Top products from r/ForgottenWeapons

I have a No 1 Mk V in the back of the safe. Yours does indeed seem like a bubba or some sort of repair.

If you're looking for parts as of 2010 http://www.efdrifles.com/ had some parts, notably furniture. The owner was quite kind in answering my inquiries. At the time I didn't have the budget to restore the rifle. Now I don't have the inclination.

http://bdlltd.com/ is a regular exhibitor at Knob Creek. He had some parts, again the last real contact was 6-7 years ago.

The book by Ian Skennerton, https://www.amazon.com/Book-Lee-Enfield-Ian-Skennerton-Signed/dp/B006559906, seems to be the most oft cited reference on the rifle.

I've had a heck of a time figuring out value. Selling the rifle outright was tricky. Casual collectors priced it like a Mk III or misidentified it as a No 5. Knowledgable collectors, all very kind to talk shop and share info, noted the missing parts and the difficulty in valuing the somewhat uncommon Mk V.

I've got pics around here somewhere. I'll scrounge those up and see if they help both of us figure out what parts each of us might lack.

I'd be eager to hear any commentary or see any data on value. I know that might be a little gauche to ask about but it's hard to figure out what fair prices on these rifles would be. That valuation directly determines if a restoration is worthwhile.

The movie is a comedic retelling, but the facts are legit. Burton - the author of the book the movie's based on - was a bird colonel who spent over a decade in the procurement machine. And the Bradley was eventually beaten into a functional and very feature capable IFV, so in the end, it was worth it.

There is actually a very detailed recap of the AR-15/M-16 development and procurement in the ak-47 book, I highly recommend it.

Source

https://www.amazon.com/AK-47-Weapon-that-Changed-Face/dp/0471726419

ISBN-13: 978-0471726418, ISBN-10: 0471726419

The SM-90 (also referred to as simply the SM-9) is an interesting machine pistol with a chequered history. These guns first appeared in Guatemala in the late 70s but the manufacturer was seemingly unknown. Later they turned up in the US, marketed by Wildfire Munitions Inc. under the name "SM-90 Phantom" for apparent military and special forces use. There were no legitimate military customers.

Actually, this gun was designed by Vito Cellini and Kenneth Dunn. Cellini was an interesting character. He was born in New York, raised in Italy and drafted into the Italian Army during WWII, but deserted to fight with Allied partisans and became an OSS contact. After the war, he worked with the CIA and became an adviser to the Somoza regime in Guatemala. Kenneth Dunn on the other hand was the CFO of Combat Military Ordnance Ltd., a Georgia-based arms manufacturer that traded under the name Merex. The "Merex" trade name was appropriated from the former firm of Gerhard Mertins, an ex-Nazi gun runner who was an associate of Lt. Col. James Atwood, a dealer in Third Reich memorabilia and massive Germanophile. As it happens, the Combat Military Ordnance company was owned and operated by Atwood and his German wife, who herself was from the Krupp family behind the famous German munitions firm.

Back to the SM-90 - I'm guessing Dunn acted as a middle man between Cellini and Atwood to get this gun into production. It was produced in facilities owned by Atwood, initially in Guatemala but later in the US after the Somoza regime was toppled, and distributed to right-wing militias and drug cartels in Central America such as the Contras. The manufacture and distribution of the SM-90 was most probably funded by the CIA through indirect means. As far as I can ascertain, the brief marketing of this gun in the 80s under the Wildfire Munitions company - apparently for the domestic military and police market - was nothing more than a cheap cover to "legitimize" its production at Atwood's Savannah-based Combat Military Ordnance Ltd.

The gun itself was as basic as they come. It was a straight blowback 9mm machine pistol made from cheap tubular welds. It had a push safety and a rotating foregrip that doubled as an extra mag housing for spare magazines. Some models were fitted with Cellini's patented compensator to reduce muzzle climb. It is interesting to note the similarities between this gun and the MP-2 machine pistol, produced by the International Ordnance Group of Texas, that appeared two years later. The MP-2 was apparently developed by Terry Callahan and I haven't been able to find any connection between him and Cellini.

Atwood died in the late 90s under conditions that some less reliable, conspiracy-laden reports have deemed a CIA hit, but I heard it was just a heart attack. Regardless, he was an incredibly shifty guy who moved in less-than-respectable circles. He used to sell fraudulent Nazi antiques, one of which was a very interesting silenced rifle - the so-called "SDK 9mm carbine" - which purported to be a 1930s Gestapo assassination rifle but was actually just something he concocted with a West German gunsmith in the 1960s. Cellini, on the other hand, is still alive and recently published his biography.