Khyber Pass Copy

Copies of British Martini and Snider firearms built in the Khyber region
Copy of Webley Pocket Pistol in .38 S&W, purchased at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.

A Khyber Pass Copy is a firearm manufactured by cottage gunsmiths in the Khyber Pass region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The area has long had a reputation for producing unlicensed, homemade copies of firearms using whatever materials are available – more often than not, railway rails, scrap motor vehicles, and other scrap metal. The quality of such rifles varies widely, ranging from as good as a factory-produced example to dangerously poor.

Models

The most commonly encountered Khyber Pass Copies are of British military firearms, notably Martini-Henry, Martini-Enfield, and Lee-Enfield rifles, although AK-47 rifles, Webley Revolvers, Tokarev TT-33s, Colt M1911s and Browning Hi-Powers have also been encountered. In the United States, a Kalashnikov-style rifle composed of a mix of parts from various style AK rifles is sometimes referred to as a Khyber Pass AK because, like Khyber guns, they are unlike any rifle produced by a factory or issued by a regular military force. The typical example of a "Khyber Pass AK" is a stamped receiver AKM in 7.62x39 caliber, fitted with the triangular folding stock common to Russian AKS-74 rifles.

The Khyber Pass gunsmiths first acquired examples of the various British service arms during nineteenth-century British military expeditions in the North-West Frontier, which they used to make copies. During World War II, some locally organised Irregular Forces were issued Khyber Pass-made rifles – partly for financial reasons and partly because there was concern the troops would steal their rifles and desert if issued higher-quality British or Indian manufactured rifles.[1]

Identification

Khyber Pass rifles are usually copied exactly from a "master" rifle (which may itself be a Khyber Pass Copy), markings and all. It's not uncommon to see Khyber Pass rifles with numerous errors and particular identifying factors, notably:

Afghanistan was a point of conflict between the British Empire and Imperial Russia throughout the 19th Century, from which it is reasonable to assume that tools and expertise relevant to both cultures were accumulated by native gunsmiths. Rather than a translation error, a reversed "N" or "L" in ENFIELD may be the Cyrillic "И" and "Г" characters, with the gunsmith using whatever letter punches he had available.

Ammunition

The ammunition used in the Khyber Pass region is often underloaded, being made from a variety of powders or even old film (which contains nitrocellulose, a key component of smokeless powder); Khyber Pass Copy rifles cannot be expected to withstand the pressures generated by modern commercial ammunition. A few collectors have made extremely mild handloaded cartridges for their Khyber Pass rifles and fired them, at substantial personal risk.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Ian Skennerton, The Lee-Enfield Story (1993). Arms & Militaria Press, Gold Coast QLD (Australia) ISBN 1-85367-138-X
  2. ↑ Jason Atkin. "The Khyber Pass Martini". Martini-Henry Rifles and Cartridges site. Retrieved 2009-07-01.
  3. ↑ Stephen Manning (20 May 2013). The Martini-Henry Rifle. Osprey Publishing. pp. 107–. ISBN 978-1-78096-508-6.

External links