Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction House checking out some of the guns
that are going to be in their upcoming
February of 2016 Regional Auction.
And ... they have here an example of a type of gun that definitely
deserves a video on this channel, and that is a turret revolver.
Now traditionally today we think of revolvers as having a
whole series of cylinders that are all parallel with each other.
Well, that's the common thing today, but early on
why not have them arranged like the spokes on a wheel, radiating out from a centre point?
That's a ... method that was used on a number of early revolving rifles and pistols.
And here we have an example of a vertical turret rifle.
Now this particular one is actually one of the more
popular and more successful types of rifles like this.
This is a first variant of the turret rifle made by a man named Perry W. Porter.
He patented this design in 1851.
So this is just slightly ahead of the real popularity of repeating lever-action rifles.
This came right at the very end of the cap-and-ball era in firearms,
and would become very obviously outdated
as soon as metallic cartridges were easily usable and easily accessible.
So, what's really cool about this thing is the whole side plate of the rifle opens up,
and we can get this great view of exactly what's going on,
and all sorts of mechanical weirdness inside.
So I'm going to go straight to that, let me bring the camera back here and show you.
So Porter made several versions of this gun, and this is actually a first variation.
And what's interesting to note here is that we do not have any
nipples for traditional percussion caps.
Like I said, this was an 1851 patent,
so ... think of this as using the same technology as like an 1851 Navy Colt revolver.
Now what Porter did differently was he had a magazine of caps located here,
that would get hit by this hammer right here.
And the resulting spark would go through a hole in this cover plate
and into a little hole just like that, right there.
That would detonate the charge, or ignite the charge.
Now he did have a later version.
The third model of this gun was simplified and used just a standard percussion cap
a pre-capped cylinder sort of system, instead of the extra complexity in this early one.
Alright, before I open this up, let's take a quick look at how it functions.
We have a lever here, very much like a standard lever action rifle lever.
It does have a manual safety on it back here. Unlock the lever, pull that back.
When I pull the lever down it is going to lift the hammer, and then rotate the cylinder.
We're now ready to fire.
I can run the lever again to index the cylinder another location.
And when I pull the trigger, the hammer drops sideways.
That hammer drops down there.
Now, we have a big hinge pin right here.
This screw would have originally held in place a kind of serpentine-looking loading lever
that you would use to ram powder and ball into the cylinder while it's mounted to the rifle.
That is missing on this example unfortunately, but.
To open this up we're going to take this lever here,
lift it up, that unlocks the side plate of the action.
Then lift this all open like that.
We'll take a closer look over here in a moment, but first,
our actual cylinder goes right there.
We have two little pieces of spring sheet steel right here,
that tension this cylinder to keep it nice and tight.
Now this is a nine-shot revolving cylinder,
you can actually count the fire holes here, nine of them.
And then the long drag looking marks and the single holes
are there for ... rotating the cylinder and for locking it in place.
On the back you just have one big peg that fits into the action of the gun.
It's approximately a .40 calibre piece, they were made in a couple of different calibres.
If we look at this you can see by the rough finish here ...
that the frames of these guns were actually cast, which is a clever way to do it.
It allows you to get a complex shape without a whole lot of machining effort.
So they'd have cast this and then finished,
for example, this bearing surface where the cylinder rotates.
Alright, now looking at the other side of our main action side plate here,
you can see we have a piece of sheet steel here with a peg on it.
This is what locks the cylinder in place.
We have another peg right here on the lever,
that is what is used to index the cylinder. So, ...
this peg, right here, locks into these outer holes.
And this peg pushes against these.
Alright, when I go to run the lever
(this would normally be held up slightly by the cylinder),
this piece of sheet metal goes into this slot in the lever,
and it lifts it up slightly, which releases and unlocks the cylinder,
so that this button can then index the cylinder and rotate it by one position.
Now to cock the hammer, this piece of steel right here
is actually a flat metal spring that the hammer is ... pushing against.
When we pull the lever here, I am lifting the hammer up against tension on this spring,
and I am also pulling this block forward.
When it goes far enough this sear locks in there, right there.
And now pressure on the lever is released, the hammer is being held up against this spring.
There you can see the hammer is lifted up ready to fire.
... If you push this peg up, this end comes down,
which releases the sear and allows the hammer to drop.
