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"Veritable Express" - Garate Anitua y Cia. Spanish made, 1920s.

8K views 27 replies 11 participants last post by  Caledonian 
#1 ·
I picked this little guy up and was not able to find too much information on it. I found a link talking about a .25acp (mine is in .32acp)with the same name and the following:

"Veritable Express" - Garate Anitua y Cia. Spanish made, 1920s.

I cleaned it up and had a question on the serial numbers all of the parts I see had 08 but it may be 80 and the serial number on the slide is 2858. So was wondering what was up with it. What does something like this run for in 2016? Wonder if I bought too early ;o) Do people shoot these? This one while dirty on the inside (now clean) functions great (not shot yet) and the bore looks great. Are there books that cover these Eibar pistols? I am guessing this was made after the Ruby jackpot that the region had during WWI.

TIA,
Kevin

 
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#2 ·
The 08 # is probably the assembly number. These were assembled in batches and hand fitted.

It is a pretty nice looking piece ! As long as it functions and looks serviceable then limited shooting should be OK.

Ivan shoots his little collection of "ruby" types sometimes. Your's is unique because of size. Most .32s were 9 shooters (or more).

Value ? $150-250 depending on location and who wants it.
 
#3 ·
Made post WWI and between 1920 and 1936 when Franco shut down all but 4 gun makers. I would shoot it just to make sure it shoots but it is not a range toy. Any parts will have to come from a donor gun and the odds are very high they will not be " drop " in parts, they will have to be fitted. Magazines for the Eibar pistols are very iffy , If yours works properly then you have good kama.
 
#4 ·
Well my karma may not be too good. Pull trigger no bang to I was thinking new spring well I need a firing pin/striker. Any leads on one would we great but I did talk to the seller and I have some options. He is going to give me a couple of his parts guys and see if we can fix it or I may have to send it back but I kind of like it. Thanks for any leads the board can provide.

Kevin
 
#8 ·
I see you are in Dallas. Stop by Lee's Gun Parts in Irving, with the pistol, he will drum something up. These firing pins are real easy to fix, Lee like to turn these one piece pins into two piece pins, your back end of the pin is visible in the one photo, ease out the retainer pin, and the pin slides out. You will see the break. You can cut/file down the front end ahead of the notched area that controls the pin movement in conjunction with the retaining pin, and place the front end of another pin there. I did this with a GECADO trademark Ruby much like your own.

I am collecting info on these pistols for a book. Would you mind sharing the serial number with me? Thanks, and if you can't fix it and have no interest in it any more, please let me know.

Thanks,
Bob A. Ft Worth.
 
#17 ·
Bob,

Yes you may use my Serial Number in your book. (It is listed in the first post) I am north of Dallas maybe we meet and shoot these someday.

I would like to also do a shout out to the seller of my gun who when hearing of my broken firing pin gave me several options to come to a good solution. Larry Eisel (AKA Gray Blanket) A+ for me.

Thanks for all the help on this one.

Kevin
 
#9 ·
I also have one of these pistols that I bought a few weeks ago. The pistol is missing the magazine and I am not having any luck finding one. I sent a pm to the o.p. asking for magazine dimensions but haven't received a reply. It would be very helpful searching for a magazine to have the magazine dimensions.

Here are a few pics of my pistol.
 
#10 ·
Your pistol, branded an Express, was not made by Garate but bears the dragon grips of Tomas Urizar. These tradenames and manufacturers are very mixed up and complicated. What this means is that I'm not sure the pistol you see above and your pistol were even made by the same factory. They were both sold by Garate but Garate outsourced many of their semi-autos even though they had one of the largest arms factories (and a true factory) in Eibar. Most of their production was revolvers.

Your best bet for a mag is to just keep trying ANY six shot Ruby/Eibar style magazine, you will find one that fits. There were workshops that made only magazines and many producers outsourced parts, including magazines, so your pistol will feed with other magazines made during that era, it will just be trial and error.

The rough measurements will be 3 3/8 long along the back spine, 3/8 wide, and an inch from front to back, but the height of the extractor, which acts as the upper limit of the magazine travel, and the width and length of the magazine well will have minor differences and you just have to try it.

By the way, could you please share the serial number of your pistol, and the slide legend, I can't read it in the picture.

