You may think that tacticool is a modern invention, I can assure you ... it is not.
[ Pinfire Sabre-Revolver ]
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
Ader in Paris, taking a look at a bunch of
cool antique firearms like this sword gun.
You may have seen knife guns,
well this is a full-on sabre-revolver.
It's a much bigger blade, and it's a repeating firearm,
so like what could be cooler, right?
As I said in that intro, tacticool is not a modern thing.
Tacticool has been going on since probably the first person figured out
like how to put two sticks onto one stick as a club, and this is no exception.
So I don't have a lot of specific detail about the origins of this particular pattern.
These in general are attributed to a Milanese ... designer by the name of Carlo Maria Colombo,
who ... basically made this style,
originally by mating a pinfire Lefacheaux revolver
to an Italian 1855 pattern of officer's sabre.
And he did this in 1864, so these are sometimes called Model 1864 sabres.
It is sort of a standardised pattern, you will see guns like this.
They were made in Italy, and they were also made in France and in Belgium.
There's really no patent involved in this, there might have been at some point,
but it's the sort of thing that got copied fairly widely.
So let's just dive right in and take a look at ... how this works, what you've got here.
Alright, it's a sword scabbard.
I'm really not that much of a sword guy, so I can't elaborate too much, except I do know
that sword scabbards typically don't have recesses in them for pistol barrels.
Of course, this one does.
You are not going to want to shoot this thing, probably, with the blade sheathed
because this front hanger ring is in fact directly in line with the barrel,
and you will shoot that off.
Unless, of course, you're hanging the sword from that, but I digress.
A little bit of nice embellishment on the blade.
But then the important part here.
We have the revolver built directly into the hilt of the [sword].
This isn't a sword that was retrofitted with a revolver,
this was very much from the ground up designed to have this revolver built into it.
[ Worth mentioning ... that there is no tang. ... In true tacticool fashion it would be quite weak in actual use. ]
Now it is double action, you have your trigger down here.
And that's going to ... I don't want to really dry fire this.
Unfortunately part of the mechanism here is malfunctioning
or has some small parts missing inside.
This would normally auto-index the cylinder like any other double action revolver.
When you pull the trigger it's going to cock the hammer and also rotate the cylinder one position.
In this case the hand, or something down in there, is broken and so it's not revolving.
But you can see how that would work.
This is an early style of Lefacheaux, so our loading gate
(which you have to have the gun cocked to open),
our loading gate is retained by a little flat spring down here.
It's just spring tension on this little guy, right there, that holds the loading gate closed, like so.
Once you open it up with the hammer cocked,
you can go ahead and revolve the cylinder to load all 5 rounds.
This is pinfire.
So if you're not familiar with the pinfire style of cartridge, it is essentially a metallic case.
The front end looks like a modern cartridge.
But the back end, instead of having a primer in the base of the cartridge,
it has essentially a firing pin sticking out radially on the side of the cartridge.
And that's what this little notch is for.
When you load the cartridge, you line up that firing pin so that it sticks up out of here.
You'll notice that the hammer has a flat face on it.
When you fire, the hammer is going to snap down onto that pinfire firing pin.
That pushes it into the cartridge this direction.
And there is essentially a primer on the inside of the case opposite to the pin.
So pinfire was a system that was a lot more common in Europe than it was in the US.
Although the Confederacy, for example, did buy a
decent number of Lefacheaux pinfire revolvers during the Civil War.
But this is a system that would exist really we're talking 1840s through maybe 1870s,
before it's thoroughly outclassed by modern centrefire cartridges instead.
Pinfire works, but of course it's got issues: you have to line up the cartridges,
it's more difficult to transport, it's more time-consuming to manufacture.
A good initial idea that just didn't survive, centrefire is a lot better.
So that in some ways dates a weapon like this.
Being pinfire, we know it's relatively early.
Anyway, going back to our loading gate here.
Once you open it, you have a manual ejector rod here to knock out all of your empty cases.
The grip has a set of four finger grooves in it.
So your grip when you're not intending to fire the revolver is going to be like this.
And then you can extend your finger down here to
use the trigger when you want to actually shoot.
This style of weapon was proposed to a number of military forces over the years.
Nobody ever actually formally adopted something like this,
but they were periodically private purchased by officers.
This is of course the period where in virtually every army in the world
officers provide their own weapons.
And there were, just like today, some aficionados of the tacticool
who would buy something like this on their own for themselves.
So they may have showed up every once in a while in actual combat,
although I don't have any records that have any specific examples.
These like - spoiler - never became super popular
because - spoiler - they're not all that actually practical.
It may seem like a really cool idea to have both a revolver and a sword at the same time.
The problem is you end up with a less effective sword,
and a very definitely less effective revolver by mating the two things together.
It had to be a little bit awkward to use the grip on this thing.
It ... doesn't impact the balance as much as you might think, because it's pretty well centred.
But that's a lot of extra material and bulk on the sword
that you aren't going to be using all the time.
It is difficult to aim something like this.
The fact that we have a curved blade on the sabre,
and then a straight barrel on the revolver
means it would actually take some practice to be able to point the blade at your target.
You don't want to point from your hand to the tip, because then you're firing down.
You have to aim using basically this first little bit of the barrel.
It's a very awkward firing grip for a revolver.
And I get it, people are going to say,
and I'm sure they said it then, and they'll say it now in the comments,
that it's great for immediate last ditch personal protection.
When the sword doesn't work for whatever reason,
you can just shoot someone instead because you've got the revolver right there.
The reality is I don't think it ever quite worked that easily.
That said, they are still very cool, really neat, firearm curiosa you might say.
So a big thanks to Ader for giving me the opportunity to film
this one and bring it to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.