[ von Steiger Revolvers ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Kessler Auction House in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, taking a look at this really cool collection of six very closely related Swiss prototype revolvers. Now the backdrop to this story is that in 1872 the Swiss military adopted a new pattern of revolver. It was a rimfire, black-powder,
10.4mm cartridge-firing revolver. And like many revolvers of that time
period, it was a fairly slow gun to reload. Meaning it had a fairly
low practical rate of fire. Once you emptied the cylinder, well, it's going
to take you a long time to get your next shot off. And that concerned some
of the military in Switzerland, and they decided that there's got to be some
way to improve the rate of fire of these revolvers. And so they started looking for
someone who could come up with a pattern of revolver that
could speed this up. And that's where von Steiger comes in. Von Steiger was born in 1818, lived until 1896. He actually served in the Dutch
... Marine Corps from 1832 until 1836. He was posted in and lived in
East India, he lived in Africa, he was actually in Brazil from 1850 to 1858. And in 1858 he finally came back to
Switzerland where he had been born, and he formed his gun company in Thun. Von Steiger's company would do
a bunch of different sorts of work. They did Milbank-Amsler
cartridge conversions on rifles. They actually manufactured
Swiss Vetterli rifles, you can find them today marked
"von Steiger" on the side from the manufacturer. And when the Swiss government went
looking for a new faster-firing revolver, von Steiger thought he might
be able to get a contract for that. One of his employees, a guy ... by the
name of Koechlin [?], something like that, had come up with a patented mechanism for
ejecting the cases out of a revolver cylinder. And that's what we have here, six different
progressive iterations of the von Steiger revolver. And these started in 9mm, then they went to 10.4mm. And I think we should just show you these up close because I know you can't see
them very well from that angle. So this isn't quite the very
first von Steiger revolver, but it's darn close, being serial number 2. And these ... very first couple of
guns actually had brass frames, presumably that being easier to machine to
get the system just right than a steel frame. And you can see the
auto-ejecting system on this. You can see there's a little tab right
here, and when I cock the hammer that is going to rotate forward, where it
will lock under the rim of the cartridge. This is now the just fired
cartridge coming out. I'll show you up close on a later one
exactly how this avoids hitting the rim, but basically it slides in underneath
the rim as the cylinder is rotating. It's now under the rim, and when you
fire the gun that tab comes back out. The same spring that propels the hammer
forward propels that tab backwards, and that kicks the cartridge
right out of that last chamber. So ... each time you fire one case
comes ejecting out of the gun. Now the problem with this that was
discovered, once they started test firing it, was it actually shot cases straight
back into the shooter's face. Which is a little distracting
and a bit of a problem. So in the second model
they would go on to fix that. There are a couple of other features
I should show you first, however. The ... beginning batch of von Steiger
revolvers were in 9mm and not 10.4. There was some discussion of looking
at a smaller cartridge for the Army. Here on the left side is a little
flat spring, this one's kind of worn. But what that does is actually hold cartridges
in the cylinder while they are rotating through, it prevents cartridges from falling out.
This also serves as your loading gate. So the reason this is a flat spring is so that you can put a cartridge
right here in this little trough, depress the spring, and load them
one at a time into the cylinder there. And lastly we actually have a
manual safety here on the side. So that engages, I believe forward
is engaged, rearward is disengaged, and that locks the hammer in place
as well as locking the trigger. If we look at the markings here, you
can see W.V. Steiger (W. von Steiger), Thun, which is where his factory was,
and this is production number M2. So this is one of the prototype models. So here's the next version of the gun. This is serial number 5, all of these
9mm guns are in the same serial range. So it only took three guns,
and frankly maybe less than that, before they realised that this
whole thing of kicking a case back right into the shooters face was
really a problem, so they added this. This is just a little deflector, so that when the case comes out it
hits that and bounces off to the side. And that should mean the problem is solved. A few other changes on this, you'll
notice it doesn't have a manual safety. A ... lot of these revolvers will have
a variety of different features to them as they experimented
with different elements. You can still see the same spring-loaded
sort of loading gate / retaining tab right there. Now if we move up the serial number range a
bit to number 25, we can find a better solution. Instead of just having a
little tab to deflect cases, now there's a whole regular
trough to really channel them out. So the case will come back,
and then bounce off to the right. We still have no safety on this one. Honestly the idea of manual safeties on
revolvers is a little bit goofy and unnecessary. I should say, these are
all 5 shot 9mm revolvers. They all have a cleaning rod in here. We'll take apart one of
the last ones in this series and show you a few of the
other mechanical details, but we are holding the same
basic form here as the ... earlier two. So there's our basic progression, we're
going to start with brass and no deflector. And then we have a very simple deflector,
then we have a nice deflection channel. Now we're back with number 32, so a few more
along, and we have a new safety mechanism. Now, instead of a sliding
button on the frame that actually interacts with
the fire control mechanism, now we have an experimental safety here
which locks into a tab in the cylinder. So this is going to lock
like that, right into that notch. And interesting that it is for the
left-hander very easily accessible. I suppose for the right-hander it is as well,
as long as you use your trigger finger for it. This style of safety is
actually kind of reminiscent of Dutch police revolvers,
which did something very similar. In the Dutch case it was to keep track of blank
rounds versus live ball rounds in the revolver. On this it was probably
just intended as a safety. Other than that we have really
the same exact style of gun. Now these 9mm guns have all been
done in the 1872 to 1873 period when they were looking at 9mm. That would change in approximately 1876, when the military decided