Thanks,
Bob
 
#11 ·
Thanks for the magazine info. I heard from the OP last evening and he said he will send me the mag dimensions. I can use all the info I can get.

I was under the impression that the pistol was made by Garate for Tomas Urizar. Pistols of the World references Urizar as a distributor that purchased pistols from Garate and Manufacture de Armes de Grande Precision. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Handguns lists Express as made By Garate for Urizar. It seems that I become more uncertain about these pistols the more research I do.

The slide legend on my pistol is

"VERITABLE EXPRESS" FOR THE 7.65 CARTRIDGE
THE BEST AUTOMATIQUE PISTOL EXPRESS

The serial # is 3190.
 
#16 ·
OK I pulled the pistol out to put that slide on with complete firing pin (Thanks Bill) and pulled the mag.

The mag (also see photo) is nickel color while the rest of the pistol is blued. There does look to be some "work" done at the bottom of the mag so I do not know if this original or a gunsmith made replacement. The work original or replacement look like quality work. For the measurements:

From the highest metal on the top side down the center of the side of the mag bisecting the holes to the mid point of the bottom is 3"
From front to back along the side is 1"
When looking at the mag plate at the bottom the back AND the front (prior to the finger extension) is 13/32"

Good luck
Kevin

BTW I did see this active auction for a 3K which I assume is Triple K for that pistol. I have no ties to this Auction just passing on information.

http://www.gunbroker.com/item/596613752
 
#14 ·
Well I hate to bash the work and word of others, but in regards to Spanish pistols, you would be best served to take Hogg and Walter with a grain of salt, and verify everything they write on the subject. Garate was a large manufacturer but also was involved in a catalog sales business, much like GECO and AKAH in Germany. Their distributor in the US was Garate Trocaola & Lemes, Inc. I attach a copy of the catalog cover, and an illustration from that catalog that Matthews used in his book. You see it was Garate selling a Urizar made pistol, not the other way around. Urizar was a manufacturer, not a distributor. They had contracts to make Atlas pistols for Domingo Acha y Cia, Continental for Thieme y Edeler (these were the famous German distributors in Eibar, later owned SEAM), Imperials for Hijos de Jose Aldazabal, Princeps for Fab D'Armes de Grande Precesion (Another name you mention, this was a large distributor that made zero pistols, but contracted with many Eibar makers and sold them with their name on the slide) and many other pistols.

I also attached a small article from the NY Times concerning the Garate distributor, sorry for the poor resolution. Thank you very much for sharing the serial number and slide legend.

Bob

 
#19 ·
Kevinofborg, I too have the same pistol but I'm missing the safety/slide stop. If you get a chance can you measure the diameter of the round portion of the part and the length? Mine is actually in .380acp caliber and seems to be hand stamped with the caliber change.
 
#20 ·
wow its looking like your the first in 2 1/2 years I myself have the Veritable "EXPRESS" FOR THE 7.65 CARTRIDGE below that it has THE BEST AUTOMATIQUE PISTOL "EXPRESS" it is a 9rd magazine also on the left side and slide it has a fletched arrow over P.V over X over crown over double headed eagle over ER. I have been trying to get al the info I can about this pistol also a second magazine for it most of the ones I have been finding are over 3/8" thick and mine is just under 3/8" thick
 
#22 ·
In 1936 I doubt that Franco could shut down anything because that precise year the Spanish Civil War began. At the beginning of the conflict Franco wasn't the Leader, he was just a prominent General in charge of the Army settled in the by then Spanish African Colonies. He raised in Arms against the Communist Republic along with other Generals, some of them of higher rank that himself. He climbed his way up, and became elected "Generalisimo" by all the other Generals of the National Army, in 1939, shortly before the war ended.
 
#24 ·
AB Zhuk's book of hand-drawn handgun pictures includes a staggering variety of these Spanish small pocket pistols. Some. probably, were always good, and Garate Anitua was a reputable maker. But the worst. from a complex of small workshops, were irreformably bad, far worse than bottom-of-the-market Belgian, which was subject to reliable proof testing. Even in the Khyber district they were dealing with customers who took a terrifying view of product liability, and knew where they lived.

General Hatcher wrote that soon after the Great War you could buy a pistol for $2.50, which he apparently considered no bargain. But in recent years, writing in 1934, he says there had been a great improvement in materials and workmanship. It might have been that the extremely repressive military governments of 1923-34 helped bring this about, by cutting down on the civilian market for cheap pistols.

