Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com, I'm Ian McCollum,
and I'm here today at the James Julia Auction House taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in
their upcoming Spring of 2018 firearms auction.
Today we have a second pattern Porter turret gun. Now a while back
we got to take a look at a first pattern Porter
and so I
definitely jumped at the chance to take a look at a second, so that we can show you a few of the differences
between those two. There would also be a third pattern and, hopefully at some point,
we'll have a chance to look at one of those as well.
Now a little bit of backstory on this: This was patented by a guy named PW Porter; "Perry" W. Porter;
in 1851; they were originally manufactured in Massachusetts
but with the second pattern and the third, manufacture actually moved to New York. Now this was an early
repeating revolver type firearm except that it, well, for one thing Colonel Colt had patented the idea of a typical
what we would call an "axial" revolver where all of the cylinders are pointed in parallel with the barrel;
this is a "radial" revolver where all the cylinders are pointing directly out from the radius of rotation of the cylinder.
So there are two types of turret revolvers: Vertical and horizontal;
although, exactly what that means depends on whether you're talking about the axis of rotation or the plane of rotation;
I will call this one a vertical turret revolver because the cylinder is in a vertical plane,
which means that when it's fully loaded you've got nine shots in the cylinder: One of them is pointing straight down the barrel;
two of them are basically pointing back at the shooter;
and the remainder are either pointing various angles down towards the ground or up into the air. This is a little bit better,
I would think, than a horizontal turret revolver where they're pointing kind of 360 degrees around the shooter,
because one of the main potential drawbacks to this sort of gun is that if it chain fires, which IS a possibility,
you're firing in all sorts of strange directions; with a traditional revolver if it chain fires,
they're all going downrange in the direction of the barrel and, while it may damage or destroy the gun,
you're probably not going to hit anybody that you weren't already pointing the gun at.
With a turret revolver kind of all bets are off if it chain fires.
Not surprisingly that was a substantial reason why these never really became all that popular; Porter made a total of about
1200 of these turret rifles;
about a third of them of each variation, first second and third.
I'm going to briefly go over the mechanics of how this works; if you're interested in more depth,
I would encourage you to take a look at my video on the first pattern Porter,
you will find a link to that at the very end of this video, and that'll tell you more about all of the mechanism;
but, basically we have a lever-action repeating rifle;
holds a nine rounds capacity. It is .50 caliber, 26 inch barrel on this particular one,
there is a manual safety lever back here that, once we disengage, then we have access to this operating lever.
When you cock the lever,
it cocks the hammer and then rotates the cylinder one position.
When you pull the trigger this hammer drops sideways and that is what actually
detonates a percussion cap in there,
like "that".
Now, I can open up the side plate of this rifle.
That's a pretty cool feature right there; lets you really see exactly what's going on inside.
This is the flash hole, so when the hammer strikes a primer, flash comes through there,
and then it is lined up with one of these nine flash holes here on the cylinder;
that cylinder comes out, of course;
fire goes into one of those holes, which then ignites a powder charge in a chamber, which then fires that chamber; so,
these other features on the outside of the cylinder are there to lock it in place and to rotate it.
So you'll find similar sorts of features on traditional revolvers; just obviously not in the same configuration.
Basically, we have a button here on the lever that pushes
on one of these; and then we have a button right here on this little keeper lever,
that locks into one of these holes to hold the cylinder in the proper position.
Now as for changes from the first pattern to the second pattern:
One of them is the addition of these two sort-of semicircular guards.
On the first pattern guns the flash holes, at the top and the bottom, are actually just barely
exposed outside of
this cover; you can see where the cover is flat here,
and when we have it closed,
the only reason that those top flash holes aren't visible is because of this little guard, and there's one there on the bottom.
That was added on the second pattern; definitely a good idea.
On the second pattern, Porter also added a grip safety, so if this is not depressed the trigger won't move.
If I push that in you can see that there's a little cutout notch in the trigger, and that
is held in place by a little bar inside the frame that moves out of the way when you depress this.
That prevents you from firing the rifle unless the lever is all the way down,
and that of course ensures that the cylinder has indexed into its proper location,
before you try to fire, so a good safety feature there.
This somewhat serpentine loading lever was added on the second pattern of the gun just to make it easier to load,
so you don't have an extra tool lying around that you have to keep track of;
you would of course pour powder into each one of these; well, one at a time;
place a ball on top,
and then you rotate it into position under this loading lever, and use that to ram the ball fully into the cylinder.
You'll note that because the pivot is here, the face is here, and the lever goes all the way out here,
you have quite a lot of leverage to make use of that with.
The other cool aspect of this is: It's able to be very conveniently positioned right here on the top of the gun,
which doesn't impact the sights because the cylinder is already in the way of the sights;
the sights are mounted off on the left side of the gun,
both front and rear,
so kind of like a top feed magazine light machine gun from a hundred years later.
And lastly, the priming mechanism was substantially improved on the second pattern gun: On the first pattern it used sort of pellet primers,
and it was a really awkward and not very effective system;
on the second pattern here, we have a much better one.
So if I cock the hammer I can then take this cover plate
and...
unscrew it...
and
inside there, we have a
basically a little clock spring.
This is a magazine for primers so I can,
this spins all the way around, and what you would do is actually bring it to the back
and then you can use this little flat spring here to...
lock it in place at...
fully open; and then you seat a whole bunch of primers in there, and then when you're done you would release this spring
to go back after this follower has gone past it, and then that will put pressure on
your stack of primers, always pushing one
into this position...
into *this* position under the hammer; so that's a much more effective system than on the first pattern Porters.
Now the third pattern guns would do away with all of this entirely,
and move the percussion caps actually on to the cylinder itself, which is...
simpler, but kind of a lot less cool.
You can see the inside of that slot right here;
and, in fact, with the cylinder out, you can see the one on the opposite side right there;
the purpose of these slots is to act as gas vents,
so if you don't have quite a perfect seal, which you won't, there is a cylinder gap in this like there is in any revolver;
the gap between the chamber and the barrel;
that hot gas is going to blow out the sides of the action;
instead, you know if you didn't have those slots, it might be channeled backwards
along the cylinder face itself,
where it might run a much greater risk of, say, getting into one of these other flash holes and causing a chain fire.
One of the interesting side notes about these guns is, and I don't know if this is true or just anecdotal,
but apparently at one point Colonel Colt - Sam Colt -
put out a press release saying that Porter had actually died when one of his guns chain fired while he was demonstrating it.
Now, this was false,
no such thing had happened,
but by the time anyone had a chance to go back-check the story, it had already spread around such that everyone already
"knew" quote-unquote that it had happened, and that these guns were in fact so ironically dangerous as to have killed their own inventor.
As a matter of fact it never happened;
I think one of the main reasons that this was done was because of Colt's patent, which precluded other people
from designing a similar type of better revolver until that patent expired.
Porter himself after making about 1200 of these would go on to change it up,
and and he would continue making guns for the rest of his career; but he switched to more traditional,
simpler designs.
If you would like to have this very nice second pattern Porter turret rifle in your own collection make sure to check the video description below;
you'll find a link there to the James Julia catalog page on this rifle,
where you can see their pictures, their description, their value estimate, and everything else you might need to know.
Place a bid online or come up here to Maine and participate in the auction live. Thanks for watching.