Roper Revolving Shotgun (now with dummy cartridges!)

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 house taking a look at some of the guns from their September of 2015 premier auction that's coming up one that I found here that I was not expecting to see was a Roper revolving shotgun now it wasn't all that long ago actually that I did a video on a different second Roper that last video the gun was it was kind of a mess it was missing some parts had some broken pieces and I didn't think I would have the chance to see a complete one for a long time so I figured I'd take advantage of the broken one well lo and behold here I have a complete and functioning one and what's really cool is that it has a handful of original Roper cartridge cases with it and those are very interesting and important element of the gun so this this shotgun was invented by man named Sylvester Roper he patented it in 1866 they went into production in 1867 he's typically not really well known today he did actually collaborate with Christopher Spenser and the two of them working together got a patent for the world's first pump-action shotgun in 1882 but what Roper is much better known for in general is actually has worked with motorcycles he was inducted into the u.s. motorcycle Hall of Fame a few years ago he actually died in his 70s while riding a steam-powered velocipede you know cool way to go out by the way classy at any rate his revolving shotgun is a really interesting gun it's totally different from probably anything else you've seen in a very long time so why don't I go ahead and bring the camera back here let me show you not just how this works but because I have these cases I can actually demonstrate the loading and firing and unloading processes all right at a basic level the Roper is is a four round rotating magazine these were made in 12 and 16 gauge this particular one is 12 gauge and what makes it first the first thing that's unusual about it is that it is actually an open bolt firing manually operated shotgun so what we have here is the bolt when I [ __ ] the hammer which by the way has a very long stroke the bolt head comes back and you heard a metallic click in here this is actually under spring tension and it rotated one position at the final bit of the hammer cocking so we now have the bolt extending backwards out of the gun what we would do is we would have one of these shells sitting in here when you pull the trigger this one's a little bit finicky when you pull the trigger the bolt drops it's going to pick up that shell that's sitting on that magazine tray it's going to run it all the way forward the bolt then locks in place so you can only pushing on the bolt won't open it up you have to pull the hammer in order to unlock the toggle inside here this is chambered and the last bit of travel of the hammer throws the firing pin forward and fires the shell you can then [ __ ] the gun again it has an extractor right there at the front of the bolt it'll pull that case out leave it in the gun in that position on the magazine and then rotate to the next shell so I have this loading gate open so that you can see what's going on what you would actually do is load the gun and then close the gate and you'd keep it closed so that the entire action of the gun was sealed up and wouldn't get dirty then to unload the gun well let me show you the loading process first because unloading is exactly the opposite of loading so to load the gun I start with the bolt closed and they need to open the bolt before I get it all the way back because remember when the bolt fully clicks back that's when this follower rotates so I pull it most of the way back like this then I take one of my cartridges and I drop it in the magazine and then I click the the hammer all the way back what that does is rotates the follower one position so now I have a theoretically loaded cartridge sitting in this position in the magazine alright now I just repeat this process a couple more times this one is a little bit finicky with the magazine so close the bolt all the way open it up drop my shell in make sure it's all the way back there we go now I have two shells in there now I drop the bolt pull it back drop number three in there we go I'm I'm only going to use three here now oh if we look there now I have cocked the hammer and I have what is hypothetically a live shell in place ready to fire now I would be doing this with the dust cover closed nothing here has to be open for the gun to actually work now I'll leave it open so you can see what's happening this now when I pull the trigger the shell gets pushed forward all the way forward right here the bolt is fully in battery and locked and then the last bit of travel of the hammer hits the firing pin and fires this shell boom gun fires now I'm ready to go again so I [ __ ] the hammer back that in theory if our extractor was not 150 years old pulls that case out you saw the magazine rotated again so we now have an empty shell down here in this compartment we have another live shell here you can repeat this process four times so if you load four live shells you can then fire four in a row and then at that point you're left with an empty gun that has four fired cases in it once once you're at that point okay you fired four rounds guns been closed now you're ready to reload what you do is pop the cover open and just flip the gun upside down and repeat the process see how many do I have in here so I have