6mm Navy Straight Pull: The 1895 Lee Navy Rifle

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company taking a look at a beautiful 1895 lee navy rifled it is in their upcoming September of 2019 premiere auctions now I haven't talked about the Lee Navy before which I really should have because it's a really interesting and unusual system so the backstory on this we have we have two parts so first off this was developed designed and developed and patented by James Paris Lee who is probably best known or ought to be best known for inventing the detachable box magazine which he did back in the 1870s late 1870s huge monumental development in firearms history however he went on to do a lot of other things he'd been working with Remington fairly extensively Remington manufactured the Remington Lee rifles which made use of his box magazine and were eventually turned into the Lee rifles of the British military and Remington actually manufactured some of the very first prototypes of the LeMay V rifle that would be used in maybe trials but we'll come back to Remington in a little you know in a few minutes the Navy itself in 1894 head was still using the trapdoor Springfield rifle single-shot 45 caliber black-powder totally obsolete at this point you know where most of the modern militaries in the world are using like mousers if they're not using mousers they're using lapels they're using smokeless powder modern small bore rifles and the Navy is not so looking at its various requirements the neat it comes up with at this point actually a very modern cartridge the 236 Navy cartridge six millimeter and it was originally designed to fire 135 grain bullet at 2500 feet per second which may not sound like a lot to us now but that's a pretty zippy little round in 1894 this is a round that has relatively high penetration which is important to the Navy because of course a lot of times they're gonna be shooting through ships this was a cartridge that they plan to use in a rifle and a machine gun they ended up adopting the colt 1895 in 236 or 6 millimeter lean Navy and having designed this cartridge they then set out a request for proposals of rifles and this one out to industry Arsenal's gun well not Arsenal's but firearms companies private inventors anybody who was interested could submit a rifle to the Navy trials and their first trial in fact had a whole bunch of different submissions Remington submitted five different guns Lee submitted his early prototype of this there was a doe to Tao and there were a bunch of other small-scale inventors who submitted rifles to that trial ultimately three of them came through is good enough for the second trial and those three were the Lee Navy the Lee here a burst rifle and a Luger rifle interesting that the Luger rifle actually shows up in these trials and remarkably it does really well however Luger had not chambered it for the six millimeter Navy cartridge he chambered it for his own proprietary six millimeter rimless cartridge and the Navy needed it to run in a vert cartridge that was one of their basic requirements for the rifle and so they requested that he redesign it or you know modify it to use their cartridge and resubmit it for the third round of testing he declined to not entirely sure why at this point something I need to look into more at any rate Luger didn't submit a rifle to the third trials the Durst rifle that had done well enough to get into the second trials kind of blew up a little bit and fractured its receiver in the second trials and basically that left the Lee rifle as the last man standing and it was formally adopted as the model 1895 US Navy rifles so let's take a look at exactly how this thing works because it not like most straight polls all right well start by taking a look at the markings up here USN US Navy of course a naval anchor serial number and NCT this is Nathan C twining and he was the navy inspector who approved this rifle there are a couple different inspector markings that you'll find over a time period of the various naval adoptions so serial number wise this is a fairly early one the initial order was for 10,000 of these rifles and those were provided those were manufactured and then delivered in late 1896 through the mid spring of 1897 there was some time the Navy changed a few things took some time to get production up and running at Winchester and anyway first 10,000 delivered by May of 1897 there was a fire in the New York Navy Yard that resulted in a bunch of guns being damaged and a bunch of them also destroyed and those were repaired and replaced in 1897 32 98 and then there was a second contract for another 5,000 guns that was placed in January of 1898 so what's interesting about this is the serial numbers the first Navy contract was one through 10,000 the second Navy contract was actually 15,000 through 20,000 and then that batch in the middle from 10 to 15,000 were Winchester commercial guns so some of them are in military configuration some of them were replacements supplied to the Navy to replace destroyed rifles from that fire and some of them were in sporting rifle configuration so that's the the serial numbers are not necessarily well serial numbers are a little bit odd on the side here we have the manufacturers mark this is Winchester Repeating Arms Company I did mention that there was a bit of a problem with Remington and Winchester Remington had traditionally worked fairly closely with James Paris Lee and Remington had made the prototypes for this rifle well in 1888 Remington had some serious financial trouble and Winchester actually bought about a 50% of Winchester bought a 50% stake in the Remington company this would have apparate shortly after this rifle these rifles were produced in part because Winchester was able to snag this contract out of Remington's hands by being the low-cost