Info. gathered from an article in this month's Small Arms review on the history of the West Hurley Thompson.
As some of you may know, the West Hurley Thompson's are inferior but transferable versions of the famous Thompson SMG. Considered an entry level SMG in the US because of the price tag sometimes less than $10K as opposed to $20K and up for a real ordnance manufactured Thompson.
It is generally believed that these WH guns will only run well, if all the WH parts are replaced with original parts leaving only the WH receiver.
However, as time goes by these guns are becoming collectable in their own right, as the number of civilian transferable pre-1986 SMG's is finite.
The history of the gun goes back to the 1960's and 70's when there were a lot of Thompson parts available, in fact the first guns were almost all original parts, but, as the parts dried up however, WH started subcontracting out to have the parts produced, often to varying degrees of quality.
The reason this is interesting to folks on this board, is that one of the subcontractors for parts was the Model Gun Corporation of Japan, they used MGC sights, butt stock slide groups and other parts in their real SMG's.
So your $10K WH Thompson SMG could have a bunch of MGC modelgun parts on it, interesting no.
So the next time someone says your MGC Thompson is OK, but not really like the real thing, you can theoretically tell him it does indeed, include real gun parts.
Pic ture is not mine - but it is a nicely remanufactred WH SMG.
Fri Oct 21, 2011 4:25 pm
Thanks very much for posting this JJ
