The Thomas Pistol
8/6/2010
One interesting gun that came out of California in the 1970s was the Thomas pistol. The Thomas was a light, mid-sized DAO gun with single-column magazine of .45 cartridges.
For its day, that combination of features made it different. While there are several similar guns on today's market, the Thomas locking system was quite unique. It was a form of retarded blowback that wasn’t really strong enough to contain .45 pressures.
Gripping the gun activated a lever that raised a pair of wedge-shaped blocks into contact with matching, sloped recesses in the slide. There was enough adhesion between the blocks and the recesses to momentarily stop the rearward movement of the recoiling slide.
It was a little like the Blish adhesion locks used on original Thompson Machine Guns. When the slide inertia of firing was overcome, the blocks moved out of the way and the slide cycled. I have never fired one, but admit to being very interested.
Thomas pistols began to develop structural integrity problems (they broke) and they disappeared from the market.