bidder for it and Remington kind of suspected that they used inside information that they had because of their connection to Remington in order to beat Remington's bid it was a little bit ugly but this of course became known as the winchester lee navy model 18 five all right now the operating mechanism this is actually a tilting bolt rifle so we have a bolt handle here which is locked because the striker is cocked you can see this little tab coming back that was done deliberately so that if you had the rifle in battery and you accidentally bumped it you wouldn't bump the thing out of battery so one side drive fire now I can open the bolt by lifting this lever and you kind of you pull the lever backwards but because it's pivoting here and it's got this cam up here what it's actually doing is lifting the bolt vertically up because this is a tilting bolt lifting it up is going to disconnect the bolt from its locking shoulder and then we can cycle it backwards and it's got this interesting floating extractor mechanism in there so when the bolts closed and in battery the extractor is of course underneath the rim of the cartridge when you open the bolt it comes all the way back to right here before the extractor actually catches and starts pulling the cartridge out of the chamber that lets you get a little velocity to make sure you can extract the empty case it then comes back it's going to stop there there's a little spring detent for it because when you actually when you cycle the bolt forward to chamber a new round it's going to move forward with the bolt until it right there then the extractor stops the bolt head has picked up a new cartridge it's going to push the cartridge up on to the extractor like that and then chamber it now I'm going to take the bolt out in a moment but first I want to point out that there's another interesting element to this which is the N bloc clip that it uses in addition to inventing the detachable box magazine James Lee also invented an N block style of clip now it's interesting that he did this basically simultaneously with Mon liquor and the two didn't know about each other's work Lee's clip is such that you it looks very much like a stripper clip you load a clip of five rounds into the magazine to the gun you kind of give it a second push and when you chamber the first round the clip falls out the bottom of the Matt with mana liquors clip the clip was actually an integral part of the feed system and it provided the feed lips and the clip didn't come out of the gun until the last round was chambered this was actually viewed as really kind of the best of both worlds by at least one army commission that looked at it because you could load this as us with a single packet of ammunition all at once nice and quickly however the clip was not an integral part of the feed system you could also load this one at a time the feed lips are built into the receiver not into the clip so the LEAs clip as far as I know didn't appear in any other production rifles and it's kind of a really interesting system anyway now we can go ahead and look at one of the other controls and we'll pull the bolt out so we have three different things going on on the side of the rifle here this one is the safety you lift it up to save the rifle this is the bolt release which allows you to take the bolt out of the gun by pushing out and down that so in this position the bolt can come out and then this is actually well it's also a bolt release because the bolt cannot open when firing pin is cocked you need some way to be able to open it if you've got a round chambered but you don't want the fire and that's this button so if I push this down it pops the bolt out of battery and allows me to open it and remove the chambered round with this open and the bolt release down I can just slide the bolt right out of the gun and there you see one of the issues that this had in the field which is the extractor is not actually physically connected to the bolt in any way so the extractor just sits right there on the side of the bolt and as long as it's in the rifle it can't go anywhere and can't fall out but when you take the bolt out that falls off a little spring here riveted on to it to keep it tensioned out against the cartridge if we look at the bolt here this is the striker and firing pin just currently in its four position under spring tension so we're gonna leave that alone notice that the handle here is connected to the striker this is currently locking that little tip right there is locking the striker back slightly that happens when you pull the bolt handle back like this to begin opening the bolt it pulls the striker back locks it in place like this so that you can't have the firing pin exposed when you're opening the bolt that's an important safety to prevent an out-of-battery discharge so like I said I'm not gonna mess with that because I don't want it to snap into the wrong position the locking surface for the rifle is right here in this guy about two-thirds the way down the bolt so this is unlocked when you drop it into position this locks up against this big ol block in the receiver so a very large locking surface nice and safe in that regard notice we also have our spring-loaded follower here which is going to go down this of course holds five rounds as I mentioned or at least alluded to and that's pretty much it this is one of the earlier rifles produced this one does not have one of the updates that was made later on you'll notice there is a hole in the top of the bolt there that is a gas relief hole later on they would go ahead and add a gas relief hole to the receiver as well just as a safety mechanism in case you had a blown cartridge a case failure which by the way can be an issue with these rifles do not shoot these with hand loaded cartridges unless you are intimately familiar