Merwin & Hulbert Revolvers

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I mean I am here today at the Rock Island auction house and I'm taking a look at some of the guns they're selling there September 2015 premier auction may happen to have a whole bunch of merwin and holder revolvers now you may not have heard of merwin and hobart they never achieved all that much widespread popularity despite the fact that they are arguably the best revolver of the frontier era so I have four different versions here because with the cool variety that are available in this option I'm able to pick out a number of different models so show the evolution of the design now the one thing I'm not going to get into in this are the non army style guns that merwin and Hulbert made they did have a whole line of 38 caliber small revolvers and we're not even going to get into those so let me start with a little bit of basic background Joseph merwin was the man behind these guns the company was merwin and Hulbert the Hulbert brothers were basically his financial backing they were apparently quite astute businessmen they're quite good at what they did merwin was the gun designer you may recognize him from the merwin and beret revolvers civil war erupted well he kept tinkering about with various different things in 1868 he and the Hulbert brothers formed this conglomerate company merwin culvert and company they did a bunch of investing thanks I'm sure to the the know-how of the whole Burt's and by the time these guns were in production the company actually was fairly well diversified they they had invested $100,000 in the Evans rifle company the Evans as you may recall is this really kind of neat lever action that has a like a 32 or 40 round magazine in the buttstock they also owned a fifty percent interest in Hopkins and Allen a very significant manufacturing company and it was in fact Hopkins and Allen that manufactured these guns for merwin and Hulbert now merwin one of the the basic design criteria that he had in mind when he devised these guns was strength and quality in particular this these were made around the time that reloading gear was actually becoming commonly available and merwin was legitimately so concerned that people would overload cartridges and he wanted to make his gun strong enough that there wouldn't be any liability from them blowing up because of overpowered hand loads on her teeth so we'll see a number of elements of that coming into his design in fact why don't I bring the camera back here let's just dive right into what is arguably the best cowboy revolver ever all right I sort of lied we're actually going to start with this one this is a very early first model frontier revolver so that's a good place to start now I said frontier because that was you can tell the flat-bottomed grip here is indicative of the frontier model from Irwin and Hobart this has a seven inch barrel which was a standard barrel length for them and it is single action so we can tell that by the fact that the trigger is it has a very short travel to it single action was typical of the time although merwin and Hobart would come out with some double action guns we'll see those in a minute in order to load the gun you put it at half [ __ ] and we have a loading gate right here that pulls straight down and then load one at a time loading it comes back up so there are three main mechanical elements that really make them or one stand out from its competitors so let's take a look at those two unload the gun you push this stud back and you can then rotate the barrel assembly 90 degrees on on its center access pin when you pull the assembly forward the cylinder comes with it all six cases are extracted simultaneously so this is as fast to unload as a top brake revolver although it still requires loading through the gate here now we need to take a little bit of a closer look at this to see how it works because you may notice there's no extractor star so how do the cases come out well the cases the bit of the rim is actually lodged underneath this flange on the back of the frame so when I put this all the way down you can see that the cylinder is tight up there that's why the gun has to be loaded through this loading gate so when you load cartridges here the rim sits on top of that flange you can see if I go to open it here that little flange right there that acts as our extractor now if you are watching closely when I opened this you will notice that the second main mechanical feature of the Merlin there is a cam in the access pin so that this last bit of travel when I'm rotating the barrel open pulls the cylinder forward just slightly that is designed to be primary extraction so the idea is in particular with early copper cartridges the cases could often expand enough they would expand but not then contract sufficiently and they'd be very tight in the cylinders if you had something like a single-action colt with an ejector rod it was hard to get those out because you all you had was an ejector rod hammer on the back of the case well with the merwin you've got this little camming action that pops the seal on the fire cartridges if they're stuck then you can pull them out straight now the third element is really clever and it's something that you can't necessarily see on video unfortunately I don't have a combination of live ammo and empty cases to demonstrate with but I can tell you is that the length of this travel is actually less than the overall length of a loaded cartridge I should backtrack and say these very first guns were offered in 44 merwin and Hulbert which was pretty similar to 44 Russian but a little bit longer if you had a loaded case let's say you loaded six rounds and you fired three of them when you opened this up the empty brass was short enough that it would fall out the intact loaded cartridges were long enough that they would not the rim would stay stuck under here and the nose of the bullet would remain just slightly inside the cylinder the upshot of this is if you fired three rounds and wanted to top off the gun when you pop it open your three empty cases fall out your three live rounds stay in the gun really a very clever mechanical system now the other thing that doesn't really come across on video is just how immaculately manufactured these guns are even when they're worn on the outside and and this one frankly is a pretty good example the fit between the axis pin and the barrel assembly is remarkably smooth so much so that when you open or close it the mechanical fit creates just a little bit of vacuum now this one's a bit worn I'll demonstrate on one of the later guns you can really actually get an audio idea of how tight that fit is and how smooth they are now the disassembly mechanism remained constant on these guns so I'll demonstrate that with this one as well the one thing that did change this is a first model frontier and one of the distinguishing features of that is it has this little tiny detent on this takedown lever so this lever allows us to pull the barrel off I do is open it up and then I have to push in that detent and then push this lever down and then the barrel and the cylinder pop right off no tools required so cylinders is very simple we pretty much already seen that so this angle right here is the camming surface that is there to break cartridges free and then there's a cut here on the end of the axis pin that cut mates up with this barrel wedge to ensure that the barrel is solidly locked into the gun so when the barrels in place you can see that that cutout is directly in line with the barrel wedge so that's a strengthening feature alright let's go ahead and move on to a second model which is has a number of differences to it you'll see this is still an