The Baby Auto Mag Story

The latest Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact débuted in 1984 and what an “Impact” it had on some of us. The movie, as you probably already know, starred Clint Eastwood and his new toy, an 8 ½” vent rib .44 Auto Mag. The story was good and the acting was everything you could expect from an Eastwood film. However, Clint’s new star gun was absolutely gorgeous!

Brian Maynard had just started his new job at AMT (Arcadia Machine and Tool, Inc) as a tool room machinist to help AMT tool up for their new .22LR caliber pistol line, the AMT Lightning when the movie came out.

Learning very quickly that the gun, the .44 Auto Mag that shared the spotlight with Clint in this movie, was made by AMT, the company he now works for, Maynard started asking some serious questions. Questions about the gun, the company, history of the two and so on, and so forth. Of course, Brian and a couple of his new found co-worker friends had to go see the movie on the first night of its showing. It was beyond belief! There it was. The gun that AMT made. The .44 Auto Mag, in Clint’s hands.

“I’ve got to have one of those!” was Brian’s immediate response after the show. Upon his return to work the next morning, Brian asked his boss how he could get his hands on a .44 Auto Mag. The response was very bleak. “We don’t make them anymore, and if you found one, it would most likely not be a new one”. Brian was told that he may find a used one out there at a gun show or something but that it would cost him somewhere in the ballpark of $1,500.00 or more”, very pricey for that era.

This was discouraging to say the least. However, after he had resolved himself to the fact that he would not be able to get his hands on an original .44 Auto Mag pistol without it costing him an arm and a leg, his wheels started turning and his imagination started kicking in. As Brian was building the tooling for the new .22 Lightning pistol line, he noticed something very interesting. If you take this pistol, extend the trigger guard, add some ears to the cocking piece, redesign the ejection port, re-contour the barrel and add a vent rib, you’d have an Auto Mag! Well, sort of anyway. It would still only be a .22LR, but it would be as close to an original Auto Mag as he could get. It would be a “Baby” Auto Mag!

So, with the approval of the company, Brian commenced to build, from scratch, a .22LR version of the infamous .44 Auto Mag. He took one of the frames that he had at his disposal for tooling-up purposes and he immediately welded and re-machined an extension onto the trigger guard. This part was quite easy with a little contouring using a rotary table on a standard milling machine. So far, so good and a little exciting.

Next was the ejection port. Brian had just completed work on a piece of tooling to hold the receiver for slab milling the ejection port, as on the Ruger Mark II. He needed an uncut receiver that he could mill out an Auto Mag type ejection port so he grabbed one from the line and started drawing it up. Once he had the dimensions, Brian did the math for tool compensation and milled out the port per his new print. Again, not to difficult. Just a little homework and a little elbow grease and he had it.

The cocking piece was next. Brian really struggled on this one but soon, with the help of his good friend Roger Renner, he came up with an answer to the problem. It was quite simple really, after he had a chance to think about it. Take a casting of an original Auto Mag cocking piece, which he had a box of at his disposal, and just cut off the ears and weld them onto an existing Lightning bolt. Easy on paper, but a harder task to perform. However, a little ingenuity was now necessary for perfecting the idea and Brian soon had it down. Again, with a little math, he came up with the numbers he needed to turn a regular Lightning bolt into a Baby Auto Mag bolt. He turned the ears on the Lightning bolt down to the dimension he determined necessary and machined an angle on the back of the bolt for cosmetic appeal. Brian then turned out two pieces of tooling for this modification. One for milling an inside radius on the ears to match the bolt and another to weld the ears in place. Once welded, he finished the new bolt by machining off the weld and sandblasted the ears. The bolt fit perfectly in his new Baby Auto Mag receiver.

Now it was time for Brian to pull out some serious imagination and couple it with an equal amount of ingenuity. The barrel was not going to be as easy as any of the previously described operations. The original .44 Auto Mag barrels have a compounded contour. That is to say that the barrel is tapered at 0 degrees, 30 minutes of an angle up to a point where it changes to a 3 degree angle. This is going to take some doing. After confiding with Larry Grossman, AMT’s chief engineer, he designed a template to use on a lathe fitted with a tracer attachment. The same one used for the original guns. Once Brian had a barrel blank welded to his receiver, he set the lathe up with his template and turned out the exact compound contour he desired. The barrel was almost finished.