with what you are doing there have been a couple detonated rifles in the last few years so be very careful with that just a couple little elements still to look at we have the rear sight here goes out to 2,000 meters the original spec on this cartridge was 135 grains at 2500 feet per second that was actually by 1897 changed a bit they reduced to the bullet weight to 112 bumped the velocity up just slightly to 20 560 feet per second with the intention of reducing chamber pressure and reducing throw to Road that was one of the big problems with this rifle with that original loading the barrel had a life of about 3,000 rounds which is terrible very very short with the new loading they were able to up that to about 10,000 rounds which that made a big difference that lightweight cartridge by the way also had a real benefit in terms of allowing troopers to carry a lot more ammunition so standard army loading was a hundred rounds for the Krag standard Navy loading for well for the Marines and sailors was 180 rounds on a person so almost twice as much ammunition they could carry the front sight is a nice narrow squared-off post with this really quite narrow sight hood over it so this was a quite accurate rifle at a quite flat trajectory the Marines did really well with it unfortunately for Winchester and Li the 1895 Navy would have a very short service life barely more than five years almost as soon as it had been adopted a joint military commission came to the conclusion that the Navy and the army all the service branches really ought to standardize on the same cartridge and that would end up being the 30 caliber 30 out three and then 30 out six government cartridges so the Navy bought a few Craig Jourgensen's as early as 1899 in 1900 but when the 1903 Springfield came out that was adopted as the new naval standard rifle replacing the lee Navy's so these actually got into soldiers hands starting in 1897 by 1903 they were replaced so very short service life during that time however they actually performed quite well they were reasonably well liked you can certainly imagine the Marines who got these rifles as improvements as replacements for trapdoor Springfield's probably loved them they kicked a lot less they could fire a lot faster they had a far greater effective range they weren't shooting black-powder magnificent improvements over the trapdoor springfield they were used in the spanish-american war they were used in the the marine expedition to China along with most of other most of the other major military powers of Europe it's a fascinating little little niche bit of history in fact in China there were a couple in and this actually happened in Cuba as well where the advantage of lighter ammunition really actually made a difference for the guys carrying these lis Navy rifles there was an incident in China where a relatively small group of Marines were able to resupply 10,000 rounds of ammunition to one of their colt machine guns in a way that had it been heavier ammunition they would not have been able to carry all of it that sort of thing makes a difference there was an incident in when Marines were fighting in Cuba when their their supply was disrupted and the fact that the Marines each had a standard load of a hundred and 80 rounds compared to hundred rounds for Army troopers with kragg's they were able to keep fighting actually past the point where their Cuban opponents ran out of ammunition and had to stop shooting so kind of a little foreshadowing of what we would see with the adoption of the five five six cartridge you know 60 years later at any rate Winchester had hoped to also sell this rifle on the commercial market as a sporting rifle and they did a little they did reasonably well for a very short time until interestingly in the aftermath of the spanish-american war a huge number of surplus Spanish mousers came into the country that were dumped on the surplus market they were chambered for a very similar round 7 millimeter instead of 6 but similar round far cheaper rifles because they were available as cheap surplus and that kind of killed the market for the the Lee Navy there were not a ton of people who are interested in paying full retail price for one of these when they could get something that was a little more familiar without the weird straight-pull action in a similar cartridge for a tiny fraction of the price through someone like Bannerman so these rifles would be assembled up through the beginning of World War one in by 1914 1915 1916 and just a couple per year and after World War one that was it so in total just over 19,000 of these manufactured 15,000 of them more than 15,000 for military and only a couple thousand the civilian market so they remain a very cool rifle today one the only straight poll the US has ever adopted a cartridge ahead of its time really cool Marine Corps connections to these rifles there's all sorts of great stuff going on with these so if you would like to know more about Rock Island that take a look in the description text below you'll find links to their YouTube channel and their Instagram page where they highlight a lot of the stuff that they have at various options thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 341,027

Rating: 4.9581232 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, lee navy, 1895, winchester lee, james paris lee, 6mm lee navy, .236 lee navy, smallbore, high velocity, navy, usmc, marines, straight pull, bolt action, rifle, marine rifle, krag, springfield, remington, luger rifle, en bloc, clip, sporting, musket, military, united states, us navy, tilting bolt, cuba, spanish american war, philippines, boxer rebellion

Id: 3BtY5N41q_E

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Anonest_of_Anons]

Weekly forgotten weapons post.

[u/bryanjurgensen]

I still want my 7.5inch Caldwell Pax