Ornate Saxon Double Barrel Wheel Lock

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company I'm checking out some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming April of 2016 premiere auction and well I don't normally have that much interest in engrave decorative firearms this one was definitely an exception that I thought we should take a look at what we have here is a saxon 2 barrel superpose so an over/under wheel lock handgun big handgun and boy this thing is really cool impressive one of the interesting things about wheel locks is that they're substantially more reliable than a typical flintlock because where flintlock you snap the Flint onto the the frizzen once and hopefully you generate enough spark in the right place to fire it usually does but not always with a wheel lock what you're doing is actually putting your Flint in contact with a spinning steel wheel very much like a handheld cigarette lighter and that spinning steel wheel is going to create a vastly larger volume of sparks that pretty much guarantees ignition every time now these firearms were available like I said this one dates to 1600 1610 in that era and yet flintlocks continued to be used as a standard military arm for 200 years after that the reason is that the wheel lock was a much more expensive gun to produce and it was too expensive to just go and equip whole armies with them so they stuck with the much cheaper much simpler flintlocks however if you a were a wealthy aristocrat or someone else of means and you wanted a really good gun a wheel lock would be the solution for you and if you wanted a really really expensive really good gun a double barrel wheel lock with two completely independent separate actions to it why don't we go ahead and take a closer look at this because really a lot of the detail that makes this really cool you have to see up close so the way a wheel lock actually functions you would start by loading it like any other muscle loader you would pour some powder down the barrel put in your projectile Ram it all the way to the back of the barrel then you're going to put a little bit of powder in here powder you're going to close this plate until you're actually ready to fire once you are ready to fire you have this which would be holding a piece of Flint and then you're going to take this and lift it up and it will pivot all the way around and sit with the Flint in contact with this wheel you would have wound the action there's a wind-up clock type spring inside and these guns would come with winding wrenches so you can wind this up like like an old manual watch really and then when you pull the trigger the ratchet holding this spring-loaded wound up steel wheel is released the wheel spins and it's really rather like a large bic lighter the Flint in contact with this wheel prevent produces a whole bunch of sparks that likes the priming powder which goes through the touch hole into the barrel lights the main charge and fires the projectile now that being said what's particularly impressive about this one is the workmanship so let's take a look at some of this up close this is impressive right down to the little cast busts on the Flint got some inlaid portraits there it's really impressive to remember to keep in mind that everything on this gun was entirely made by hand because we really in 1610 there really were not any machine tools around to do this work for you got some weird creatures in laid another one up here the muzzle has some floral in life thanks for watching guys I hope you enjoyed the video it's cool to kind of put some things in perspective sometimes not a lot of these guns survive because well there weren't a whole lot of them made in the first place and the ones that do survive are actually often really fancy ones like this because they were in the possession of people who had them as the prestige pieces so they didn't get you know worn around every day and and beaten to death over the course of 400 years they survived because the workmanship was so impressive if you'd like to add this one to your own collection hang it on your own wall take a look at the description text below you'll find a link there to rock Islands catalog page on this piece you can check out their pictures they have some provenance on it and if you're interested in it you can place a bit right through the website thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 321,058

Rating: 4.9744287 out of 5

Keywords: saxon, german, germany, wheellock, wheelock, wheel lock, twin, double, over under, ornate, engraved, inlaid, antique, muzzle, muzzleloading, muzzleloader, flint, flintlock, elaborate, ingraved

Id: TfeusAG1oTQ

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/kuilinbot]

Here is a snapshot of the page at the time of its posting!

(~I am a bot owned by /u/kuilin)