Sig Hammerli 401

[nutbushuk]

Hi Chaps

As it seems from browsing the forums that my rifle is a bit rare I thought i would put up some info on it for those interested.

My rifle is a Sig Hammerli Mod 401 .177 bought 1979 for 6yard and 10m target shooting, it had been recommended by several at the Cromer club I joined as a beginners i.e. cheaper but quality rifle, worked through my summer holiday to save the money for it.
So it started with diopter sight and within a few months I added the optional Hammerli sleeve barrel weight, which you dont see very often, thought it was a great gun and used for about 5 years, but then motor bikes and girls became more interesting and it got mothballed in the shed.

About ten years after that I briefly joined a local field target club and resurrected the Sig, unfortunately shortly after this it broke its mainspring which destroyed the anti-bear trap, as an engineer I decided to rebuild my now beloved sig and using a maximiser kit from Gunsport for a HW77, replaced the spring with an ox and fitted a turned down PTFE piston seal, unfortunatly no spares available for the anti bear trap and I wasn't that bothered about it anyway so I left it off, refinished the beach stock with a darker stain and a nice oil finish and fitted an adjustable butt plate.

Also removed the front sight and fitted a new turned sleeve to fill the gap at the end of the barrel weight so I could fit a Niki sterling 3-9 x 40 , it was surprisingly good in this configuration although it now had slightly more of a twang on firing it was not off putting. I don't know what the power output is but it seemed slightly better than the original which was quite low.

For the last 15 years its hardly seen the light of day, but now the kids are looking after themselves its nice to get back to my early interest.

Have noticed that the early air arms side levers appear to either be close copies of the Sig Hammerli or use many of the Hammerli components, be interesting to find out if the spares are interchangeable, if so I may have to gas ram my gun.

Below Pics

[stu4483]

Nice peice of kit that.

[Hsing-ee]

The parts aren't interchangeable with the Jackal/Sussex Armoury/AA sidelevers, but I have a Hammerli 403 (401 with the sleeve and the adjustable butt-plate) which I can sell you for spares if you like. It is missing the diopter, the foresight is non-original and the blueing is worn but it is complete. I also have one of the earlier Model 3's if you are interested.

I used a 401 in the early days of FT, and I eventually found one a few months back. I am looking for an original foresight & rearsight elevation wheel.

Power on the 401s and 420s is from 7.5 to about 8.5 ft/lbs in .177. Individual rifle and pellet combos might make 9 ft/lbs, one AGW writer said his did 10.6 but I can't see how that is possible from the small swept volume.

This is an old piece from an old thread...

The Hammerli 420 military-style rifle was produced in the mid 1970s before the Sussex Armoury Jackal. Hammerli is a Swiss company, although I think the factory was in West Germany at this point. Some say that the Jackal is a larger, beefier copy of the design and that some of the early Jackal barrels were made in the Hammerli factory. It is a Hammerli 400 target/sporting rifle in an assault-style stock, not sure why this target gun company decided to make one. Perhaps for the Swiss market? they have a citizen's army so are obliged to practise shooting their G3s and it might be something they could use at home in their gardens/fallout shelters! Anyway, it was reviewed twice in AGW and always did extremely well in the accuracy section, although it wasn't very powerful, about 9 ft/lbs tops. The mythical 'Fred Grimwade' in AGW was a great fan of the wood-stocked Hammerli 401 series in .177 as a HUNTING rifle, he valued accuracy over power and was the first person in the UK to 'come out' and say that .177 was superior to .22 for hunting.

Internally, the 400 series has an extremely long spring (you really need a spring compressor) which is under a great deal of pre-load and which has a long, tightly-fitting spring guide. This gives a very sweet firing cycle and very little recoil or vibration. The chamber does not have a large swept volume, so there is not much room for improving power, but the transfer port and loading tap have little 'dead space' so they are very efficient. According to Hammerli legend, there is a tight choke on the barrel which contributes to its superb accuracy and relative lack of pellet sensitivity. DON'T 'carbine' this rifle, you will lose its excellent accuracy.

The trigger is sweet as they come, although the stamped parts cause the problem of wear if the trigger mounting bolts are not done up tight. It's mechanism employs very long levers which allow a light and crisp action.

The lack of sear engagement is quite common. The trigger unit is held onto the compression cylinder by six or eight tiny allen screws (too small in my opinion) and if these are not tightened up properly then the sear will not engage, or it will only partially engage and then wear the tip of the sear off. The sear itself is a small flat piece of tempered stamped steel with an angle on it, if it is worn out any competent engineer or gunsmith could make one up in 20 minutes for you. The screws holding the trigger unit on should be carefully screwed in, first just finger-tight and then finally with an allen key, doing them in sequence so the pressure is spread evenly, just like when you are fitting a cylinder head on a car engine.

The rifle should have an anti-beartrap mechanism which is quite noisy, you can press down a lever which juts up near the cocking slot and ease the spring down if you need to de-cock, but be careful or you will chop your finger tip off!

The strange drum-style loading tap, with its knurled round knob annoys some people but I soon got used to the one on my 401 and could open it very easily with the left thumb by applying a sort of rolling pressure. Once I got practised I could load and fire it at the same speed as a break-barrel.

The open sights on these rifles comprise the quite nice interchangeable tunnel foresight from the Hammerli 401, which is held on by a bolt squeezing the unit on the muzzle, plus the non-windage-adjustable rearsight from the Hammerli Model 3. But to experience the great accuracy these guns exhibit you need to fit a scope. I seem to remember they have quite wide scope rails, 13mm, the mounts from the older Weihrauchs fitted well.

It's a really nice rifle and I think the only reason they didn't sell well is that they were not '11.9 ft/lbs' which is all anyone ever cared about in those days. There were probably about 100 sold in the UK, most of them with the swoopy stock like the one you are selling, also didn't have dummy magazines and were sometimes black in colour, sometimes green like yours. They are far better rifles than the Sussex Armoury Jackals which were larger British copies of the Hammerli, but as the Jackals were very popular (11.9 ft/lbs!) they allowed Sussex Armouny/NSP Engineering/Air Arms to develop and eventually come up with the TX200 series. Of course the TX is Ken Turners 'perfected' HW77 and owes nothing to the Hammerli in terms of design, but in spirit, the gun you have is the great-grandmother of the TX200!

You can still get mainsprings from Chambers, but other parts are not available. The piston seal is leather so you can make your own, but the design is very simple so you shouldn't need any other spare parts (other than the sear, which can be made up) really.

To answer your question, were they target or hunting, they are really both for the time that they were sold in. They were good hunters up to 35 yards, and they were the same power as most .177 hunter rifles anyway. The BSA Airsporter and Original 50 (which are comparable fixed-barrel hunting rifles of the time) both did about 9 ft/lbs tops in .177, only the BSF and Feinwerkbau rifles were really powerful in .177. Of course it is not a match rifle but it's superb for informal target shooting and plinking. Its a peach!

[nutbushuk]

Thanks for that Hsing-ee

I would be very interested in the 403, and please PM me what you would be looking for, but unfortunately I suspect it may be too rich for my current available funds, two mortgages on two houses to pay at the moment.

However when that clears up later in the year, I am putting together a shopping list for items / projects I want to start, mostly items contempory with the 401. I prefer to refurb myself rather than buy pristine.

list below.

Walther LGR
FWB 300su
Original Mod 66

FWB 65 or 80
Original Mod 10

Original Mod 50
Classic HW35E
AA Mistral, bora or Carmargue