EmGe Zenit .177 Pistol
This little pistol was left to me by my Uncle Les. It is a nice little pistol, it reminds me of Flash Gordon ray-guns for some reason. It cocks with an over-lever, when you open the lever to cock, the barrel pops up for a pellet to be inserted. The barrel is (I think) brass, inside a steel tube. One particularly nice feature is that the cocking link locks out the trigger during cocking, which makes it quite safe. Unfortunately, the spring has been replaced with a weaker one, and someone (?) has apparently filed off the rearsight! Apart from all this, it is a very nice little pistol. I have had to strip it down and rebuild it, as it was quite filthy, having been stored in a garden shed for decades. Les probably fitted the weak spring deliberately so that he could shoot the cats who often came to kill his pet goldfish. This was probably the reason why the pistol resided in the garden shed as well!
The butt of the pistol is a really nice piece of walnut. As you can see from the pictures, it looks good now that I've scrubbed it up a bit. I had to make a new breech seal, I also made a new leather piston washer for it, apart from lubrication, I won't be doing anything else with it. It is difficult to judge the accuracy of the pistol due to the lack of rearsight. Also the lack of power from the mainspring may be adversely affecting accuracy. Still, it looks nice, it is a pleasure to handle, I hope to learn to shoot it accurately one day.
These pistols were made in (I think) the late twenties and thirties, by the firm of Mayer and Grammelspacher (hence Em-Ge), a firm in the town of Suhl in the Thuringia region of Germany. I have no idea of the age of this one, but I am sure that Les told me he bought it new when he was a schoolboy. This is the only foreign airgun in my collection.
Before
After
