.38 ACP Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver

it's a wobbly english in it yeah a wobbly 4's b45 automatic eight shot they don't make them anymore how many going out of it well none because it's 38. hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccollum and i'm here today at morphe's with the one version of webley fosberry we have not previously been able to take a look at this is a 38 caliber webley fosberry automatic revolver and it's really unfortunate that these didn't do better really webley deserved to do much better with this pistol than they actually did this turned out to be a dismal flop so the setting is uh basically 1902 the webley fosberry automatic revolver in caliber 455 webley was introduced by the webley company in 1901 uh it was presented it was used at the 1901 and the 1902 busily shooting championships and it proved pretty darn popular they won a bunch of places a bunch of the you know the first second and third places went to shooters with webley fosberries um but there were a couple problems so right at this time period the boer war was has had ended and so military demand for revolvers had dropped precipitously that was of course a big part of webley's business and that had fallen off in the civilian target market and in the military market as well there was a lot of disruption coming from this newfangled technology of the practical automatic pistol so of course the mauser automatic pistol had been around since 1896 although not in huge numbers this is only five years or so six years after the fact well now there's a new contender and this is john browning and the colt company in the united states manufacturing new 38 caliber automatic pistols that are really making quite a splash this would be the colt 1900 uh colt 1902 and colt 1903 pocket hammer guns all of which were chambered for colts 38 acp or automatic pistol cartridge it was a high velocity flat shooting really a very impressive cartridge for its time and so webley is sitting here looking at well we're not really selling many military revolvers and this automatic is popular but we're losing we're looking at potentially losing ground to new automatic pistols in 38 how about we take our automatic revolver chamber it for that same fancy new high velocity 38 cartridge and released that and this they hoped had the potential to just like swing them straight through the middle of the whole revolver semi-auto argument have a good cartridge like this is the modern tactical high-tech option that in theory should please everyone it's a revolver and an automatic well it turned out to unfortunately please nobody but before we go into that let's take a look at the details of this because there are a couple cool elements to it that you don't see in the 45 caliber version when webley introduced the 38 caliber version of the fosberry automatic revolver they gave it all of the improvements and updates that they had been working on over the course of the previous development of the 455 caliber gun so while early ones would actually use wooden grips many of the later pattern later 38s did use the vulcanite rubber grips like this one does it has some elements to it like the double limb cylinder latch up here in the top the main spring is a coil rather than v spring they are clearly marked on the side 38 automatic with the webley flying bullet logo just for comparison here's what the 455 ones look like and on the top strap of the frame it is marked webley fosberry and we have a serial number on the right side of the frame this is relatively late in production this particular example came from a batch of eight that were made on the 26th of october and 1903 and lastly it is marked on the top of the barrel with the manufacturer p webley and sun london and birmingham well this is an extremely rare pistol unfortunately this particular one has a bulged barrel slightly bulged barrel right there unfortunate but there it is a couple minor differences the cylinder is slightly smaller in diameter than the 455 caliber cylinder the front sight is integral to the barrel instead of being pinned in place like on a 455 caliber version the most substantial difference of course was that the 38 caliber gun held eight rounds where the 455s had only held six now there's a little bit of an interesting detail going on here in that uh 455 is obviously a revolver cartridge with a big rim the 38 acp was intended as an automatic pistol cartridge and it is semi-rimmed which means it has both an extractor groove cut in it and also a small diameter rim that is actually larger than the body of the cartridge semi-rimmed cartridges can work in revolvers and the webley fosberries can be loaded with just standalone cartridges the semi the rim the semi-rimmed uh nature allows it to sit on this section of the chamber wall or the chamber face and still be extracted by the extractor however they also made an eight shot full moon clip that would hold all of the cartridges in place frankly a bit more securely and would hold them all together so that they could be loaded as a single set of eight and that was a fairly novel thing for that time period so you can see the little scalloped uh cut it's almost star-shaped uh in a way that you don't see on most modern full moon and half moon clips now like the 455s of course the the basic action of this is you would [ __ ] the gun when you fire it recoil action is going to cycle the top half of the gun backwards which runs a cam on the outside of the cylinder and it indexes the cylinder one position and it recocks the hammer unlike most revolvers these then have a safety catch which you can engage only when the hammer is cocked which locks the frame in place and it locks the hammer so the gun can't be fired if you are interested in the specific other variations and the development of the webley fosberry i have a couple of good videos on the 455 caliber versions that i would suggest you take a look at production of the 38 caliber webley fosberg revolver began in may of 1903. the gun was formally launched to the public in 1903 the first recorded sale was in july of 1903 and production would continue through the end of january 1904 and by that point the factory had assembled 341 of these revolvers the problem was they hadn't seen that expected big surge of demand in fact there was very little demand nobody wanted these uh it would take them many many years to actually sell off all of those revolvers and in fact they didn't ever manage to sell all of them because the factory went and converted a number of them back to 455 caliber guns just to move them out the door so of those 341 originally produced not even all of them left the factory as 38s which is a little bit odd one would think that webley's plan in this gun was pretty solid like uh the guns five ounces lighter than a 455 it's fast to empty because of course it's it's a top brake revolver so you pop it open and all eight cartridges come out it's fast to reload because you've got those full moon clips much faster than one of the 45 caliber guns unless you want to go out and get you know prado type speed loaders for it it's a great cartridge it's a far better cartridge than 455 webley and yet there's just basically no demand this was just a complete of a commercial failure and i think there are a couple primary reasons why for one thing of course there was zero military interest webley made one sort of half-hearted attempt to get the military into it but the british military was only really looking was only looking for 45 caliber guns specifically 40 caliber and up this is 38 it was just they they rejected it out of hand they weren't even interested in looking and then on the civilian side the pistols act was passed in 1903 in britain which significantly restricted the ability of someone to actually buy a handgun for recreational or self-defense use and so the the potential civilian market that webley had really had in its eye on was heavily chilled by the passage of that legislation and those two things combined together with the relatively high price of the gun this was introduced at 110 shillings at a time when you could get a 38 caliber colt in the same cartridge for 85 shillings and that's a proper semi-automatic um there is some question as to how how beneficial is a an automatic revolver really and i think that that was the final nail in the coffin for the webley fosberry it was the most successful automatic revolver out there but that's a very low bar because these this concept in general was very unsuccessful so that is uh the story of the 38 caliber webley fosberry revolver i should point out before we close that there is one place that this particular gun despite its incredible rarity has really made a splash in pop culture and that is in the maltese falcon where one of the gentlemen is shot by what is described very specifically as a 38 caliber webley fuzzberry automatic revolver so i think what little is uh recognized about these guns in general culture is largely due to uh daschle hammond and the maltese falcon anyway hopefully you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 145,321

Rating: 4.9778152 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, 38 app, .38, 38, Webley, Fosbury, automatic revolver, semiauto revolver, rare, scarce, collector collectible, 455 Webley, Dashiell Hammett, maltese falcon, sam spade, revolver, pistol, handugn, ww1, target, army, military, competition, Bisley, moon clip, speedloader, 8-shot

Id: XzOm66SNmvo

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020