Developing the Boberg XR9

While holding down a full-time day-job, Boberg Arms Corporation founder, Arne Boberg was secretly working on a new-technology cartridge feeding mechanism in his basement machine shop.  Starting in mid-2003, the first XR9 mechanism was designed and built at 4X scale and patterned off the .32 ACP cartridge.  Imagine 4-inch long aluminum dummy cartridges being hand-fed in a vertical fixture the size of an average computer.  Once the bugs were worked out of the scaled model, a small bench-top feeding mechansim was built to fire live ammo.  What was not learned from the hand-drawn scale model was the incredible speed at which the cartridge would travel backward with the slide.  It was very difficult to keep the live cartridges from flying out of the top of the gun.  This must have been what it was like for Mr. Gabbet-Fairfax in development of the Mars Pistol.  Unfortunately for Mr. Fairfax, he did not have access to a high-speed camera nor a CAD system back in 1900.  In early 2004, just as the .32 ACP Boberg feeding mechanism started working well, the announcement of the Rohrbaugh R9 came out, and it was decided to re-design the Boberg feed mechanism to use the 9mm Luger cartridge instead. 

Two 9mm bench rigs were built and tested before an actual grip frame was made for off-hand firing.  By this time 6000 hours of weekends, holidays and vacation time were spent. And it was just starting to get interesting.

The third pistol, the Gen 7 XR9 (with a picatinny rail) was presented at the Las Vegas SHOT Show in 2008.  While there was a lot of interest in this gun, it had only been fired a few times and required a bit of de-bug, so several thousand rounds were run through it and several hundred design changes were made.  A Gen 8 gun was then built, but in the "Shorty" format, and several thousand more rounds were fired, resulting in several dozen design changes. Consolidating all the design changes into the Shorty proved to be a good decision since it would have been very hard to scale down a longer gun, but very easy to make the Shorty longer. While many skeptics thought that fitting a recoil spring into this gun was impossible, there was actually a space for it, but in an unconventional location - along the lower-left corner of the barrel, allowing the spring working length to be virtually the full length of the gun. The newly-styled Gen 9 Boberg XR9-S (Shorty) pistol is the current configuration for 2010 and is being tested while keeping an eye on durability.  So far, no major design changes have been needed, but several changes affecting manufacturability have been implemented.