That is done back in here by the trigger.
So this trigger simply pushes up on this lever.
Simple system.
And this, right here, is the business end of the fire hole
through which the primer spark comes.
We have these three holes here, and a matching three holes right in here.
And those are basically just gas relief holes, so
you know you're going to lose some gas
at the intersection of the cylinder and the barrel, right here.
And those holes allow it to vent in a safe and easy direction.
Don't want to put your hand over those when you fire.
Alright, now here's where things get a little bit more complicated,
and where I'm not entirely sure of how this element functioned.
So we have the hammer cocked, we have this fire hole beneath it.
And then we also have a magazine of percussion caps on ... the side of the gun.
(It's a little difficult to open, there we go.)
So this plate opens up and reveals a magazine underneath.
So this centre spring-loaded wheel rotates like this,
it's got a little wound-up coil spring underneath.
And what you would do, as far as I understand, is you would actually line up a bunch of caps in here.
What I'm not sure of is what prevents them all from just falling out.
Because when the rifle is cocked like this, a cap is ready, and in theory the way it works is
when you pull the trigger the hammer smacks into a cap.
And propels some spark down through that hole, like so.
Once the hammer is down it prevents more caps from coming out.
But as soon as you operate the lever the hammer re-cocks.
And now ... what I don't know is if this example is missing some small piece,
or if there's just something to this design that I'm not quite understanding correctly.
But something prevents the caps from all just falling out here,
and falling down along the side of the action.
Of course it's important to note that the centreline of this rifle has this big
nine-chambered vertical turret sticking out of it,
so you can't have the sights right in the middle of ... the barrel, so the sights are offset to the left.
It's an offset rear sight, and then all the way up here our offset front sight.
So that's why those are done that way.
There is no front handguard on this rifle,
just kind of stick your hand out there and hold on wherever you feel like.
Now the reason that these never became popular is probably self-evident to some people already.
But consider that cap-and-ball revolvers occasionally chain fire.
Where the spark jumps from one fire hole to the next,
and more than one cylinder fires simultaneously.
In a traditional revolver that's not that big of a problem, I mean obviously a problem,
but assuming you're pointing the gun in a safe direction,
you might damage part of the revolver,
but you're not going to like shoot anybody unintentionally.
With a turret revolver like this,
these things are pointing in all sorts of different directions simultaneously.
And one of them is always pointing directly back at you, the shooter.
In fact several of them are, ... if I'm sitting down firing this thing, this is going to hit me,
this one's going to hit me, that one's going to hit me,
should it decide to chain fire.
This was a daunting proposition.
Regardless of how common it was actually, ... how often these things actually chain fired,
it was a possibility that people didn't like.
And it certainly hurt the commercial feasibility of these guns.
In fact, this was in some ways a competitor to Colt's 1855 revolving rifle.
And Colt himself in his marketing kind of skewed facts a bit
and claimed that Porter, the developer of this gun, actually shot himself
and killed himself with one of his own guns. Which is not true.
In fact Porter lived just fine.
After the basically commercial failure of these guns
he went back to making more traditional guns, and had a reasonably successful career.
In total, about 1,200 of these Porter turret rifles were made.
I mentioned this is the first pattern,
you can tell that because it's got this squared off cap magazine on top.
You will also find them with a circular magazine up here, that would be the second version.
And then if you find one that has a cylinder that has actual
nipples for regular percussion caps, that's the third pattern.
That was the simplified gun.
Some people were willing to buy these. They were a bit complex.
But they did offer nine shots of repeating firepower in a rifle,
which is not something you could get all that easily any other way in 1851.
So, some people were willing to buy them, a lot of people decided it wasn't worth the risk,
regardless of how real that risk was versus just imaginary.
And that led to turret rifles of all sorts generally being commercial failures.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
This rifle of course is coming up for sale here, like everything at the auction.
So if you are interested in it, probably more for cool factor and hang on the wall,
rather than to actually shoot and potentially shoot yourself with,
go ahead and take a look in the description text below.
You'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on this.
It is actually the number 2 lot in this upcoming auction,
so just about the first thing in the morning that they're going to auction off.
So, if you want it you could either come here in person
to participate in the auction early in the morning,
or place a sealed or telephone bid, easy to set up through their catalogue.
Thanks for watching.