Bjorgum 1905 Norwegian Prototype Pistol

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm in and today we are taking a look at an extremely unusual and extremely rare Norwegian pistol this is a bjorgen pistol and I don't even know exactly what its designation is although my best guess is that it is a model of 1905 so what we've got going on here this is a pistol made by a guy named niels bohr gyum he was born in 1864 in Norway and ultimately died in 1949 so live to the ripe old age of 85 and what's kind of funny how it has this for a way to start he was a professional painter and artist he was classically trained as a painter and he was actually a successful and recognized painter in the 1880s in the early 1890s had some exhibitions traveled abroad to practice and study and and then got interested in firearms and in the 1890s from like 1894 until 1899 he was particularly interested in rifle manufacturing construction and he came up with his own bolt action rifle design and tried to propose it to the army but his timing was really quite bad because the Norwegians had adopted the Craig Jorgensen rifle in 1894 so they'd just gotten done trialing guns and testing them and picked one done that's going to be it for a long time so after he finally accepted that he kind of got interested in pistols instead now remember he has no engineering training no machining training he kind of came into this as a neophyte interested in the subject so he got interested in pistols he creates his model of 1904 pistol which is apparently a blow forward action quite unusual it's chambered for the 763 Mauser cartridge which is relatively powerful still in 1904 and holds either 8 or 16 rounds it's not entirely clear and the army actually informally tested it they fired all of 16 rounds through it and determined it was 75% reliable they had four malfunctions in 16 rounds and they were a wide variety of types of malfunction they had a failure to feed they had a round get stuck while either feeding or extracting they had some that failed to fire when the firing pin was hit bunch of problems but he went back and started tinkering and in 1905 he approached the Norwegian Parliament or their version of a parliament at the time with a request that they should finance him to develop these three different pistol design ideas he had as well as a self-loading rifle and he basically wanted wanted them to pay for the work and he wanted to work in the Kongsberg rifle factory where he could have the tooling and the machinists and everyone there to help support him doing his work in firearms now interestingly he managed to get a supporter in the parliament a guy named captain Ewell sued I think I'm pronouncing that right and captain you'll shrewd wrote him a pretty pretty glowing report on his pistol basically that yet had some issues his 1905 design specifically had some issues but he really thought they could be worked out and this would be a really good service pistol for Norway Norway didn't have a semi-auto sort of his pistol at this time and they were interested in that so he managed to convince the Norwegian Parliament to fund him to the tune of 7,000 Norwegian kroner to put that in context a colonel salary at that time was about 5,500 kroner per year you could make a cry Jorgensen rifle and bayonet for 57 kronor so what the Parliament was basically paying for was the equivalent of 125 Krag rifles in exchange for developing these four prototype ideas so Jurgen works in the Kongsberg Arsenal for two years 1905 and 1906 and he's working on his pistols and he's getting advice from the guys there and he's making progress sort of and it sounds like the the actual employees and the director of the Arsenal were really kind of unhappy with this situation they were getting a little fed up this guy really had come in with no firearms experience and he was making weird crazy experiments he was doing things in a way that just didn't make any sense to the professionals there who had long experience manufacturing firearms and not really surprisingly the guns he was turning out really weren't working so his 1905 pistol ultimately the army did test a version of it they put 50 rounds through it before they discontinued the test and said this thing was just totally unfit for service for a variety of reasons and you'll see exactly why when we take a close look at this I think this is a model of 1905 or part of one anyway 1907 he comes back he's run out of money he's looking for more funding he wants another five thousand kronor and Parliament kind of puts him off this time they they procrastinate and they kind of try and avoid this issue and he instead manages to go out and find some private funding instead so he's back able to continue working at Kongsberg and he starts working on the model of 1911 pistol this one is a rotating bolt pistol now rifle trials or pistol trials are coming up in 1914 and ultimately what Norway would adopt was the Colt model of 1911 under the designation model 1914 very cool pistol but bjorgen really wants to get into these trials and and he manages to kind of force his way back into the combs burg Factory some more at this point he's now working at cost he's paying his own way so the time and the machining time and the the employee time that he's using to help him they're charging back to him and end up he had been pay rolled as an employee for awhile and half of the money he earned as an employee ended up going back to the factory for his continued work on his 1914 model pistol which is ultimately like all the others written off as being just totally unserviceable by the time the 1914 trials arrived he's kind of this is like his worst attempt yet he presents a not quite completed gun that doesn't work right he presents two barrels for it a nine millimeter barrel and a 10.15 millimeter barrel neither one of these barrels is for a cartridge that actually exists which is a problem the things that it's a garbage fire it's a hot mess it's a real disaster it turns out ultimately Parliament was kind of looking into this and really the only reason he had gotten nearly this far so many times was that he was one of the very few Norwegian domestic arms designers who looked like he might actually be able to put together a working pistol and the Norwegian military was would have really liked to have an indigenous pistol design to to adopt an issue rather than having to go outside the country to Europe or the United States for so they were there kind of allowing him to continue only for that reason ultimately the Parliament finally completely pulled the plug on him in 1915 cut off all his funding and basically threw him out in 1916 he formed his own firearms manufacturing company went back to looking more rifles well they didn't like his rifle either handed up spending 1917 and 1918 in the United States he appears to have have converted his rifle to 30.6 caliber tried to interest the United States in it and that went nowhere ultimately his company was dissolved it was totally bankrupt in 1923 or 1921 it's a little unclear which and at that point he kind of retired from the gun making business and went back to painting and I think successfully as far as I can tell and he would live another 28 years dying in 1949 just a really interesting character here the the artist turned totally failed gun maker turned back to artist so having gone through the background story here let's take a closer look at this