Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're doing wheellocks 101.
I've covered some of these in the past
and people are always really curious about them.
They're a weapon system that's very foreign to what we have today.
So I figured let's take the chance here and take a closer
look at this one and do some shooting and discuss its history,
and mechanics for that matter. Now this particular
wheellock is actually a hunting rifle that is owned and
actively used by a friend of mine named Mike Carrick,
who is an editor for Arms Heritage Magazine.
Definitely a thing to check out if you're looking for more information on interesting historical guns.
This particular rifle was manufactured in 1991 by a guy named Earl Wyatt in New Zealand,
so it is most definitely a modern reproduction. It's got a high quality steel barrel, it's got good sights on it,
but it's designed in the exact style of a 1600s German hunting rifle.
In fact in the style of one that I did a video on not that long ago.
So one of the first questions that always seems to come up with people when they look at a gun like this is,
"How do you hold that? Because it looks really awkward with this stuff going on and this thing on the butt plate."
Well, the answer is ... while it looks awkward, you hold it kind of like it looks like you ought to.
So you got three finger grooves here plus ... a space for your trigger finger,
and then it just comes up into your shoulder, like so.
Now the reason that there's this steel ball on the butt plate is to protect the butt plate itself
when you're putting the gun on the ground. So you can stand it on that ball
and that takes all the brunt of being scratched up on the ground.
The reason you need to do that a lot is because this is a muzzle loaded rifle.
So historically we know these were around at least as early as 1512, because there's a surviving Royal Declaration
from Maximilian I forbidding ownership of these to people in, I honestly don't remember what country, but it's a surviving decree
and it tells us that the guns certainly existed as early as 1512, which means they probably existed earlier.
At this time period in the 1500s the typical military firearm was actually a matchlock.
The idea behind a matchlock is it's an extremely simple muzzle loading rifle.
You've got a touch hole at the back, and you literally carry a lit smoldering match.
Usually this would be like an ammonia soaked piece of rope or twine.
And you touch that into the flash hole and it sets off the gun.
That was reliable and it's cheap. But it had some downsides, namely
you had to be wandering around with a lit match all the time. And so of course if you
lost track of it, you know, got distracted by something else, the match could go out and then you'd have to light it again.
And by the way in 1500 you couldn't just be carrying around a pack of Bic lighters.
You also had the potential hazard of, well, you're also carrying a powder horn full of black powder.
And if you manage to carelessly get your lit match into your black powder, say when you're loading the gun,
it goes kaboom and it blows you up, and that's a problem.
Now the wheellock offered an alternative to a lot of those problems, although it brought its own problems instead.
So the advantage of a wheellock was that you could wind it up and have it ready under spring tension to fire
with the powder pan closed, protected from the elements. And you could carry this around
loaded and not have to pay attention to it the way you would with a matchlock.
The downside was these are a little less reliable to actually fire than matchlocks,
it's not uncommon to ... pull the trigger and have the wheel spin and it just goes piff, and nothing happens.
In addition, in the 1500s and 1600s you didn't exactly have modern manufacturing technology,
so there were a lot of issues with low quality materials, low quality barrels, low quality springs.
Easy to have a spring that doesn't quite have the right heat treat to it and it loses tension.
All of those things can cause major problems on a gun like this. So these kind of tended to remain
guns for the wealthier folks in society, this wasn't a peasant's rifle.
Now they were actually used by knights in armour on horseback,
the guys we always normally think of as riding around with swords.
Well those guys recognised that firearms, and wheellocks in particular, were quite effective weapons.
You're not going to be riding around on a horse with a matchlock. That's really awkward and problematic.
But you certainly could do so with a wheellock, or a pair of wheellocks.
And this is where our concept of the cavalry carbine really actually begins.
It was this, not quite a full length rifle like this one, but a shorter carbine or musketoon
that could be carried by a soldier on horseback or a knight.
Or alternatively a pair of wheellock pistols. Not uncommon to have a pair of holsters on the saddle of your horse,
carry a pair of pistols there. That concept actually came right down through history through things like the
Walker Dragoon Pistols, and the Roth-Steyr 1907 cavalry pistols. It began with wheellocks.
The typical military rifle of the time remained a matchlock though.
There were some military forces that were equipped with wheellocks, there are castles in Europe
that are full of literally thousands of these from various military forces.
But in general it would have been matchlocks simply because of the reduced cost and the simplicity.
And the wheellock kind of stayed this dead end of development.
... The matchlock was ultimately replaced by the flintlock in military service.
By the middle of the 1700s these were pretty well obsolete, pretty much everyone had gone over to flintlocks.
They were more expensive than a matchlock but they're a lot cheaper than this. And they're more reliable than one of these.
