Argentina's Open-Bolt Pocket .22s: the Hafdasa HA and the Zonda
Semiauto Pistols
•
11m
Originally made by Hafdasa (Hispano-Argentina Fábrica de Automóviles S.A.), the HA pistol is a .22 Long Rifle caliber, semiauto only, open bolt pocket pistol. It was produced in the 1950s, right at the end of Hafdasa's existence (coincidence?). When the firm shut its doors, a group of employees took the basic design, improved it in a few ways, and creased a new company called Armotiv SA to produce it under the name Zonda.
The Zonda has a floating firing pin instead of the HA's fixed one, and a creative safety machinist which simply cams the magazine down when engaged. As an open-bolt gun, if the magazine is too low for the bolt to pick up a cartridge, it cannot fire.
Both the HA and Zonda are quite rare today, as not many were originally made or sold.
Up Next in Semiauto Pistols
-
W+F Bern P43: A Swiss Take on the Bro...
In 1940, Switzerland began a series of trials to replace their Luger service pistols with something equally high quality, but more economical. They had squeezed as much simplification out of the Luger as they could in 1929, and by this time the guns just needed to be replaced. The first 1940 tria...
-
W+F Bern P47 Experimental Gas-Delay P...
The Swiss were the first country to adopt a self-loading service pistol; the Luger in 1900. They would keep those in service clear through World War 2, at which point they began seriously looking for a more economical and more modern replacement. During the 1940s, a number of experimental designs...
-
Development of the SIG P220, aka the ...
The SIG 210, aka the P49, was a magnificent pistol, but really too expensive for a modern military sidearm. In the 1960s, the Swiss military began looking for a new service sidearm that would be a bit less costly, and SIG developed the 220 in response, which would ultimately be adopted as the P75...