pistol because it's different and weird and oh boy it's not not really a good gun all right so the bureau gun which i think is a 1905 it might be a 1914 but I think it's a 1905 now what we have going on here is a rotating barrel we have three locking lugs to lock the magazine is back here trigger this is the safety sort of this is the fire position when we rotate it down we have the safe position this is however a terrifyingly bad safety because if you pull the trigger with the safety engaged it won't fire until you disengage the safety at which point the hammer will immediately drop that's a really bad failure of a safety fact I can show you that right now this is the hammer here recessed in there I can pull the trigger there and see the trigger actually went back a little bit and then I'm going to hold it down so it doesn't snap when I reengage the safety look there it comes boom to fire that's assuming of course that it would successfully fire which is not necessarily a given so I'm going to reek och the hammer by hand there you go until it clicks hammer sits down there now when this cycles I'm going to do is push the barrel back and you can see that it rotates so when I push the barrel back as if it's cycling you can see that the barrel rotates we've got a curved lug right here that causes it to do that and the barrel goes back about that far now the front sight is permanently fixed to the barrel pin to the barrel so when the barrel rotates and retreats backwards the front sight gets cocked off to one side now at this point the action is unlocked and what I have to do is pull this cover plate backwards to open the bolt there you go we have a spring in here but it doesn't really pick up until about this point which is probably because it's a very old spring and it was probably not well made in the first place now looking up close here you can see that there are three sets of interrupts interrupted thread type locking lugs so there's for actual lugs in each of those sets there's one at the very bottom and then two up on top here at the very top we have our extractor there's a firing pin in the middle and then this guy is the ejector so this is going to sit back until this lug hits that tab at which point this will kick forward which in theory kicks the cartridge case out now obviously this isn't fully cycled this continues backward all the way to here all the way to here we have our magazine right there that in theory there's a drawing of this in in the one reference book that describes this pistol this magazine appears to hold 16 rounds of 30 Mauser 762 Mauser 760 by 25 ammunition now in the testing reports they mentioned that this was very difficult to load with stripper clips which makes sense because you're going to need two eight round clips and this is under quite a bit of spring tension right now and to load it you would have to pull this back and it kind of takes two hands one to hold the gun one to hold this back and then you have to stuff a stripper clip in there with your third hand which presumably holds that stripper clip would hold the slide back but that gives you eight rounds and then you have to somehow pull that clip out and put another clip in to load it all the way up to capacity and that seems very difficult so not not sure how that was supposed to happen now this cover is just a very thin sheet metal cover this whole grip assembly is a very thin sheet metal grip you can see that it's kind of folded together and spot-welded down here it is cut for a shoulder stock just kind of interesting but this whole thing feels honestly like a toy it's extremely lightweight it's clearly all made out of sheet metal the chamber here is really quite thin the bolt is very low-mass I would be extremely surprised if this were safe to fire for any sustained period of time now one of the advantages listed in the one of the the letters to Parliament sent on by organs behalf was that this pistol was very lightweight and you know what it is it's substantially lighter than anything else that would have been competing especially anything with a locked breech in a substantial power cartridge but you know to a certain extent you really need some mass in these parts in order to work safely and properly and I don't think the organs pistol had enough of that now it does have two rails in here and this I assume is where the springs are located you can see we've got two guide rods right here one on either side and then I'm assuming that there are little coil springs in here that are being compressed into this space if we look at the front there's a little sheet metal cap on there I expect you would push down on this now that retracts easily you probably push down on that and push it out of the way or something and this comes out I don't know exactly how to field-strip this thing and to be honest I'm not that eager to go trying because this doesn't seem like the sort of pistol that is particularly durable and I don't want to be the guy who breaks it so I think we can pretty clearly see here why burgum was ultimately we totally rebuffed by the Norwegian Parliament and the Norwegian military in fact it's really quite surprising that he managed to get funding and money for as long as he did if this is the sort of quality of gun that he was producing which it really seems to be that this is exactly the sort of thing that he was producing really actually kind of a testament to how badly the Norwegians really would have liked to have a domestic domestically designed and manufactured pistol no unfortunately they they were not going to end up with that fortunately for them though they did end up with the Colt 1911 which is a very good pistol for the time period thanks for watching guys I hope you've enjoyed the video I want to throw a big thank you out there to two very helpful Norwegian viewers Erin and Eric who very graciously spent a bunch of their time helping me to translate information out of this book Kongsberg Colton by Hana Vic which is pretty much the only source of information on your gyum and his pistol so if it weren't for those guys we wouldn't have a video because I wouldn't know anything about this gun now if you're interested in this particular pistol or bjorgen himself or any of the other guns that were experimented with by norway around the time of the 1914 trials or of course the main subject of this book the 1914 Norwegian colt definitely pick a copy of this up you can still get them they're not completely sold out yet but I'm sure they will be before too long this is another very niche book but ton of great info in it it is all in Norwegian though so be aware anyway thank you very much to Erin and Eric for their help if you enjoyed this sort of content please do consider checking out my patreon page its funding from folks like you at a buck a month there that makes it possible for me to travel about find weird old guns like this one and show them to you guys thanks for watching very much outside the box yes he was definitely thinking outside the box it's a happy box there's a reason to be in the box he did not want to be in the box so

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 209,128

Keywords: norway, norwegian, kongsberg, bjorgum, trial, trials, prototype, history, 1915, m1914, colten, colt, forgotten, development, experiment, experimental, rotating barrel, 7.63mm, Mauser

Id: JMbCbAhwp_w

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2016