open-topped gun this is a second model of merwin and holder it is also in a pocket army instead of a frontier the the obvious visual difference the frontier has the flat bottom grip the pocket army has a bird's head with what some books call it a crested bird's head with this extra finger loop some people call this a skull crusher grip for hitting folks on the head with I'm not sure that was may or may not have been the original intent at any rate with this bird's head grip this model is referred to as a pocket army despite the fact that it really is pocket-gun so much except in comparison to the much larger frontier this has a three and a half inch barrel that was also that was the other standard barrel length from our women Hulbert now the distinction with the second model is actually fairly subtle general mechanics work the same way put the gun at half [ __ ] and pop this open and we have all the same mechanical features the recoil bolt has been improved and there's no longer an open plate down here that you have to to get into to do some of the maintenance on the gun we should show you that here on the first model this is a removable plate here on the second model it's not as a solid frame now one of the other changes that the second model made the first model guns were all offered in 44 merwin and Hulbert which is of course impossible to get today yeah I'm sure you can handle owed it but with the second model they started offering these in 44 40 or as it's marked here caliber 1873 Winchester that made the guns gave them a wider market because the the 44 40 40 cartridge was very popular and easily accessible everywhere so the other thing that I want to point out with this one obviously the outside is not in as good of condition but it is engraved and in fact you'll notice if you start keeping your eyes out for a lot of marijuana and halberds that there seemed to be a remarkable number of engraved examples there's good reason for that the company actually came up with an engraving method that was largely mechanical it involved basically pin punches instead of a handheld engraving tool that allowed them to offer engraved guns from the factory at a very reasonable price point if you were simply reasonably middle-class sort of person who wanted a fancy gun you could afford an engraved merwin and Hulbert if you wanted an engraved example of a cult or a Remington well that was all hand-done work and that was much more expensive so for that reason you'll find a lot of engraved marwan's out there from people who simply wanted to have they appreciated the fact that they had the best mechanical revolver on the market and they wanted it to be one of the best looking ones as well so enough of the second model here let's move on to the third model so we have two examples here of the third model of merwin and halter the top one here is a frontier there will be a quiz at the end I suppose the frontier has the flat grip the second one has the bird's head gripped which would make it a pocket army model what's really distinctive about the third model is that they finally introduced a top strap so the barrel wedge up here is gone that's no longer necessary because now the barrel is held in place down here and up at the top that being said it still retains the same mechanism put the gun at half [ __ ] pull this back and it opens to extract and eject now this particular example is also in 44 40 caliber it has this very frightened looking deer on it some of the engraving in fact the engraving patterns vary quite a bit and some of them are a bit entertaining this again has a three inch barrel I think you could make a very substantial argument that this gun this exact model would have been the best firearm in the Old West it's got the strength of a solid frame revolver it's got the reloading objecting reloading speed of the fastest top right guns has a very convenient short barrel this is really the epitome of the ideal Old West gunfighters pistol now we do also have this version the clever ID we'll have noticed that there is something different about the trigger here this is a double action version of the merwin in Albert I mentioned that they did make these well this is a third model double action frontier now I believe this one yes this is also in caliber 44 40 again that's marked Winchester 1873 because that's when the cartridge came out and how it was often designated alright I had mentioned I had kind of hyped the quality of the machine fit between the barrel and the access pan and this is the gun that I want to demonstrate to you with now if you look at this gun closely frankly the finishes it's not in real good shape that's an awfully Brown cylinder there's a lot of surface pitting the nickels coming off you would think this is not a particularly well cared for gun and yet internally it is still magnificent at least the action is so being double action I cocked the hammer all the way back to to free it up to reload push this in pull this back and I'm going to do is actually point the barrel down and there is enough of a vacuum created by the mechanical fit that it actually pulls the barrel back under vacuum until it's that vacuum slowly leaks out and it comes all the way forward so there we have and a basic introduction to the 44 caliber merwin and Hulbert there are a lot of other guns that the company made over the course of its business lifespan but that lifespan was frankly pretty short the company was out of business by 1880 or 1881 this was largely due actually to the death of Joseph merwin in 1879 and the company was in pretty dire financial straits at that point for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of its guns unfortunately that hundred thousand dollars in the Evans rifle company had been a bad idea because the Evans failed to be a commercial success and there were three major shipments of merwin and Hulbert revolvers to russia that ultimately were never paid for the company was having some issues it was these guns were tested by the US military which found all of the the strengths that I've gone over with you but the army didn't think that they were enough of an improvement over the 1873 Colt to be worth changing over to and that may have been as much politics as mechanics but ultimately didn't make a difference to merwin because the army didn't adopt his guns thanks for watching guys I really hope you enjoyed the video these are fantastic guns that just really don't get very much recognition they didn't in the day they still don't today and it's really a shame because they're great guns in addition to these four there are a number of others here in the auction I have links in the text description below to these I'll leave it up to you to browse around the auction catalog and find the other if you're interested in them thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 351,540

Rating: 4.9697485 out of 5

Keywords: Merwin, Hulbert, revolver, old west, frontier, cowboy, 44, russian, 1873, winchester, 44-40, sixgun, pocket army, single action, double action, sa, da, birdshead, birds head, engraved, engrave, decorate, fancy

Id: 0O4msUTg16k

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Schwanz_Hintern64]

*I meant that it allows you to top off the cylinder

[u/mrwallace888]

So it’s kind of like a Webley?

[u/GoredonTheDestroyer]

The Merwin & Hulberts are one of those firearm families that you'd expect to be in this game on principle because because of how weird they are.

I mean for God's sake we have the Gepard PDW in the game, which is pretty much a one-off prototype SMG!

[u/MaxDrex]

yes yes yes yes yes

[u/Starsky99]

Oooh, very cool!

[u/MaxDrex]

It's been a month but I just cant get how cool this is out of my mind, I hope anton adds this someday