Strange Unique European Revolver

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I mean I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company we're taking a look at some of the guns that are coming up for sale in their September of 2016 premiere auction and I have one here that has absolutely no markings and I really don't know any historical provenance on and neither does Rock Island as best we can tell however it's an interesting mechanical piece and so despite not knowing who made it or when we can probably make some guesses and it's interesting gun to take a look at so I'm not going to bother with any further ado out here let's bring the camera in up close and take a look at this thing so obviously the first thing that comes to mind is oh my god what kind of weird deformity in the hand did this guns designer have although it actually as long as you don't mind having an extremely high or access this isn't terribly bad for a grip it's weird it's not great but it's not totally horrible now what's interesting about this gun is the way in which it works normally in order to revolve the cylinder of a revolver the most common method is to have a hand in the back plate here and a series of ratchets on the back of the cylinder and the hand is this little thing that pushes up which hits the ratchets rotates the cylinder now a secondary method which is a lot less common but which you do find is to have a zigzag pattern of grooves cut on the outside of the cylinder then you'd have a stud here in the bottom of the frame that rotates in or that runs back and forth in those grooves forces the cylinder to rotate you see that in for example the Webley Fosbury the mauser 1878 revolvers and a few others out there this kind of uses a play on that but this is as far as I can tell pretty much a unique system for operating revolver what we have here are a series of diagonal splines I suppose you'd call them on the outside of the cylinder and then in the bottom we have a track that moves back and forth and has a diagonal slot cut in it so in order to [ __ ] the revolver you use this finger piece down here and you can see right there we've got this diagonal spline running in that slot and rotating the cylinder so now it's locked in place at the same time the space between these two splines is the same width as this bar that runs back and forth and so that forces the cylinder to lock into position because it can't rotate to either side with these splines being blocked as they are now we have our firing pin here which interestingly by the way the firing pin is just a threaded piece in this what looks like a hammer and so you can very easily adjust the firing pin depth of contact or take it out entirely then when you're ready to fire and hold on to this pull the trigger which releases this bar drops down and the firing pin obviously hits a primer and fires to wreak och the piece you do it again so this is a single action only gun and now we can get to the problem with it this this actually seems kind of clever it's certainly a neat idea at first glance but reloading is an issue so there's a loading gate you open the loading gate and then you put a cartridge in and then you rotate the cylinder to put in the next one which you can't do ah well that's because the Hammers down that's that's typical we need to put this half [ __ ] which allows us to freely rotate the cylinder well there is no half cocked position and because of the way this mechanism works there can't be any half-cocked position the hammer firing pin is directly connected to this piece and this piece positively rotates the cylinder there's no position we can put this in in which the cylinder is free to rotate so I can put one cartridge in there and by the way there is no ejector of any sort you have to like get a stick or just hope they the cases fall free I can put a cartridge in there but then in order to rotate it I have to [ __ ] the hammer okay now I can put a cartridge in there but the one I put in first is directly under this firing pin and in order to rotate the cylinder another position I have to lower the hammer the firing pin all the way down onto that cartridge which is a bad idea that's just asking for an accidental discharge and then you have to repeat this process four more times to fill the rest of the chambers so I don't know that there's any particularly good solution to this problem short of being really really careful I suppose or the other thing you could do is unthread the firing pin and then I guess that would probably be the best actual safe way to do it is unthread the firing pin so it comes far enough out that it's not actually going to contact the primers and then you go through this cocking mechanism to load all six chambers and then you would have to remember to replace the firing pin and you want to get it to the right protrusion length too far in and you'll pierce primers too far out and you won't detonate them and then you can actually go ahead and fire so now in this designers defense this was clearly an experimental piece this I mean with no markings it's all in the white you put some definite work into it I mean it's pretty well finished here it's a nicely produced gun and it doesn't bear the really rough markings machine markings of many prototypes but despite that this is clearly an experimental design and not ready for actual sale for all I know it may not ever have been intended for sale this may have been someone's personal project just a gun that they wanted to make for themselves people still do that today and people certainly did it a hundred years ago in terms of general characteristics I would estimate this at somewhere like 1880s style with the the single action only with a loading gate like this that's a late 1800s type of feature the sights seem like that this doesn't appear to be a modern production gun all the features really do point to a set in 1880s maybe 1890s late enough to have center fire metallic cartridges but early enough that well frankly early enough that tinker's like whoever made this hadn't started working with automatic pistols so much thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed the video definitely something weird out of the box here to take a look at today if you think it's out of the box enough that you really like to just own it yourself well take a look at the description text below you'll find a link there to rock Islands catalog page on the piece and take a look at their pictures and description and not place a bid right there online or come here in person to participate live in the auction thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 905,203

Keywords: europe, france, belgium, mystery, strange, unique, unusual, zig zag, zigzag, revolver, spline, gunsmith, prototype, experiment, experimental, history, 1880s, 1890s, webley fosbery, fosbery, 1878, mauser, unknown, weird

Id: NHggIGRdvCg

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/indigo-phoenix]

This is a great channel for old and really unusual guns, and great inspiration for any steampunk fiction.