This 1690s Pistol Is Hiding a Surprise!

[Music] hey everybody Adam Savage and I am in the armor conservation Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside our friend Sean how are you sir doing well uh this is we've been filming videos all day and I am not only not tired I am so happy I just love being in this place um you guys have brought out Mysteries you've brought out conundrums some amazing pieces and I recently collected Hamilton's dueling pistols and we were talking about such and you've brought out a Unique Piece I did I brought out this gorgeous little pistol this is an Italian pistol made by uh um Mateo uh cheki who's known by really the name Aqua Fresca Aqua Fresca him and his whole family so fresh father yeah father went by it he had Brothers in the trade as well so sometimes it can be tired to tell which of them made it but in this case Mateo was the master of Engraving and chiseling and this is clearly one of his pieces now what's really cool here on the back you've got a number three so there is an identical pistol with the same number three in another collection absolutely identical which means this was part a very large garneter so you would have had you know you wouldn't have had a single set of pistols or a pair you would have had two sets of two riding pistols with it you two of these little pistols you might have a fouling piece we don't know how large it was but the fact that both of these have the same number on it instead of them all being sequential indicates we're talking pretty big multiple recessive matched pairs of the highest possible quality oh yes all decorated to the same level wow and I you've got this beautiful silver inlay chiseling I quite like if you can look at this uh a little monkey holding an apple engraved in there oh my God it is a monkey holding an apple Aqua Fresca look at that also this is silver inlaid in wood it is so fine how do you how does one even chisel wood that that skinny I can't do it to get to get I can't even and now this this came in and had a very interesting condition issue oh okay so if I can actually show you something real quick yeah this is of course not just a pistol I wouldn't show you just a pistol Museum of Art this also conceals a hidden dagger no what boy they were really good at designing shivs back in the uh yeah yeah that is so now when this came into US yeah I'll show you this here if you look at the bottom you see there's a break here along the trigger guard the if you look at how these are held together you've got these two little Clips here there's a clip here and the corresponding clip on on sort of the four stock here yeah base of the barrel when you press up on the trigger guard it pulls back this and inside is that's sort of an S shape and the other end of that pushes on the other clip uh on sort of the the fore end of the gun so it unlocks both of these lashes simultaneously and no other way could the barrel be separated that is the wallage of somebody you shove something in there that is the way yeah that is the way it's done yeah so this trigger guard that that toe of the trigger guard here acts as a spring so what happened is years and years of people going hey look what I got right that snapped oh it broke out yeah so right where it needed to present provide the spring tension right just just years and years of that sort of deflection eventually across stress fracture and it broke so when it came to us someone had previously repaired it and they had sort of pinned on they chiseled out underneath the stock yeah and they riveted on a tiny piece of brass Way Too Thin to function as you spring in any way so then that over time snaps when it came to us we had like a chunk of brass up inside this chiseled grip and then we had a bit of brass on the end of the trigger guard once you disassembled it so now let's imagine this pistol came to us you know it let's imagine it broke here there was no repair no original repair whatsoever you know we're often asked do we keep we maintain our Firearms as functional weapons right broadly speaking no this is an art museum if a mainspring breaks I don't need to replace the mainspring for the visitor to come in and appreciate what the firearm was fair enough however this is functional right right taking these apart that you know that that sort of part of what makes this piece so interesting and we were kind of fortunate in that the previous restoration had already been done you know like We I Wouldn't chisel out the stock or drill a hole in the trigger guard myself but if it's already there I'm not going to look a gift horse in my mouth fair enough yeah so uh what we ended up doing is I took a piece of good steel and I ground it to shape to fit the cavity that already existed and then I riveted that oh he treated it so it had a nice spring nice spring he treated it on there or he treated it and then riveted it in back onto the trigger guard and now we have a functional pistol that we can show to our visitors amazing amazing I noticed something here uh when you were when you've been handling it as I looked at it I noticed that the two shiniest parts of it as I look at all this beautiful shine are the bottom of the trigger guard which makes sense because that's where you'd be pressing to separate it and then I also noticed that this uh Lazaro Mark there's also crazy shiny and so I was just holding this and I realized oh yeah there you go that's how they'd be holding it like this and you get your big fat thumb on there and so this is a 100 200 years of Polished by people showing it out previous owners going oh look how cool this is dude and that's exactly what we're doing yeah what a magnificent piece the sculpturality is in sculpturality sculptural aspects uh he's a master missing a ram rug missing a ramrod uh one of my dreams one day is to make make one to match another Mateo you must have well does the other version of this in another Museum have the ramrod it it has a ramrod not the original one but it's fabulous because it's a little seated monkey wearing a crown fabulous so good so we do have a match pair made by the same maker so we could we could model it on and does that not have a monkey eating a pair sadly now if you replicated it might you add a monkey with a that's amazing I I'm thinking about it now um I love the idea that someday a new ramrod might get made for that and of course if we did do it it would mark it so that it could be identified as a replacement this is do you want to give it a try oh yeah can I yeah oh it's very subtle yeah it's not even like you feel a real click it's just a bit of pressure yeah it's really well made that is it's got a little bell crank linkage in there for moving that that's incredible it's amazing that it's still so smooth yeah also what a just brutal shiv again this is just something something so small and elegant packing such a brutal little yeah and the trigger still was able to oh right yeah because you can just the trigger worked because it's just moving that lever nothing in here oh that's totally great right because it's a real because it's a Flintlock wow it's also um the interior yeah yeah you get to see the interior of the lock and it's gorgeous and they've actually gone and added some matching he knows it's going to be taken apart and including he polished the inside here as well oh that's great one of the things I love about coming here is that I'll often have some line of obsession that I have only indulged in pictures and literature and when you guys let me handle these things it just feels like this whole deeper appreciation and elaboration of the history and of the craftspersonship yeah it's different when you get to hold it in your hands really is oh right so that depression is just for that big Flathead screw head there dude can do this for hours thank you my friends that was amazing [Music]

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 303,430

Keywords: tested, Matteo Cecchi, historic firearms, history pistol, metropolican museum of art, adam savage, adam savage met armor, adam savage met, Acquafresca, matteo cecchini, ancient firearms

Id: eei4rBWdXhM

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023