that it wanted to stick with 10.4. And so von Steiger would produce
a second batch of pistols in 10.4mm. These were actually tested as
early as 1872 by the Swiss Army. And apparently they worked quite well,
at least on the trials field. They were very fast to shoot, one officer came
out with a record of 10 shots in 20 seconds. Which for what is effectively a gate-loading
type of revolver, is in fact pretty darn fast. Now with the [10.4mm] production guns
the basic style stayed the same, but of course the frame
had to get a little bit beefier, and the cylinder definitely
got beefier as well. However, we still have this same system
of auto-ejection using this little tab. In fact on this one you can see
how, as I'm cocking the hammer, that ejector tab is going
forward in between cartridges. Then the cylinder rotates
the rest of the way, allowing that tab to kind of sneak
in under the rim of the cartridge. Then when I fire, that tab pops back open. And now lastly we have one further
... 10.4mm example of the gun, and this is pretty much the
final trials version of the gun. This is the pre-production prototype, and
this is what would have been produced. Now these were never produced in quantity
because they weren't actually chosen, we'll get into that story in a moment. But this is the final version,
so I'm going to pull this one apart and show you some of the
other mechanical details of it. So we can start by unscrewing the cleaning
rod here, that's the lock for the axis pin. So that's our manual
ejector rod or a cleaning rod. Once that is out, I can then rotate
this and remove the cylinder pin. Then we're going to put the revolver at
half-cock and the cylinder just drops right out. One of the downsides of having an
automatic ejection system on a revolver is that it requires a substantially
more complicated cylinder. You can see all the additional cuts in here
required to give space to that little ejector finger. It's interesting to note that they actually went
and numbered the cylinders, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Now for accessing the lockwork, if we take a look at the pistol we can see this
little open slot in the back, and a screw here. And that is a give-away that
this side plate comes off. That of course requires a screwdriver,
and that would be a foolish thing to have for a military service weapon right?
Something that requires special tools? Well, von Steiger thought of that. We have this rotating lanyard
ring here, but if I push it in, it ... locks into this plug in the bottom
of the grip, which I can then unscrew. And what do we have in here
... (very tightly in there), but a couple of tools. For one we have a cleaning jag that
screws onto the cylinder axis pin. And we have a folding screwdriver. So I can take the screwdriver,
and unscrew ... that side-plate screw. Now with the screw out, if it's
too tight to get the side plate off I can actually use the screwdriver
as a little leverage wedge right there. Pop this open and, presto,
there are my internal components. Here on the side plate you
can see the ejector finger, and how it gets cycled back and forth. And then inside we have this
whole mess of lockwork. This ... is definitely not
a super-cheap revolver. This thing has a lot going on inside, and it would
have been a fairly expensive gun to produce. However, a really nice gun. And there you go, one von Steiger revolver. I'm not going to open up all of the other five
for you, they are all basically the exact same. Same system, same disassembly,
same internal mechanism. Just the changes as we've seen to
the ejector system and the calibre. Here's a view of the lockwork
without the cylinder in place. So we've got the hand to
start cycling the cylinder. We've got the ejector, and we've got then the
lock that rises up to lock the cylinder in place. Then of course when you fire, the lock
stays in place as long as the trigger is held. The ejector comes back. And when I release
the trigger, the hand retreats and the lock drops. So seeing how that is supposed
to function is cool and all, but what you guys really want is
an actual demonstration I'm sure. And in this case I actually have a
piece of empty 10.4 Swiss brass. So I can load it here as
if it were a live cartridge. There we go. And then cock the
hammer, we would fire that one. So it's now been fired. I cock
the hammer for the next round. Now the ejector is under that, and
when I fire it - boom - it goes flying out. Let me zoom out a bit so you can
see that from a little more distance. Got that. This is a
double-action revolver. There it goes. It is flying
directly towards the camera, but note that I am back here
and the camera is over here. If we are directly behind it,
it's going to kick the case out to the right so that it
doesn't hit the shooter. Like so. There it goes off to the right. Ultimately, all of this talk
and development about ... auto-ejecting revolvers
would come to naught. What the Swiss Army finally decided
on was a much simpler system. It was the Abadie system as ... developed into a
Swiss revolver by, I believe then Colonel, Schmidt, who was actually running the
Waffenfabrik Bern plant. And what the Abadie system does is
basically when you open the loading gate the trigger is disconnected from the
hammer so it only rotates the cylinder. Which means you can open
the gate and use the trigger to cycle the cylinder
through one shot at a time. And it does substantially
increase the speed of reloading, while also being much simpler
than any of these auto-ejecting systems. The Swiss would keep that revolver, that
would be the 1878 pattern revolver in 10.4mm. And then it would very quickly be
replaced with the pattern of 1882 revolver, which was basically the same sort of system, but in a new 7.5mm cartridge,
a much smaller revolver cartridge. So in total, von Steiger revolvers, they
didn't make more than a couple of dozen. We have a really good sampling of
the whole production series here. From basically the very first model,
through to the trials version in 10.4mm, and this was pretty much the end
of the line for von Steiger revolvers. It's really cool to get a
chance to look at these. I did mention at the beginning that
I am at the Kessler Auction House, however, as some people are
probably going to recommend, these guns are actually earmarked
for a museum here in Switzerland. So I don't know if they'll be on display or not, but they will actually be going to a museum and
not into a private collection, for better or worse. Anyway, thanks to Kessler for
letting me take a look at these. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you did,
do consider checking out my Patreon account. It is the folks there supporting me at
a buck a month that makes it possible for me to travel to places like
Switzerland and bring you guys really cool prototype revolvers like these. Thanks for watching.