one more loaded chamber there it is flip it over upside down I pull out my empty cases the gun is now empty and ready to reload now let's take a closer look at these cases these are steel frankly this is very similar to what the very first Gatling guns used this is a rebase achill II a reusable hand loaded cartridge case so as I said it's steel you would actually set up cushon cap in the back here the gun came with a little tool for setting those the manual recommends Berdan caps as being the best suited you would put in powder put in your shot buckshot birdshot a single slug whatever you plan to fire put on some something to seal it the manual actually says after you put the primer in you should put on a little bit of tallow to make it waterproof and and make sure the primer doesn't come out but I should say percussion cap rather than primer and you could have as many of these as you want it you know that allows you to reload them this one actually still has a fired primer in it the manual also mentions that you should as quickly as possible after you're done shooting you make sure to pop the percussion caps out of these so it says if they start to corrode at all it will become very difficult to get them out which makes sense given that it's a steel cartridge case so this is a early predecessor to the brass metallic case now in 1867 when these guns were being made there were more advanced cartridges on the market if you think about it the the 1860 Henry was on the market and the 1866 improvement on it the winchester 1866 had recently been released to the public but for shotguns there weren't quite as many modern options in the Roper wasn't that bad of a gun at the time definitely had an advantage over say you know two shot double guns they were moderately successful never made a huge dent in the market though and that leads them to be quite rare today alright now that we've seen this work I want to point out a couple specific elements of the gun and why it works this is the firing pin and I will show you that is that's more easy to point out by disassembling the gun to do that we have two screws down here this one is actually just a set screw and to take the front half of the gun off I take this set screw and I actually screw it in deeper like that and then the whole front end of the gun unthreads so this is just a big hollow cylinder with a barrel in it it does also have a center hole right there that's a locator for the magazine follower if we look at the back half of the gun you can see we have the follower here when I push the bolt forward you can see that this is a continuation of that firing pin piece comes to right there we can pull out the follower it has for very small little cut see reges that dictate its rotational motion in this they're a little bit worn and every once in a while you have to manually kind of adjust the the follower to get it to cycle you price saw me doing that and then this is the back end of the gun so what this system did was ameliorate the problem of a muzzleloading shotgun by using this cartridge case to fully enclose the the combustion in the chamber so if we had a gas seal it would be up here the barrel came all the way back to here and that prevents any significant amount of blow by it probably got quite dirty this is a very thick steel case and it would almost certainly not operate well observation is the idea of the the case material expanding under pressure to form a gas seal you can do that with steel cases in fact there's quite a bit of steel cased ammunition has been used regularly by militaries and frankly a lot of the AKM oh you buy today is steel case because that's cheaper to make a steel case this thick isn't going to be doing very much stretching here's our extractor on the bottom of the gun interestingly the previous Roper that I was looking at on video had an extractor on the top of the bolt instead of the bottom I'm not sure exactly what significance that has probably some manufacturing changes over the course of production well thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed the video I certainly didn't anticipate I'd be able to do this one anytime soon and it's really cool to have been able to get my hands on a functioning and intact Roper if you'd like to add this to your own collection maybe about that last one and you're ready for a live gun instead of just a wallhanger go ahead and take a look at the link in the text description below that will take you to rock island's catalog page they've got some pictures their description of the gun and everything there to set up an account online and place a bid if you'd like to have this yourself thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,346,148

Rating: 4.8795462 out of 5

Keywords: Roper, Spencer, shotgun, cartridge, Civil War, 12ga, 16ga, revolving, rotating, repeating, black powder, velocipede, open bolt, single action, history, Sylvester Roper, Sylvester H. Roper (Deceased Person)

Id: T-UUGG_ElFg

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/jakedadogg]

What an interesting mechanism for such an old gun. This would definitely be interesting in take and hold.

[u/TrucksAndCigars]

This seems like it'd need some brand new code to keep fired shells in the magazine, otherwise you'd have physics-active empties just flopping around clipping out of the gun.

Super neat gun, though. Wouldn't mind it in early-game Calico.

[u/Braekyn]

Wow, looks like a huge P.I.T.A, I love it!