Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum and I'm here today at Hire Arms, a movie armoury company in Johannesburg, South Africa, and we're taking a look at a really unusual and cool German 1920s revolving semi-auto
shotgun. So this is a Becker shotgun, it was actually designed in the 1890s, patented in the
1890s, but didn't go into production until the 1920s. And according to all the sources I've been
able to find, only a hundred of these were made. The serial number on this one is a little odd
considering that, but we'll get to that in a moment. The way this works, this actually
has a six position cylinder that has five chambers in it and one blank position. 16-gauge, apparently they were all made in 16-gauge,
and then the barrel blows forward with each shot. It automatically ejects the empty
cases, the first four empty cases, the last case remains in the
cylinder until you manually eject it. And a really interesting and unusual design. So
let's take a closer look at how this whole thing works. So this actually isn't even marked 'Becker' on it anywhere. The only marking on it is on the left side
of the barrel, right here, where its marked 'Deutsche Jagdwaffengesellschaft Dusseldorf', so, German hunting weapons
manufacturing, Dusseldorf. Then it has a serial number on the receiver here and the
serial number (assuming this is a serial number), is 755. That's a bit odd if only 100 were made. You know, it's certainly very common for
companies to start at numbers other than 1, but usually they start at, like, 100 or 1,000. So I don't know, either they started
at a weird place or perhaps the common knowledge about how
many of these are made is incorrect. We have a German 'Crown over U'
proof mark here on the rear tang, and then the other really cool set of
markings are here on the cylinder. Each of the chambers is actually
numbered in Roman numerals 1 through 5, and then there is one blank which is actually
an empty, a plugged space for a chamber. So let's take a look at how this works. So the first thing you need to do in order to
load this, is actually cycle the barrel forward. And this is what normally will
happen when you fire it, you take this and pull it just slightly forward. That action
re-cocks a striker back in the firing mechanism. So from this position, I can actually dry fire it ... [click] you can hear that. Normally that would rotate the cylinder, but our
cylinder is already at its fully unwound position. So once I've got that barrel forward,
I can then load a cartridge through this loading port, and then index the cylinder, load number 2, index it, load number 3, number 4, number 5. And then, having loaded number 5, we roll it to the sixth position where it is solid and plugged, and that means that chamber
number 5 is in line with the barrel. So the first thing that's going to happen when you
fire is that the barrel is going to snap backwards, like that. When that happens, ... there's a cone on the barrel,
and there's a cone on the front of each chamber. They interlock and that provides
a gas seal to prevent blowby. That allows the shot to go down,
you don't have gas blowby coming out, although the Becker does have a nice
shield on the front just as extra protection. At the same time, gas is actually being
redirected into the previously fired chamber. Now in this case this is our first
shot fired, so there is no previous one. This, what would be a chamber, is just a plugged block. ... Once we get to our next shot, this gas coming
over is going to automatically eject the empty case out the ejection port, so. And then the barrel is going to go back forward. So right
now we've just fired round number 5, chamber number 5, the barrel is going to be forced forward like so, it
only moves about an inch, a little less, maybe 20mm. When that happens, the cylinder rotates
one position, it indexes down to number 4. When you load this up, when you wind it,
you're actually winding up a spring that gives it the energy to unwind for one full
revolution as you empty the whole cylinder. So now that we have number 4 in line, the gun is cocked, we can see that the
barrel is forward. When we fire this one, now chamber number 4 is going to fire,
gas is going to come down through here and it's going to vent into
number 5 and blow the case out there, and then it is going to immediately
proceed to blow the barrel forward ... [click] and as you can see right there that trips a latch,
and allows the cylinder to index one more position. So now we're on number 3. When
we fire number 3, it will eject number 4. When we fire number 2, it will eject number 3. When we fire number 1, it will eject number 2. And then you are left with the gun in this
position. The barrel has blown forward, you are left with the blank solid
chamber facing the barrel, and you still have your empty round number 1 in its chamber,
because there's no cartridge left to blow it out. So in order to deal with that there is a
manual ejector rod, just like an old-style revolver, and we can pull that back and
kick the case out manually, like so. That also means if you have, say,
a really sticky case, or for some reason the ejection system malfunctions, you can
easily use this manual ejector to go back and unload any cases that didn't automatically eject. In order to reload the thing, what we have to do is re-cock the action and then you can wind this back up,
loading as you go, until you're at number 5, and the gun's back in that original
loaded, hot, ready to fire configuration. We have a safety latch down here, that's
just going to act as a standard safety. And then there are two disassembly
pieces. There's a plug here, which I suspect holds the barrel in place,
and pulling that down allows you to take the front end of the gun off. And then there
is a disassembly lever on this side which rotates down, and I believe that allows
you to take the rear end of the gun off. Unfortunately, this particular example is... I'm not entirely sure how to take it apart and I don't
want small pieces to go flying all over the place. So unfortunately, that's as far as
we're gonna take this down at this time. But I think you got a pretty good idea for how it works. Well, thank you guys for watching. These are obviously really quite rare guns to find. This one is not in the world's greatest condition, but I think this is the first time I've ever actually seen one of these in person, so I didn't want to miss the opportunity to get some video on it. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. A big thanks to Hire Arms for letting me take a look at this and bring you guys the video. Thanks for watching.
Honestly one of my gripes with the game. The fact that there are all these guns we’ve all seen before in the wester movies, which is fine. But none of the guns that would fit the weirdness of the game like this one.
Like as opposed to adding the Colt m1892 (a double action revolver) they added another Nagant and made it double action. Rather than putting in a nine shot LeMat revolver, they put in a Peacemaker. Mind you, I love the Peacemaker but you get the point.
A double action revolving rifle medium size medium ammo would be nice too. It would have near same firerate as dolch precision, but you would have higher reload time but at the same time better ammo reserve.