Last week I received this body in the mail which I had thought was a raw CCM S5 body. The standard CCM Series 5 back block lines up nicely and the feed neck area looks similar as well with a round top and post 2k front block/banjo hole.
This body lacks a serial number, doesn’t have a sight rail and uses a ball detent instead of the wire nubbin detent that appears on all Series 5s.
Above you can see the video of stripping this body down. After removing the non stock parts I didn’t find a serial anywhere which made me a little unsure whether it was a CCM body or not?
After a little more research and digging around online, I found a post on mcarterbrown by Bill “CCMachinist” Holstein, current owner of CCM. In the thread, Bill is responding to questions about these Pre CCM/Non CCM style raw bodies and writes that he did the machining on these bodies before he owned CCM and these weren’t technically sold as CCM bodies.
Bill writes, in response to a questions about these non serialized bodies:
“That was a body I sold [from] 2001-2003? All CCM S5 guns at that time had the site rail. It was a S5 with no sight rail and was just sold as a raw non-ccm body. A few people wanted threaded detents instead of the wire.
I did not put the ccm logo on those bodies.
If I recall there were no serial #s.”
Find this post at:
http://www.mcarterbrown.com/forums/ccm/154766-list-rare-ccms-7.html#post1743359
Later in the same thread, Bill goes on to answer more questions about these bodies and estimates their production at 50 to 100 total:
“I made parts for CCM at the time. They didn’t sell raw bodies. I cut the site rail off so people wouldn’t confuse them as being CCM.
But now that I am CCM I can say they were the same.”
I’m assuming Bill was making CCM parts for Jason Chipley at the time and made these bodies that took standard ball detents as another product he could offer. Chipley didn’t use the bodies so at the time they were not actually CCM. But as Holstein write, he now owns CCM so they are part of CCM’s history and were somewhat made by CCM.
I’ll be keeping this body and selling the parts I removed from it. The body will eventually be rebuilt with CCM parts into as a CCM Autococker or a CCM pump.