At first Brian thought the rib would be no problem. He came up with some numbers for the towers along with the dimensions he needed for the front sight and rear sight pocket. However, he found himself in a bit of a quagmire when he realized he now needed to match the rib to the contoured barrel while keeping everything flat and straight. Numerous attempts were made to no avail. He was at his first stopping point. Not only was he having trouble matching the radius on the rib to the contour on the barrel, he was also unable to keep everything straight. Again, he confided with Larry about the situation and had the answers he needed to move forward. Everything had to be done to the underside of the rib with minimal repositioning to minimize error. Brian revamped his whole approach and soon had a rib matched to the barrel.

Once the barrel and rib were complete, it was time to weld the two together. Brian built a welding fixture for the operation, set the barrel and rib in the fixture and had the company welder do the welding. Then it was just a matter of finishing the rib once it was welded to the barrel/receiver assy. However, there was a big problem. The welding of the rib to the barrel pulled the barrel up considerably. Sitting the assembly on a granite inspection plate, Brian noticed that the barrel had risen almost one eighth of an inch. This was unacceptable and the whole barrel was scrapped.

It was time to confide in Larry again to see what needed to be done to correct this problem. Larry advised Brian on how they did it for the originals, to make them come out perfectly straight. He would need to completely revamp his welding fixture to such a degree that it would have consistency and repeatability allowing for a perfectly straight barrel, once it was released from the fixture. Brian decided to make a new fixture from scratch, using better materials at tighter tolerances. He now had gages and indicators that told him where he needed to position the barrel for the end result he needed.

Brian had to make another barrel from scratch, using the same techniques he developed with the first barrel. However, now he had the tooling perfected and the operations sound. In a few weeks, he had a Baby Auto Mag in his hands worth bragging about. He immediately went to his boss and others to show off the finished product. They all loved it! But when Brian asked his boss the question “do you think we could market and produce this gun?” The answer was a stern no! His boss didn’t think it was worth the effort and AMT’s CEO Harry Sanford wanted nothing to do with it. In his bosses opinion, it wasn’t really a marketable product while Harry’s approach was that he didn’t want anything to do with it, still having a bad taste in his mouth from the original Auto Mag project that brought many lawsuits and bankrupted him twice. However, they both wanted one for their own collections. Brian ended up making ten in all. One for Harry, one for his boss, one for Larry and so on.

So, Brian called Roger Renner at Guns & Ammo and asked him to stop by when he had a chance and told him he had something to show him. About a week later, Roger showed up and Brian showed him his new “Baby”. Roger fell in love with it and asked Brian to bring it down to the office to show it off. Brian took the next day off and went to Petersen Publishing Company in West Hollywood to visit with Roger and to debut his “Baby” to all the gun scribes. They all loved it and couldn’t believe it was only a .22LR pistol. It just looked “too big to be a .22”.

Roger took Brian out for lunch along with Garry James, Phil Spangenberger, David Arnold and two other writers to discuss the gun and how to approach a story on it. It was determined that the gun deserved at least a “two page, color and spread”. The lunch was adjourned and Brian went on his way. About a week or so later, Brian received a call from Roger asking if he would like to be involved in the “shooting” of the gun. Brian was ecstatic and of course said yes. Roger and Brian went out that next weekend and did the shoot which had very pleasing results.

About a week later, Brian received another call from Roger. This time he asked Brian if he was “sitting down”. Not knowing what was going on, Brian immediately asked, “what’s wrong?” Roger was pleased to advise him that the gun went over so well at the office, they decided to use it for the cover story in the June ’85 issue of Guns & Ammo magazine. Brian was beside himself. Not only was it now a cover story but it was due to be released exactly one year after the Dirty Harry .44 Auto Mag story debuted.

When the issue was released, Brian was mailed ten copies, courtesy of Petersen Publishing. He soon sat down and read the story and he immediately noticed his picture on page 35, not to mention that his name was plastered throughout the article. This was a dream come true for Brian. It started out as a personal project of something he was very passionate about and snowballed into a cover story for a leading international firearms magazine.

Brian personally received many letters from readers asking if the company was ever going to produce the gun. So many letters came in that Harry asked the receptionist to throw them out as they came in. However, the receptionist and Brian were good friends and she secretly saved every one for him. AMT was soon after approached by J&G sales of Arizona, one of AMT’s distributors, requesting the company to manufacture 1000 guns for them and to designate them as sole distributor of the gun. Harry accepted the request and immediately went into production.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering what ever happened to the original scrapped proto-type gun. Brian bought the frame from AMT for $100, marked it “Bruce 1” and gave it to his brother Bruce for a Christmas present. He has it safely locked up and has learned to shoot it with extreme accuracy, in spite of the fact that it shoots about a foot high at 100 yards! No, its not for sale. There is just too much sentimental value in the piece.