So ... most of the surviving wheellocks tend to be kind of fancy sporting guns
purchased by kind of wealthy people in the 1500s and 1600s, and maybe into the early 1700s.
The last one that I'm aware of being manufactured was in 1829, not counting reproduction type guns like this one.
And so that's pretty much the period of the wheellock, 1500s into the 1600s.
So the way this works mechanically. On a flintlock you've got a piece of flint striking against steel and creating sparks,
on a wheellock you have a serrated steel wheel that's spinning against a piece of iron pyrite,
better known as fool's gold. You can actually see a little bit of the gold here,
the rest of this is all sooty because we've been shooting it today.
But what you would do is you actually have a spanner wrench and you have to wind up this wheel.
Inside the action you have a very long leaf spring and then a chain connected to the wheel and the spring.
And when you wind this, what you're actually doing is winding that chain up,
so the spring is being pulled up. When you pull the trigger, the wheel is released,
spring pulls down, and the chain spins this thing up kind of like a yo-yo.
Now in order to set it I have to first pull this rear trigger. That basically locks the trigger mechanism in the wheel.
And then I have my spanner wrench here, that fits on the square hub of the wheel,
and it's going to be about a three quarter turn,
like that. It's going to lock in place, and now the wheel is sprung, loaded and ready.
What I would do next is pour some powder into my priming pan here.
You can see there's a flash hole right there. And then when I'm ready to fire,
I drop the pyrite right down in contact with the wheel, pull the trigger, the wheel is going to spin,
friction against the pyrite is going to create sparks.
That will ignite this powder charge, which will then go through the flash hole and ignite the main charge.
I can spin the wheel here for you guys, just so you that can see that happen.
Actually ... not quite as remarkably impressive as you might be expecting, it is only three quarters of a turn,
But that's enough for that steel wheel to create sparks against the pyrite.
So the first thing we need to do is load powder.
This is a .58 calibre rifled gun,
and its standard full powder charge is 100 grains of 3F or 2F (although its owner prefers 3F) black powder.
Although we're going to use like a 75 grain charge today, because we're not actually trying to shoot an animal.
Typically you'd have a powder horn, but just taking our measured charge of powder, dumping it down the bore.
There we go.
Now typically you would also use a cloth patch around the ball,
but the balls we have today are pretty much the exact bore diameter. They're a nice tight fit.
So going to put that in there, and I'm gonna have the sprue mark facing straight up to give best accuracy.
We have this two-part loading tool. The first part here is used to seat the ball,
which I mostly did by hand, and then you have a starter rod,
push it that far in. Once we've got it that far in we transition to the full-length rod to ram the ball all the way down the action.
The full length rod allows me to finish seating the ball.
You'll notice it has a guide here, so that I don't damage the crown.
Ram that nice and tight down to the bottom. You want to make sure that the ball is tight against the powder.
You want the powder nice and tightly packed without any air gaps to avoid, you know, explosions.
Next up I have to wind the wheel. So I'm going to pull this trigger to engage it, and then put the spanner wrench on,
(the side that fits, there we go). Counter-clockwise about three quarters of a turn on this particular gun.
Now the wheel is cocked and ready and next I'm going to fill the priming pan.
In theory you could do this with 4F powder, the owner of this particular rifle has found that 3F
works just as well, and then it's one less thing that you have to carry with you.
Now ideally
I want to keep the serrations of that wheel clear so that the pyrite sits nice and flush on the steel.
If I were going to wait to fire, I would now
press this button
to close the pan and keep it protected. Since I'm ready to shoot, we'll leave that nice and open.
Last thing to do before firing,
just lift the pyrite into position on the wheel. Now we're ready to fire as soon as I pull the trigger.
And I even made a hit.
Firing a muzzle loader like this, or a flintlock, or a matchlock,
one of the interesting things that you notice is that there's a very long lock time.
And that means the time from when you actually pull the trigger to when the gun fires.
And in this case you actually have to wait for the wheel to start spinning,
to create sparks, to ignite the powder in the pan,
and then to ignite the main charge and then the bullet to leave the muzzle.
And that kind of looks like it all happens in an instant, but compared to a modern gun
where you pull the trigger and hit a primer and things go off, this happens far slower.
This is ... is a difficult test of marksmanship if you are shooting at serious targets,
because you have to hold this on target through that whole sequence.
If you want to get really good at shooting, get good at shooting one of these.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I hope you know more about wheellocks now than you did when you first clicked on the video.
If you did enjoy it make sure to subscribe to the channel both on YouTube and Full30.
And check out Arms Heritage Magazine if you're looking for a good magazine subscription on interesting historical firearms.
Thanks for watching.