Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, and I have a really cool once-in-a-lifetime chance here to take a look at the only extant Pancor Jackhammer. So first off, I really want to
throw out a thank you to Chad, who is the owner of this gun,
who was OK with me fondling it and getting
it on video for you guys. These guns are really well known
primarily for video games, and secondarily through some movies, both movies with the Jackhammer itself, and actually movies that have guns that
are made to look like Jackhammers as well. Ironically, ... only 3 of these
were ever made in the first place, and they never found any sort of
production or ... military acceptance. But they've come to be culturally fairly
well known through video games. So a little bit of the background on this thing. John Anderson was the guy
who originally designed this. He ... ran a little one or two man
shop out in the Mountain West. And his experience with shotguns
started in the Korean War, where he actually used
pump shotguns in combat. And while he was doing so apparently
really thought he could do better, loading the thing was time
consuming and a bit awkward. And so he started back in the '50s, in the Korean War, started thinking about ways you
could do a better combat shotgun. Well, he came back to the States,
started tinkering, took out some patents, and ended up building this, the Pancor
Jackhammer full-auto combat shotgun. He did submit it to military trials, and that's
kind of where the whole project fell apart on him. This did reasonably well in trials, HP White
did a full formal destructive test on it. It was able to go through 50,000
rounds without significant problem. The problem was Anderson
had a little small company, he didn't have a whole ton of funding. And the Department of Defence ... were deciding whether they wanted
the shotgun for US military use. And while they were thinking about that
they wouldn't let him export it to anybody. So, they take their time, eventually
they decide not to adopt it. And by that point Pancor has pretty
much run out of money and gone broke, and doesn't have any capital
left to build more models to sell. He got a lot of foreign interest in the gun
from everywhere on the planet basically, but nobody who was interested enough to
finance development and final production of it. So the gun kind of fizzled out at that
point, much to his disappointment. Ultimately, like I said, three of these were built,
two of them were destroyed by HP White, so this is the only surviving example. Anderson did build a bunch of other examples
out of basically sheet tin, and balsa wood, and clay. He was making a lot of working
... tool prototypes that way to figure out exactly how to
dimension things, what would work. So he made a couple of
dozen of those apparently, but ... the only surviving
functional one is this one. It's also interesting to note
that ... people look at this and because you've seen
it in so many video games we tend to assume that this is the military
gun, and this is how it would have looked. In actual fact this gun is basically a
tool-room prototype, it's a proof of concept. It is not quite shaped the way that the
final production guns would have been. It has a lot more material on it,
there are a lot of big cast parts, especially things like the trigger guard
down here, ... the ... grip assembly. On the guns that were sent to HP White
there was like 4 pounds of material removed, they used a lot of stampings
and a lot of lighter parts. This was the very first one. When we start disassembling it you'll see
that there are some kind of complicated areas where you take a look and go,
"Wow, the military would never accept that." Well, that's because the
designer improved those areas, and he came up with better mechanisms,
and this was simply the first gun. And this is the one that he kept for himself
when he sent others off to be tested. So with that in mind, some
of the basic controls here, it's actually a very simple gun to use. And ... a lot of guns that look
really cool on the outside turn out to be kind of blasé on
the inside, this one is actually a very creative and interesting mechanism,
which will be really cool to look at. Anyway, we have three main
controls that you can see here. Safety on the side I'll start with:
this is safe, semi-auto, full-auto. We'll take a look at exactly how that
works when we pull it apart, pretty simple. This hook back here is
actually a cocking lever. So if you have a light strike on a cartridge, you can re-cock the ... striker
with that to try firing it again. So this is not a control
you would typically use. What you mainly use is this handguard,
which actually cycles forward. That manually rotates the action and re-cocks
the striker, so that's your charging handle. One funny thing that I
really want to point out. This ribbed forearm is kind
of distinctive on these guns, you'll see that virtually every time
you see a depiction of the gun. It wasn't actually originally on the gun. ... Basically the first guy who
bought this from Anderson when he decided to sell off
his ... interest in the gun, the first guy who bought it
was a movie gun company. And when he got the gun this forearm
was really slick, it's smooth metal, painted. And he said unless you had
just like totally dry hands your hand would slip on this thing
and it'd be really hard to use. So he took the rubber handguard from an MP5SD and screwed it onto the handguard
here, and that's why it looks this way. So also a lot of our depictions and video games
of the gun come from that original owner. He rented it out to a couple
of movie companies. He also basically rented out use of it to
animators and computer graphics guys for comic books and for video games. And so they would come
in and 3D model the thing, and that's where most ... of
the depictions come from. Alright, before I get deep into
disassembly let me show you just the basic operating mechanism
that you can see from the outside, because there's only a
little bit going on visually. The main thing we have
here is our drum magazine, this holds 10 rounds, ...
