Sorry for the delay but the phones were down and so was the net!
OK.
Mack The Knife, I'm afraid I cannot take a pic of this French-made air pistol that is much older than me, at the moment as I am away from my home in Paris, and from France. I will be back in November and I shall post pics then.
In the meantime, I can say that this is the rarest post WWII air pistol I have ever seen in years.
It is an all-steel construction with black bakelite grips that gives it a Webley air pistol look overall, but it uses the trigger guard-come-cocking lever for compressing air inside the chamber located at the top with the barrel above it Webley-style. Rear and front sights are pretty high allowing the shooter to keep the pistol lower than usual.
It is inscribed “MANUFACTURE DES ARMES DE ST. ETIENNE Model 1950”-ish, I can’t recall the exact year, with a Seral Number below the inscription and a finely polished blueing that is almost 100%!
Its power is adjustable in countless levels from very-very low (my hand can almost catch a pellet!) to something like ~2 Joules max. I’ll have to CHRONY it to find out for sure. It suffices to say that the maximum power setting is enough for punching through an alu Coke can @ 10m, through-and-through but just.
At 33 feet all bullet holes touch…The power is adjusted from a large screw above the grips that increases or decreases the pressure of the breech seal against the .177 cal. barrel. The more pressure the breech seal has the more powerfully it shoots and the harder it gets at cocking. The low power is achieved by turning the screw anti-clockwise until the bbl bearly touches the breech seal.
This is great fun as I was trying to puncture a thin piece of paper @ 10m (33 feet) in LOW power and the pellet bounced off without going through! It recochets a lot, though, at low power, although accuracy remains the same at 10m as in the FULL power setting that tears through 10 pages of a Phone directory with H&N Final Match pistol (dark blue tin can) 7.0 grains pellets. Steel-core Prometheus and Dynamics create more penetration, but accuracy suffers. Also, RWS Meisterkugeln (yellow tin) 8.2 grains (the latess of mine weigh 8.3 grains) pellets shoot perfectly. Yet, the top pellet for this strange postol with its square barrel (not round), is the vintage GEVELOT 8.2 grains waisted pellets, of which I have just one full ~500-count tin (it’s a collector’s item, but I run a few through this French pistol in order to attest it’s potential, which is tip top).
As soon as I get to photograph it I shall let you know.
Mehul,
What is a Mat 49
The writer and poet Nikos Kazanzakis (of Zorba The Greek fame) came from Herakleio (Mid-East Crete), but I was born in Chania (Western Crete). In all honesty I am not acquainted with anything bigger than .22 Long Rifle! I prefer airguns and I shoot .22 rimfire competitively for a few years. I must be amongst the tiny minority of those owning a firarm legally
but I prefer it that way.
Grumpy,
I am from Greece but I live in Paris for nearly 20 years. My Walther LP53 is a pre-1970 model with the curved receiver rather than the straigh back one, which makes it a desirable variation. It requires a lot of practice from a shooter to use accurately, but a few thou pellets later I am hitting Coke-size targets at 40 meters (offhand of course) with Geco 7.0 grains and H&N Final Match 7.56 grains pellets.
Cheers to all,
Nikos
I am writing from Europe.
And you live in one of the most enthusiastic gun owning parts of the world. 
I must have used a case, but aiming was happenschance.