Phillips & Rodgers M47 Medusa: Multicaliber Revolver for a Nonexistent Apocalypse

huh well the bombs have fallen unfortunately all I have is this hobo sack full of ammo i raided a Walmart and I found a desert at RV and and found a couple rounds on the ground and so I've got a hobo sack of ammo it's a good thing I've got my m47 Medusa hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm out here at the range today with Rogers and Phillips m47 Madusa revolver and this is basically a Smith & Wesson Kay frame with a special cylinder in it that allows you to shoot effectively any cartridge that is shorter than 357 Magnum and has a bore a bullet diameter of 3 5 7 or less so the official literature says something like 25 different cartridges there's actually over a hundred technically the literature sticks to only 9 millimeter or 38 caliber cartridges but in reality you can shoot stuff with a smaller bore diameter and it'll work fine too so what they did to come up with this Jonathan Phillips the two inventors were Roger Hunziker and Jonathan Phillips but I guess Phillips and Hunziker didn't sound as good so they used Rogers instead in any right there is a mechanic's tractor in this revolver is substantially different from a typical one and what it's designed to do is allow you to headspace both rimless and rimmed cartridges so let's take a closer look let me show you exactly how that works all right so what makes this unique is the extractor mechanism as you can see here what we have are six little fingers and these are all on they're all bendable they're flexible and the idea is if you have a rimmed cartridge like a 38 or 357 it's just gonna go in it's gonna drop into the recess in the chamber here and headspace on the rim like it should like it's designed to if however you have a rimmed cartridge then you're going to use this finger that finger is going to hold on the back of the extractor groove and that will bow that will hold the cartridge in the correct position in the back of the cylinder so that the firing pin will actually hit it and they did actually have to do a decent bit of design work to make sure that the firing pins would actually hit and detonate a wide variety of cartridges so we can demonstrate that here a bit here's a 357 now that one of the tricks to this is instead of trying to ram these things in and push the finger down with the tip of the cartridge if you pull the extractor out slightly and then push the cartridge in it's much easier so there's a 357 it has pushed this finger all the way down because there is no extractor groove to work with now we have a nine millimetre parabellum a couple issues with this this is actually although it looks straight it is a slightly tapered case so that's going to present an issue that we'll get to in a moment I'm going to push that in and you can see that that finger is holding in the extractor groove and then we'll actually just leave this I've got a seven six to Tokarev this will fire safely because it will fit in the chamber like so but it will blow the case out and the bullets going to be well we all know where the bullets gonna go because it's just going to kind of bounce down the barrel back and forth since it's a 30 caliber bullet in a 35 caliber barrel and then you can even do something as goofy as 32 ACP because oops let's try that again let me put the extractor down and then my 32 fits in there it kind of wobbles a little bit but it will actually work one other element that they had to put into this gun is a double tapered forcing cone now the problem is you have a really long throat on all of pretty much all of these cartridges because you know a 357 is coming out to hear the nine-millimeter is like half the length and so a nine millimeter a nine Parabellum bullet is going to have a long long bit of free boar before it actually hits the forcing cone and in order to maintain any sort of decent accuracy you need to make sure that those those nine millimeter bullets hit the forcing cone in the same orientation every time and so by having first a slight and then a little more aggressive taper to the forcing cone they're able to basically stabilize those bullets properly so it's in theory fairly accurate as long as you're shooting a nine-millimeter bullet all right the problem with something like this is while the concept is really cool and the manufacturing is fantastic it's a very high quality gun the problem is the concept just isn't really all that realistic the fact of the matter is really there's only three cartridge well let's say four cartridges that would realistically fit this requirement nine Parabellum 380 thirty-eight and 357 and of course with the 357 you can already use two of those and pretty much everyone out the only group of people who are really going to be willing to pay significant money for something like this our survivalist types someone who thinks well in case of the end of the world I need some gun that I can use to actually shoot a hobo sack full of weird ammo well I think you and I both know that everybody who is serious about that probably already has at least one firearm in every one of those calibers already and so they're not really likely to go out and buy one of these and we see that in the reality of what actually happened to the company they only sold something like five hundred a couple hundred of these guns and then went out of business so this is a money where your mouth is sort of problem a lot of people say it's cool and say they'd really like one and then when someone actually goes and produces it well then people realize that you know my cat has tonsillitis this week and so I have to pay the vet and so I can't actually afford but I will but and then yep and then they never sell any so all right we're gonna do a couple targets here I'm gonna go through my hobo sack of ammo now I'm gonna look for nine millimetre parabellum and I'm gonna shoot an entire cylinder of nine Parabellum and we're gonna see how well this thing actually groups with all the same ammo there we go six rounds one of the downsides to this gun you know the upside is you get to shoot multiple calibers the downsides are pretty much well most everything else one of them is you can't really load this super quickly because you have to play nice with the extractors there we go five and six rounds alright and then there we go one of the other problems is you will get carbon rings