standard size 12 gauge. Now the military trials for guns like this, what the military was looking for was
actually a very wide variety of ammunition. They wanted buckshot,
they wanted flechettes, they wanted mini grenades,
they wanted all sorts of stuff. And some of the big companies that
designed guns like this, like the HK CAWS, were able to partner with ammunition
companies and supply that sort of thing. Anderson was basically just a little
home shop doing this on his own, so he had no way to make
specialty ammunition. Instead he designed this gun
around military number 4 buckshot, which is the buckshot that
they had initially specified. So the way this works is actually reminiscent
of a Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. When the gun cycles there's a pin that
controls rotation of the drum magazine here. I can do that manually by racking the forend, and you can see that the drum rotates. The way this works is
again like a Webley-Fosbery, on the forward stroke
it moves half a position, on the rearward stroke it moves
the other half of the position. So there's a peg here that's
starting in this position, and it comes forward to here. And then because you're still pulling
forward, it forces the drum to rotate to there, and then on the rearward
stroke it comes back like this. Because of the geometry of these points,
the drum can't ever rotate backwards. So that's also one of the sketchy
areas of this specific gun, is that these camming grooves had to be very
precisely machined in order to work properly. And that's one of the more
difficult areas of its design. So, let's move on to some disassembly. I mentioned before that ... what we need to do
is consider this to be a tool-room prototype, not ... even a field trials level of gun. So as we go through you'll see
that everything in this gun is basically held together
with Allen head screws. Which is the sort of thing you
would do in an early shop prototype, obviously not something that
the military would have accepted. So I'm going to start by
taking off the rear cover here. So there's our rear cover, just
sheet metal and a butt pad. Then I can take off the top cover. This just lifts up ... and out. We have a big metal hook at the front. That connects to this
little bar on the top cover. This does also have our sights on it, they
are a very simple V notch, and a front blade. You're firing buckshot, ... you're not looking for
anything particularly precise on a gun like this. Alright, next up, let's
take off the muzzle brake. This is rotated 90 degrees, and it comes off. And there's a big recoil spring on the
front that pushes the barrel backwards. So it turns out the Jackhammer
is actually a blow forward action, gas-operated blow forward,
really cool, and really unusual. So this big thing is
basically there for show. A few vents maybe hold it down, and then you have a surface in the back
for the recoil spring to push against. Then to get the barrel out, I just rotate it. OK, so the barrel comes out pretty
easily, you rotate it 90 degrees, and it just pulls out the
front of this barrel jacket. Now the way this gun works is,
like I said, a blow forward action. You can see we have a gas seal
right here, this one's a little bit worn. And then inside the barrel
jacket, right about here, you can actually locate it by the screws
on the outside of the barrel jacket, there is a block inside there. If I shine a flashlight there, you can
see that silver ring down in there. The barrel has two gas ports
in it, one here, and one opposite. So one drill straight through. And then you have a seal here, and you have
that block in the back of the barrel jacket. When this is assembled you have this little
short space between this block and that block. When you fire gas comes through the ports,
fills up that area, and forces the barrel forward. Now, when we look at the magazine,
you'll see that it actually has rebated mouths on the chambers, and ... the end of the barrel actually fits
down into the chamber on the drum. When your shot shell fires, the shot
shell is sitting more or less right here, and then the end of the shell expands
open into the mouth of the barrel. And that forms more or less a gas seal. Then when the gas ports do their
thing, the barrel goes forward, pulls off the end of the shell, and then
the operating rod rotates the drum. This will make more sense when we pull the
magazine out, so let's keep disassembling. So the next step in our disassembly,
we have to pull off this hook so that we can pull out this pin, so
that we can take out the magazine. I mentioned this was a tool-room prototype,
this is not exactly an easy magazine change. This is actually what you
have to do to reload the gun. Obviously not a militarily effective method, given that it requires taking
out Allen [screws] to reload. The two guns that were sent to
HP White for destructive testing actually had a different
reloading mechanism. ... By that point Anderson had perfected a
better system and used it for those guns. But again, this was the tool-room
prototype that he kept for himself, so. This is the centre axis pin for the magazine,
it is actually brass and been painted black. To clear the magazine out, I now have
