Winchester 1893 & 1897 Pump Shotguns

[Music] 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 coming up for sale in their February 2015 regional auction one of the ones that jumped out at me in the catalog here was this winchester model 1897 pump shotgun classic John Browning design but what I think a lot of people aren't necessarily familiar with is the gun that preceded this which looks very much like it yes is the winchester model 1894 gun also John Browning design works the same way it's very hard pressed to find one of these out in the wild the reason is actually partly that winchester destroyed a whole lot of them partly that they weren't made very long and partly that they had some significant problems so the pump shotgun didn't originate with John Browning the pump shotgun was actually the invention of an American man named Christopher Spencer you may recognize that name he was also the inventor of the first repeating rifle used by the US Cavalry the Spencer repeating rifle used during the Civil War had a buttstock in the magazine lever action design not the world's most practical lever action it certainly was quickly outpaced by the the Henry and Winchester guns but it was the first and it did do fairly well at any rate after the the Civil War was over Spencer spent time inventing a number of things and came up with the pump shotgun they went into production in 1882 and we're kind of a commercial failure the gun wasn't the world's greatest design had some marketing issues at any rate it was sold off lock stock and barrel so to speak the patents the guns the factory the tooling everything we're sold to a company called Bannerman's Bannerman is a think of them like the century international arms of the 1800s going into the 1900s they did a lot of dealing in surplus arms and they did a little bit of manufacturing where it was convenient like buying an existing production line from someone like Spencer Bannerman sold out sold these Spencer pump shotguns for some time and in 1893 when Winchester brought to market John Browning's pump shot and Bannerman immediately sued them over the notion that Spencer had already patented the critical notion of the pump-action shotgun the case actually spent four years in litigation Winchester made these guns until 1897 slowly ultimately the lawsuit result in Winchester's favor and they were allowed to go forward with their production but at that point it was 1897 and they rereleased the gun as the model 1897 alright so here at the bottom we have our 1893 up at the top is the 1897 as I said production on these started in 1893 and in total about 34,000 of them were made before the switch over to the model 1897 the only really the the one major visible difference between the two guns is looking down at the receivers from the top you'll see the 1893 has this cutout on the top of the receiver in 1897 does not that's by far the easiest way to distinguish between the two guns that said if you can get a close look at the guns you'll see that on the side of the slide handle the 1893 is marked winchester model 1897 is of course marked 1897 so the model 1893 was an exposed hammer shotgun so you can [ __ ] this manually if you want to drop it there and of course the bolt comes out the back and the lifter drops out the bottom this was you know this wouldn't be considered ideal on a shotgun today but in 1893 you know some things like this could be excused in terms of design it was a reliable gun it worked the big problem with the 1893 is that it was actually design for 2 and 5/8 inch black powder only shells at the time that wasn't you know that wasn't that much of an issue smokeless powder had been developed it was on the market but it wasn't necessarily the biggest thing yet well the problem was over just the next couple of years smokeless powder became very popular slightly longer shells also a bit popular and Winchester realized that the 1890 three simply didn't have the strength they weren't designed to fire smoke smokeless powder loads and sooner or later people were gonna start doing it and the guns were going to start breaking and possibly hurting people so Winchester did two things they they designed the 1897 which was actually built specifically for smokeless powder it was stronger components better steel and a design intended for higher pressure cartridges and then Winchester actually offered to exchange any 1893 that a customer brought in they would take it and give that person a free 1897 model shotgun this of course attracted quite a few interested parties and all of the 1893 s the Winchester took back in they destroyed which is part of why we have very few of them around today at the 1897 went on to be an extraordinarily popular shotgun for the Winchester company it was in production until the 1950s with in by Winchester and they made just shy of a full million of these guns like I said very popular they were used by the US military in World War one and World War two the the trench gun version has a short barrel and a heat shield up on the barrel and actually a bayonet lug so one of the interesting characteristics about the 1897 is that it does not have a disconnect er what this means is that if you fire the gun and hold the trigger down when you run the pump the hammer will automatically drop and that will fire another cartridge meaning that if you hold the hammer down you can empty the magazine on this the shotgun as quickly as you can rack the slide back and forth how effective that really was kind of depends on how much practice you have but it was a popular feature and frankly remains a popular feature to this day most modern guns do have disconnectors and and that isn't something you can do with them 1893 was released with 30 and 32 inch barrels and only in 12-gauge two and 5/8 inch shells the 1897 has a few more options I should say special-order barrel lengths were available with both guns the 1897 was also available in 16-gauge and little ways into production they developed a take down model where you could remove the barrel and magazine tube rather quickly for compact transport that was takedown was never an option on the 1893 so beyond the change in some of the subtle design elements and the material quality used or the material grade being used there are very few differences between the 1893 in the 1897 the parts are not interchangeable but the design is is basically identical I hope you guys enjoyed the video hope you learn something about the development of the pump-action shotgun early on and if you would like to have these two guns they are for sale this is an auction house after all there is a link right below where you can take a look at Rock Islands catalog page for these two guns and if you'd like to add them to your own collection you can certainly do so thanks for watching [Music]

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Views: 298,980

Rating: 4.9583178 out of 5

Keywords: Winchester Model 1893, Shotgun, Winchester Repeating Arms Company (Defunct Organization), Pump-action Shotgun, 1897, 1893, Roper, Spencer, pump, slide, shells, 12ga, 16ga, black powder, smokeless, Browning, John Browning, JMB

Id: JtIGfX7MGTE

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 12 2015