built up in the chambers just like you would shooting 38 and 357 and so one of these is pretty sticky and I'm sure I'll have to hit that one out with a stick after I've fired alright I realized after I got those all loaded that one of them actually was a nine browning one so now we have six rounds of nine by nineteen all right let's go this has a pretty nice trigger to it that target is horrible Wow dang that was bad I was expecting this to be pretty decent it's a well-made gun it's got a nice trigger and my first shot was this one which was awesome and then these and the last two aren't even on the paper these two certainly appeared to be ki holing so boy I don't know what the issue is well yes I do the issue is that there's like an inch of free boar before the nine Parabellum bullets hit the rifling so this is to me one of the downsides of multi caliber guns is you're gonna be optimized for none of them or in theory there should be one caliber one cartridge that actually works well maybe it's 357 that's the longest that's gonna take the best advantage of the full length of the cylinder maybe we should try a target of 357 all right the next issue is after you finished firing you have to eject these cases and the ejector doesn't want to move and you do not want to force the ejector rod because the most really the only fragile part of this gun are those little extractor teeth so what we're gonna do instead is use a wooden rod and we're going to tap each of these cases out gently there we go that one came out easily so they all kind of come out easily I'm just really hesitant to put any force on the ejector rod because these are really expensive guns and this one is borrowed and the company is long out of business so if you break apart you're just screwed all right 357 Magnum this time we'll see if we can get any better of a group by the way is it ten yards so let's go I think has a lot more recoil obviously [Music] that's definitely better take a look that's a lot better at this point that's all me that group none of these key hold I think what we have here is an issue of free bar and there's they were able to put some tricks into the design to improve it with nine Parabellum and other short cartridges nine Parabellum also being a tapered cartridge that's going to give a little bit of issue 3:57 worked actually pretty nicely now let's try it out with a complete miss matte mishmash of six different cartridges on one target and see how close they actually are to each other alrighty so now I've got a 38 Smith I've got a 9 largo I've got a 357 Magnum a 380 a 9 Parabellum and a 9 by 20 browning long you may notice that the one the one cartridge that you may expect here that is not in this batch is the 9 mil in a millimeter Makarov you cannot use that in this gun because it's not actually 9 millimeter that is a nine point two millimeter bullet so not safe to use here don't do it the other thing is as the manual recommends you want to shoot these cartridges if you have a mixed cylinder in order of length the longest ones first all right there we go a complete mix all right I loaded those actually backwards so I fixed them cylinder rotates counterclockwise we're good now so this will be a 357 and progressively getting later that was the 38 Smith I don't know what that was supposed to be that was the 380 all right so one of these did not fire I think it was my 9 browning long let me try one more strike on that there we go that's actually not a bad target I'm really surprised check it out I'm actually really quite surprised at this we have one round that key hold and then one of these had been a pasty that was shot out of the way so one two three four five six pretty impressed I think maybe nine millimetre parabellum is like the worst cartridge to shoot in this because of its taper and its really short length no now the one other thing we can do is shoot cartridges that are less than nine millimeter bore diameter so we're gonna load up some 32 and some 760 to Tokarev and see how those shoot alright last one is going to be sub nine-millimeter cartridges so we got some 760 to Tokarev and some 32 ACPs the 32 is kind of just just barely held in place at all there alrighty let's give that a shot this will be fun okay ten yards Tok revs and then thirty twos failure to fire I think I actually hit him let's keep shooting in the same spot so it wasn't quite as terrible as I was expecting but that's about a two foot maybe a two and a half foot group at ten yards because of course the bullets are kind of only bouncing back and forth off the rifling now the fun part is looking at the brass after we fired that so one of our 32s has slid down into the chamber there we go the ejector actually worked on this one our 762 Tokarev is blown out completely straight and r32 oh it's not bad there we go that one's got a little bit of a bulge in it that one's got a little bit more of a bulge in it so you can do it safely but I suppose this is in in n extremis sort of situation which again sounds pretty sexy and cool when people are talking about it but as a practical matter in real life I'm not sure this ever actually is a problem that someone faces I'd like to give a big thanks to Rob for loaning me this gun these are not cheap these guns are in excess of 1500 or 2000 dollars today and so it was very generous of Rob to send me this one let me do some shooting to bring it to you guys if you enjoy seeing this sort of thing on the net please do consider checking out my patreon account it's support from folks there that makes it possible for me to bring you cool guns like this everyday thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,476,931

Rating: 4.9539218 out of 5

Keywords: phillips & rodgers m47 medusa, Rodgers M47 Medusa, medusa, m47, revolver, philips, rogers, multicaliber, bore diameter, Medusa revolver, long flexible fingers, Forgotten Weapons, rimless cartridges, headspace requirements, extractor mechanism, Jonathan Phillips, proper indexing, rimmed cartridges, different cartridges, fragile component, reliable firing, interesting firearm, history, development, accuracy, shtf gun, apocalypse, survivalist, prepper, prepper gun, mccollum, gun

Id: HkUJ2EuTNE0

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Joseplh]

Also explains the bad aim.

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Wow, my two favorite goateed long-haired internet people on one site!