to run the action forward, there we go. And now I can pull out our 10 round drum. So here we have the back end of the drum,
with ... slots for the rims of the shells. At the front end you can see that the
shells are pretty heavily rebated in there. And what happens is this
tapered end of the barrel fits into the drum like that. And our shot shell, when it fires, gives
us a gas seal because it bridges that gap. This is actually in concept fairly
similar to the Nagant revolvers. Then when you're firing, the gas ports fill
with gas, the barrel gets pulled forward. And then the drum rotates one position, until the recoil spring on the barrel forces
it back into the next open chamber. Alright, at this point I want
to take a break for a moment, and talk about something that is commonly
believed, and there actually is a lot of truth to it. That is what was called the "bear trap". This was this gun would come with a
mechanism by which you could turn this drum into an ad-hoc landmine. ... So none of these bear traps
were ever actually produced, but there were plastic models of them made. Again, just like the models of the
guns made out of wood and clay, there were plastic models of this bear trap
mechanism made to test exactly how it would work. And I've talked to some folks who
actually saw these things in person. And the plastic models with a regular
drum ran quite well apparently. ... So the idea is actually kind of straightforward.
You have the drum in one part of a fixture, and then you have a second part
of a fixture sitting underneath. There was a special pressure rim that came
up through the centre axis of the magazine (or around the outside, I'm
not entirely clear on which). And the bottom plate and this top piece had basically a ratcheting sort
of teeth mechanism to them. So that when you stepped on the top
it would compress and then release, and you had 10 firing pins on the bottom plate. And they would fire all 10
cartridges simultaneously, or however many you happen
to have loaded at the time. So, a very neat and very creative idea. But again, none of them were actually produced
that way, so it was never live ... fire trialled. Alright, getting the rest of the
gun apart so that I can show you the firing pin and the
actuating rod mechanisms pretty much requires me to
take everything else apart. So, we will start with these two side plates. These are actually purely decorative to
maintain kind of the round profile of the gun. We got that, now ... the forend here is
actually held on by a pair of set screws. Got a pair of flats in this operating rod, and this forend is held on by these two
screws tightening down on those two flats. Next up, I need to take the barrel jacket off. Leave that on for the moment. I also
have to take off the end cap here. This actually holds in the firing pin
mechanism, which is kind of interesting as well. So we'll pull this off. That's the end cap, that holds the firing pin
assembly into the back of the receiver. Now. Alright, and here is our firing pin assembly. So the sear is right up here at the top,
we'll see how that works in a moment. And then the firing pin
spring is right inside there, and you have two pieces
that move back and forth. Take a look at this now, we'll
come back to it in a moment. We have to take the grip
assembly off as well. The grip assembly is held on by
three screws, two Allen heads up here, and a flat-head screw that's probably
a replacement from some point. Alright, now I have pretty much
every screw out of this thing. So we can take out the grip assembly,
again we'll come back to this as well. OK, we finally got pretty much
everything else pulled off of this, I've got the screws out of here. Now, in order to take the shroud off the
receiver and get the operating rod out, I'm going to pull it forward ... to
this point, rotate it up 90 degrees. Now we can separate the receiver
from the barrel shroud here. Which again, you can see it has that
stop right about there for the gas system. And we have our operating rod
and half the trigger mechanism here. So in looking at exactly how
the firing mechanism works, we're going to start with
the trigger frame here. This is very squared off, frankly
it's kind of uncomfortable. But a lot of that is because, again,
this is a tool-room prototype. So the final production guns
would have had much cleaner lines, and a lot less material
than these components. Our selector lever
works with this little pin. That pin locks into the front of the assembly,
prevents it from moving when it's in safe. Once I rotate that pin up and out of the
way, now I can pull the trigger back. You can see our sear down here. That pushes up when I pull the trigger. And when I put it onto full-auto,
what the full-auto does, you can see there's a
cutout in the safety bar here. In full-auto I can't pull
it back quite all the way. When I set it to semi, now that cutout allows
the trigger to come back just a little bit farther. And when it goes all the way back it
activates the semi-auto disconnector, and that's why you hear it snapping. When it's in full-auto I simply
cannot pull the trigger that far, so it fires until I release the trigger. At any rate, what's happening here is these
two arms are getting pushed upward, like so. They are pushing upward into