Spanish politics might have been more inept and violent than would do for us, but it wasn't simple. In 1934 King Alfonso III, who seems to have had something the matter with him, gave up permitting them to govern by decree, and abdicated in favour of a republican government. Communism wasn't strong in Spain at that point, despite the recent right-wing government, as in Cuba and Vietnam, methodically campaigning for it. But in war, and especially the kind where surrender was so often fatal, you take help where you have to. Both sides committed atrocities on a grand scale, but there is no doubt that the Nationalists did it more and sooner, and the Repulican cause was lost before it was predominantly communist. George Orwell the novelist had the good luck to be in hospital in Barcelona in 1937, when his Marxist militia was mostly liquidated in a coup by the Stalinist communist faction.

Hitler seems to have a genuine desire to save Mussolini from his own failings, but detested and despised Franco. He had come better out of Spain's Rif war than most senior officers, but how hard is that in the greatest defeat ever inflicted on the First World by the Third. with the dead three times outnumbering all the Rifs in the field, and Alfonso the idiot saying afterwards "Chicken meat is cheap"? A friend of mine, a former British Army sergeant-major, saw the Spanish guardia civil shooting a suspected smuggler in the 1950s, and not even going to check how dead or how guilty he was.
 
#25 · (Edited)
Caledonian, not pretending to offend but you had read the wrong books. Recent historians had altered the reality of the outcome and development of the Spanish Civil War, to make the Republicans look like Saints and the Nationals look like the worst, cruel MF's ever to walk this world.
Not so. In fact those "adorable" Republicans, NEVER won the elections, that were won by the right wing party CEDA. Instead they start revolting in the street and assesinating every political oponent, ( such thing is a comunists tradition ... look what Lenin and Stalin did in Russia, and others did in China and N. Korea ... ).
The adorable and nice guys commies, started assaulting convents and killing and violating nuns and monks, also burned thousands of churches. They instituted political prosecution and assassination , ( executions ), to a level never seen before, even worse than the French Revolution. If somebody reported his neighbor as being "non revolutionary" , they will get him and kill him, usually after days of terrible torturing. To be non revolutionary it was enough to be Cristian, or even own a book.

So ... no. To be honest, the ones that were the most cruel and devilish beasts to ever live in this world were the comunist republicans. They killed much more than the Nationals, much, much, very much more. I can give you exact numbers if you want, but you will be surprised.

True that after the war the Guardia Civil was terrible. They still are, ( but not to that degree ). The king that resigned was Alfonso XIII.

True also that before the war there were lots of gunmakers in Eibar with awful quality ... but not all. There were also grwat gunmakers. But such thing not only happened in Spain. Official proof houses were stablished in most European Countries for that reason.
 
#26 ·
You have to search pretty hard among fake historians to find support for anything you say there. It is always a good idea to trace individual historians online, and see how they stand up to peer review and are supported by reputable publishers. There were few innocents, adorable people or wise statesmen in Spanish politics, but the true situation and events accepted by genuine historians remains pretty much what is given here. Even those grossly disparate murder figures don't take account of deaths by starvation, or in most people's figures those which took place in peacetime, up until the 1950s. :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War


The Republicans certainly did win elections. When Alfonso abdicated in favour of a republic he called municipal, not national eections, in which the Republic gaining control of all the major cities. Franco's coup was a reaction to their gaining control of the national government in the 1936 elections. I lived in Spain while there were a lot more old people who remembered the war, and over and over again I heard them say that the Republican atrocities were spur of the moment hysteria, but the Nationalist ones were adjustment of the kind of population they wanted.

It has been suggested that the presence of the Astra factory was the main reason for the bombing of Guernica. But it is unlikely that the Condor Legion were capable of hitting anything smaller than a civilian population. The workforce had been almost universally anarchist-syndicalist (i.e. trade unionist), and Señor Unceta had left his company and joined the rebels. Thereafter they supplied the Republican forces until a rebel takeover on the ground, and then the Nationalists. But most of the workforce probably escaped to new arsenals in Barcelona, where they produced pistols and submachine-guns which probably conformed better to peacetime quality standards. Other quality companies may have followed the same pattern. But Franco, although he was late in reaching the Basque region, couldn't afford to continue small-workshop production, which offered such opportunities for an official and an unofficial output.
 
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