell where foreign patents were honored, most of their production went to Latin America, where this mattered little. Their S&W and Colt copies have been presented here before.
Some years before WW I, Eibar gunmakers had begun to produce semi-automatic pistols based on John Browning's 1903 design with various trade names. So when the French army came looking for suppliers of large numbers of service handguns, the Basques were ready.
The Eibar firm of Gabilondo y Uresti (an ancestor of Llama) submitted its "Ruby" design and was awarded large contracts by the French government starting in 1915. Gabilondo ended up having to subcontract to seven other companies, and even that did not stop more than 40 other area gunmakers from snagging additional direct French contracts.
Somewhere in the vicinity of 800,000 Rubys are thought to have been made. Most went to the French, who soon discovered dramatic quality differences. But they weren't in a position to be picky. After WW I, the pistols went to the new Yugoslav and Polish armies, as well as the Finns who still used them against the Russians in 1939/40. Many were captured in 1940 in France and ended up in the holsters of German reservists on occupation duty. I have seen one with bringback papers from a US service member from Vietnam, where it presumably landed in the inter-war years with French colonial troops or police.
The caliber choice of .32 ACP, or 7.65mm Browning as it was known internationally, has been panned for its weakness, but made sense in the context. It allowed for a simple design and at the time, it was the by far most universally used pistol round in the world. Even in the US, most semi-autos (the most popular by Colt and Savage) were selling in that caliber.
My Ruby was made by F.Arizmendi y Goenaga, one of the largest gun makers in Eibar with over 100 employees. They reportedly made about 80,000 of these for the French. Note the French FEU - SUR labeling of the safety lever. The AG on the back left frame was a military manufacturer's mark to keep guns and magazines matched up, since interchangeability across makers wasn't a thing. You'll note that the mag does not match on this pistol; it is stamped HE for the firm of Hijos de A. Echeverria.
The fact that I got this gun/mag combination to flawlessly cycle an old partial box of .32 Silvertip hollowpoints shows that both AG and HE were among the higher-quality Ruby manufacturers.
A quirk of early 20th century Spanish law invalidated patents unless the patented invention was actually produced in Spain within a specified number of years. This allowed Spanish gunmakers, for centuries concentrated in the Basque country around the town of Eibar, to happily produce unlicensed copies of foreign designs. Since they could not legally sell where foreign patents were honored, most of their production went to Latin America, where this mattered little. Their S&W and Colt copies have been presented here before.
Some years before WW I, Eibar gunmakers had begun to produce semi-automatic pistols based on John Browning's 1903 design with various trade names. So when the French army came looking for suppliers of large numbers of service handguns, the Basques were ready.
The Eibar firm of Gabilondo y Uresti (an ancestor of Llama) submitted its "Ruby" design and was awarded large contracts by the French government starting in 1915. Gabilondo ended up having to subcontract to seven other companies, and even that did not stop more than 40 other area gunmakers from snagging additional direct French contracts.
Somewhere in the vicinity of 800,000 Rubys are thought to have been made. Most went to the French, who soon discovered dramatic quality differences. But they weren't in a position to be picky. After WW I, the pistols went to the new Yugoslav and Polish armies, as well as the Finns who still used them against the Russians in 1939/40. Many were captured in 1940 in France and ended up in the holsters of German reservists on occupation duty. I have seen one with bringback papers from a US service member from Vietnam, where it presumably landed in the inter-war years with French colonial troops or police.
The caliber choice of .32 ACP, or 7.65mm Browning as it was known internationally, has been panned for its weakness, but made sense in the context. It allowed for a simple design and at the time, it was the by far most universally used pistol round in the world. Even in the US, most semi-autos (the most popular by Colt and Savage) were selling in that caliber.
My Ruby was made by F.Arizmendi y Goenaga, one of the largest gun makers in Eibar with over 100 employees. They reportedly made about 80,000 of these for the French. Note the French FEU - SUR labeling of the safety lever. The AG on the back left frame was a military manufacturer's mark to keep guns and magazines matched up, since interchangeability across makers wasn't a thing. You'll note that the mag does not match on this pistol; it is stamped HE for the firm of Hijos de A. Echeverria.
The fact that I got this gun/mag combination to flawlessly cycle an old partial box of .32 Silvertip hollowpoints shows that both AG and HE were among the higher-quality Ruby manufacturers.