these two bars right here. Then that is coming out here to the front. When I push these in, this
wedge gets pushed forward. That wedge pushes this spring down. And then this whole bolt is
under spring tension here because it's locked up
against the end of the receiver. So when this goes down and falls out of
the way, this whole assembly goes forward. And inertia pushes the firing pin forward
fast enough to detonate a cartridge. That complicated enough for you? It's actually not nearly as complex as it sounds. If I mock this back up with
a few other parts and the gun, we can show you exactly how it works. Now while all of this is going on,
this piece is moving back and forth. And this little peg on it is
what's actuating the magazine. So this peg is running inside
these grooves in the magazine. That's what operates the feed mechanism. Alright, now I've put some
of the pieces back together so I can demonstrate
how this actually cycles. So you remember we have
our op-rod assembly here. That is physically linked to the
... barrel by this squared off block. You install the barrel through the
op-rod, and then rotate it 90 degrees. So when the barrel moves
forward, the op-rod goes with it. Now if we look at the magazine,
when the op-rod goes back and forth you can see that it operates
the drum, forces it to rotate. So when the gun is in
the ready to fire position, the sear here is caught in the operating
rod like this, so it's all the way back. When I pull the trigger,
that little wedge in the op-rod pushes down on the
spring-loaded part of the sear. You can see it moving right there. When I pull the trigger all the way,
the sear is pushed fully out of the way, which allows the firing pin ... spring to
push the whole firing pin mechanism forward. It hits a primer, fires the cartridge. Then, because the op-rod is directly connected
to the barrel, the op-rod goes forward. When it goes forward it rotates
the magazine by one position, or rather when it goes forward it
rotates the magazine half a position. When it comes back, it rotates the
magazine the other half position. The spring-loaded sear
catches in the op-rod again. And then as the op-rod comes the rest of the way
back, it tensions the firing pin spring inside here. And the thing is ready to fire again. Alright guys, there's your disassembly and
history and operation of the Pancor Jackhammer. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I want to
throw another shout out to Chad, the owner, for being so kind as to let me
get my hands all over this thing. And also the guys at Movie Gun Services,
they're the ones who have it right now, and they're the ones who offered
me the chance to do the video. So definitely couldn't have done it without them. And I also certainly couldn't have
done it without all the folks who very generously stepped up and
helped provide the financial support to make it possible for me
to fly out here and do this. So thank you very much to all of you
guys, I appreciate the opportunity, and hopefully you guys enjoy the video. Now, a couple of other things I want to
point out before we're completely done here. We did put this guy on a scale,
it comes out at 17.5 pounds. Again I want to reiterate that
this is a tool-room prototype, and it uses a lot of rather heavy cast parts. The guns that went to HP White for testing, and the guns that would have
actually been developed and sold for commercial and military purposes
would have had a lot more plastic. This upper assembly, for
example, is metal on this one, on the HP White guns that was plastic. The trigger assembly frame would have
been made out of a much lighter component instead of cast, it would have
been stamped most likely. Anyway, the HP White guns ... they were able to
get them down closer to 10 pounds instead of 17.5. Rate of fire on this was about 240
rounds per minute, which is fairly slow. ... You kind of have to have a slow rate of fire
to have a 10 round magazine and be feasible. As an interesting comparison:
240 rounds a minute is almost exactly what the
French Chauchat shoots. So if you listen to one of those firing, you'll get
an idea for what the rate of fire was on this guy. I also want to point out that on the
Wikipedia page about the Jackhammer, or at least as of when I'm filming this, the exploded view they have is directly
taken off of one of John Anderson's patents, and it does not quite accurately represent
the way this particular gun was made. Especially the magazine
attachment mechanism is different in the patent drawing than it is here. And there are a couple of
other subtle differences as well. So keep that in mind if you're using
that patent drawing as a main reference. You should instead use
this video as your reference. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed watching the video, have some basis of reality now when you take
a look at a Pancor in a video game or a movie. Now you actually know how they work. Thanks for watching.
Why am I not surprised that of all people to get their hands on the only real one left, its Ian McCollum
Official weapon of army of Free Republic of Liberland
You know, because it's fictional
Zach’s gonna gut you whilst you sleep cause you posted this
Funny cause I saw this video in my recommendations and thought, "I doubt Zach would like this..."