Bottom drawer oddities. Number 4. Koma LDP3 One of the worst air pistol designs?

[ccdjg]

One of the pistols found in my clearout of bottom drawer to-do project guns was this Koma LDP3. These German pistols are almost unknown over here but are quite well known in Germany, and if you have ever shot one you would wonder why they ever got manufactured in the first place. It must be up there as one of the worst air pistol designs, but even so they are quirky and interesting, and are a must for box-ticking spring air pistol collectors like me. This particular example was in dire need of a new piston seal, but now that I have fixed it I and put a few pellets through it, I thought some of you might like to know what you have been missing all your lives.







The Koma LDP3 was introduced onto the market by the German company Koma-Werk in 1950 and it was available over a period of about 8 years, and even survived a change of company name in 1955, when it then became known as the Voere LDP3. Interestingly the only other air pistol made by Koma/Voere was the LDP4, a much bigger affair and in my opinion, not one of the worst air pistol designs but THE worst design ever. But that’s another story.

The LDP3 consists of a steel tube cylinder inserted into a hardwood stock that is bored right through to accommodate it. Naturally the wood around the cylinder is very thin on the sides and on top and as you might expect is prone to splitting. Not a good design feature. The rear sight is crude, and is made from the cylinder securing bolt with a notch filed in its hexagonal head.





The gun is cocked by pulling out the rear knob until the sear engages as shown here:








Then the muzzle cap is unscrewed to allow the barrel to be removed.






The pellet or dart is inserted into the barrel and barrel unit then screwed back in place. One interesting feature of this pistol is that the cocking rod is hollow and telescopes over an inner rod connected to the piston. This means that the cocking plunger can be pushed back into the pistol when it is cocked and you don’t have the trauma of the plunger shooting forwards on firing. So the gun in the cocked and ready-to-fire state looks as in picture 1.

This is the piston/ cocking rod unit with the spring removed.






Now on the surface the telescoping plunger seems like a good idea but the reality is that it is pretty much counterproductive. For this telescoping action to work you can only compress the spring about half of the length of the cocking rod.

When you start the cocking action the outer cocking plunger tube is loose and comes out 2 cm before it engages with the inner rod and starts to compress the spring. When fully cocked the rod is 5 cm out so that in reality the spring has only been compressed by 3cm. This is less than for a typical push-barrel pistol of similar length. A Harrington Gat for example has a compression stroke of just over 5cm. Admittedly the cylinder diameter of the LDP3 is larger than a typical push-barrel but it still does not make up for the reduced cocking stroke. The narrower Harrington Gat for example has a swept volume of 13 cc in comparison with only 10 cc for the LDP3.
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So how does this pistol perform?

Well I started off by grasping the knurled knob of the cocking rod and pulling the rod out until it came to a stop. I then yanked on the plunger and heaved until I heard the sear engage. This required quite a Herculean effort as, boy, was that spring strong for its size! I was glad that the cocking stroke was only 3 cm. I then pushed the plunger back into the housing and unscrewed the muzzle cap to remove the barrel. Laying the cocked gun down on the table I then inserted a waisted pellet into the barrel breech (the pellet had previously been sized by pushing it through the barrel with a rod). After searching for the cocked gun, which seemed to have walked since I last placed it down, I picked it up and tried to screw the barrel back into the gun. I say tried, as the screw thread is on the end of the barrel rather than on the muzzle cap and you have to line up the barrel end with the threaded hole in the cylinder head down at the bottom of the barrel housing before the threads engage and this is fiddly. In fact while doing this the pellet fell out of the breech into the barrel housing twice and it took three goes and more than three curses to get the barrel and pellet safely in place. Feeling proud with my achievements, I lined up the cocked pistol with the aperture in my chrony and squeezed the trigger. There was quite a loud crack as the gun jumped surprisingly violently, probably because of the harsh trigger pull and the light weight of the frame. In eager anticipation I looked at the chrono read out. It registered a magnificent 75 fps! A couple more goes showed no improvement. I followed the chrono test with another using a Harrington Gat and a similarly sized pellet, and this gave an average reading of 170 fps. ‘Nuff said. The LDP3 is going back into the main collection as a non-shooter.

I wonder how many German kids were put off airgun shooting for life after being given one of these for Christmas?

The only question that remains is why did this gun remain on the market in Germany for 8 years?

[magicesperanto]

What a great review.

And what a truly awful design of pistol, or is that pisstol?

[Geezer]

One of ccdjg’s other great write-ups:


https://forum.vintageairgunsgallery....r-pistol-ldp4/

“This break-barrel pistol is identical to the Koma LDP4, and can only be distinguished from it by the impressed logo on the grip. The Koma was made by Koma Werk, Germany, from about 1950 up to1955, when the company underwent a name change and the trademark Voere was introduced. The renamed pistol was then sold up to about 1970. It is arguably the worst air pistol design ever: the short barrel makes cocking very difficult and the sharp unprotected foresight compounds the problem; the breech seal system is inefficient; the sight base is even shorter than that on the Tell 2 pistol; the slab sided grip is both ugly and uncomfortable. It is surprising that the gun managed to remain on the market for so many years."

That thing looks truly awful. A cut-down tinplate rifle action on a horrible grip.

[cinedux]

but the Voere pistols were handled by hardware stores in NZ. I remember buying one of the break-barrel ones in the 1970s.....

[Shed tuner]

The safety aspects are pretty horrific too.. screwing the barrel back in to the cocked gun.. as soon as the barrel is engaged on the threads, you have your fingers at the business end of a loaded gun. On the plus side, the woeful power output somewhat mitigates the chance of serious injury.