Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and we've got a funky one for you today.
This is a Howard Whitney Patent Lever Action Carbine.
Somewhere someone came up with the name
"Thunderbolt" for it, although I'll be honest,
I'm not really sure where that name came from.
But it is a funky, interesting design.
So basically the Whitneyville Armoury was kind of like the Amazon self-publishing of the mid/late 1800s.
If you had a patented idea, and you couldn't sell it to any of the big players
who could do a proper job of putting it into mass production and marketing,
and doing all the stuff, like Colt or Remington or Smith & Wesson.
Well, you might be able to take your patent to Eli Whitney and the Whitneyville Armoury,
and get him to make it for you.
There are a lot of interesting small designs that came out of Whitneyville during this period.
Now specifically for this we're talking between 1866 and 1870,
when no more than about 1,700 of these, apparently, were manufactured.
They actually took part in an Army trial in 1867, which predictably they lost.
But what we have here is a patented, single shot,
lever action, rimfire carbine, chambered for .44 rimfire.
Patented originally in 1862 by one ... Charles Howard.
He apparently worked with his brother, Sebre Howard.
(I think I'm pronouncing that name correctly.)
But they patented this originally in 1862,
there were three follow-up patents in 1865 and '66 that refined the design,
and then it was put into production by Whitneyville.
So let's take a closer look at it.
Whitneyville made this in three patterns, apparently.
Aside from some of the prototype stuff like the military trials musket,
they made it as a rifle, a sporting rifle, and a shotgun.
Now the vast majority of ones that are actually surviving are rifles,
I have not seen a shotgun example.
The difference between a rifle and a sporting rifle seems a bit vague.
I think this is a sporting rifle because it has this buckhorn style of sight.
... About half of the ones that I've seen have what's more of a period military style sight,
with like three sight notches on a flip-up ladder.
We have a nice, actually fairly large, brass front sight here, drift adjustable for windage.
And a quite heavy profile barrel, ... it's a thick barrel, and it's very much a front-heavy gun.
It is marked on both sides of the barrel here,
"Manufactured for Howard Brothers by Whitney Arms Company, Whitneyville, Connecticut".
And here on the left side,
C. Howard, Patented September 26 and October 10 1865, and October 28 1862.
The original design, as drawn up in the 1862 patent,
has set triggers and it apparently was side loading.
Where this, the actual production version, loads from the bottom.
So check this out, you have basically a one finger lever.
... This whole thing is petite, especially by today's standards.
And if we open the lever, we can open up the loading port on the bottom here.
So you've got the chamber right there.
This whole thing is basically a long tubular action.
There are two extractors, which you can see right there and there.
So to load this you would put a cartridge in with the rim behind those extractors.
You would then close the lever.
And as you're doing that, what you can see right there at the top is the firing pin.
And once you get to this point, there are actually two separate elements at work here.
And you can see this at work, right here, under the lever.
So there's a sheath on the outside of the bolt
that actually has that firing pin. And that big spring.
Once I get to this point the sheath stops,
it is being held back by a sear connected to the trigger.
And as I close the lever the rest of the way
I'm pushing the bolt forward and compressing that spring.
Notice that when I do that the firing pin point there stays in place,
and the bolt is going to close ahead of it.
So you can't see it now, but inside here we have
our bolt sheath with firing pin under ... a compressed spring right here.
When I pull the trigger it will snap forward, and fire the cartridge.
And I'm not going to dry fire it because this is a rimfire gun,
and I don't want to slam the firing pin into the breech face.
But if I just hold it back a little bit like this,
you can ... hear the click right there when ... the sheath locks over the firing sear.
And right there it'll snap forward.
Oops, just like that.
Now the locking system on this was the weak point.
It apparently had a tendency to blow open when you fired, which is a problem.
Basically it's just a knee joint sort of toggle.
You can see there's a little bit of a cut here where it locks into the back of this receiver tube,
but there's not a whole lot.
... There's theoretically a little latch here that holds the lever in place,
and it sort of does, but not a whole lot.
I think a decent bit of the locking strength on this comes from you sticking your fingers
through that lever and making sure that it doesn't come open when you fire.
This being Forgotten Weapons I feel like I ought to take this apart
and show you guys some of the internals.
So we've got two screws on top, one that goes through the side,
and one on the bottom here.
We'll pull those out and we can take the stock off.
Alright, screws removed, we can pull this off the back.
This is just a solid wood stock.
Then this looks like a receiver, but this is actually - just call this the rear trunnion.
This is just a piece that screws onto the main receiver tube and holds the stock in place.
So if I pop the lever open and I take out this little connecting screw,
I can then take off this whole rear piece.
There we go, that disconnects that.
And then this just, oops, let's get the bolt all the way forward, there we go.
And then this just unscrews.
Presto.
So here's our rear trunnion and trigger housing.
There's just a simple catch right there, and a flat spring.
When I pull the trigger that catch drops,
which releases what is, in effect, a tubular striker.
Now with the bolt assembly there should be a way to take this screw out,
take the lever out, and then you can pull this whole thing off.
But to be honest, I'm not entirely clear on how to do that,
and I think we're just going to leave it in for the time being.
This is the actual striker component.
The back end of the bolt itself is a stem that comes up here inside the spring,
and is threaded onto this nut.
That nut, there we go, comes out.
And then we can take out the striker spring.
Now at this point we've got the bolt, which is this guy right here,
and we've got our striker right there.
This by the way is just another one of these nuts
that acts to hold the front face of the spring, so don't worry about that little guy.
This surface right back here is what the trigger holds onto.
So when you charge this, the bolt goes all the way forward.
This gets locked back in about this position.
And when you pull the trigger, the spring punches that forward to fire.
Then when you go to extract it,
you can see that these two extractor claws are going to pull the cartridge back.
Normally they would hit on the rear trunnion frame here, and stop.
That's the inside.
And fundamentally this whole thing is just a tube with a gun in it.
... The whole thing is made from a barrel blank, or could be,
if you just drill out the back end here ... before you do the chamber.
And a really mechanically interesting system.
The serial number is marked in several places.
You can see it here on the connecting lever, number 891.
And you can also see it very clearly here on the inside of the lower tang, 891.
I'm not sure what the "F" is, probably an assembly mark, or acceptance or proof mark.
On the one hand it is totally not surprising that this failed military trials.
On the other hand it is a remarkably compact and efficient little design.
Leaving out any possibility of the locking system being not
really strong enough for the cartridge,
I feel like that could probably have been improved.
The real shortcoming of this is that it's just a single shot.
And of course we're talking 1866, and the next couple of years there's a lot
of surplus carbines coming out of the US military that are no longer needed.
So you really don't have a whole lot of incentive
to pay new gun prices for something like this,
when you can get some really similar sort of stuff for a whole lot cheaper
coming out of the surplus auctions of the US military,
and all the various resellers that bought that stuff up and re-marketed it.
So, obviously not a successful design in the long term,
but I think a fairly interesting and cool mechanical system.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video as well.
Thanks for watching.