Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at some of
the guns that are coming up for sale here in the June of 2015 Regional auction.
And I happened to stumble across, while I was looking through rifles, one of the, in fact the very first,
bolt-action military rifle. And I figured that would be a pretty cool one to take a look at.
A lot of people have probably heard the name of this. This is a Dreyse needle-rifle.
But a lot of people probably haven't taken a close look at how these things actually work on the inside.
So as I said, this was the first bolt-action rifle adopted by a major military power.
These were adopted by Prussia in 1841.
The inventor, Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse, had actually been working on this concept since at least 1824.
He had apprenticed as a gunsmith before that, and worked with some other folks who had pioneered this concept as well.
What Dreyse was able to do was actually put this together into a functioning, very practical
(well, for the day), rifle that he was able to successfully sell to the Prussian military.
Now ... it was initially adopted in 1841.
Its first real combat use was the Second Schleswig War against Denmark, between Prussia and Denmark,
Where it was, frankly, fantastically effective. Much better than the Danish
muzzle loading rifles that were being used. And that's when it really kind of hit it off.
The Prussians made versions of this gun clear up until 1869, and it was ultimately replaced
formally by the 1871 single-shot cartridge Mauser, in 1871.
So that's the basic overview of the history of these things. What we have here is a model of 1860 rifle.
The changes to these models didn't really affect the mechanics very much,
it was much more about the length and the style of the stock, and the style of the trigger guard, the sights,
the type of bayonet, the length of the barrel, those sorts of changes.
So, why don't we go ahead and bring the camera right back right away and
pull this thing apart and look at how these actually work.
Right to start with, just to point out this is a model of 1860, it was manufactured at the Danzig Arsenal.
Now this one is marked 1861 and 1862 on the other side of the receiver.
To be honest, not entirely sure what those markings indicate,
but probably small sequential updates or repairs to the rifle.
So to explain how this works,
I'm going to start from the very beginning with the thing completely disassembled here.
First off, what's important to realise about the needle-rifles is that they fired a paper cartridge.
It was composed of a bullet at the front, and then there was a primer actually sitting basically at the very base of the bullet,
then you had a charge of gunpowder, and the whole thing was wrapped in a paper case.
So in order to fire you would have a needle. This tube is hollow, it's brass,
and it would hold the needle. And the needle would extend several inches beyond the end of this tube.
And when you fired, this needle would poke through the base of the paper cartridge,
all the way through the gunpowder, and hit the primer at the base of the bullet.
That would detonate the cartridge and everything would fire. Now that little 1mm steel needle was
completely inside this exploding gunpowder with every shot, and that tended to wear them out fairly quickly.
Most people say that the needles would last a couple hundred rounds before they needed to be replaced.
So this is actually an easy to replace item, which we'll get to, in fact, right now.
This is what you would call like a striker body. So the needle runs inside this piece,
it's threaded at the back. I can run it in there, screw it in.
Now you can see the needle extends through this face. We do have a little leather pad there,
that's to seal the ... firing pin hole in the breech face. Now this piece gets a spring, which sits back here.
And the sear in the rifle grabs onto this surface right here,
and when you cock the action this spring gets compressed, the needle gets pulled back, when you fire it
it's released forward, the needle enters the cartridge and fires it.
Now this component goes inside of our inner bolt sleeve.
It's going to go in this direction, and springing like that.
Not a whole lot going on here, except that we then have
this spring, whose job is to hold this in place.
So to put this in, I'm going to
(so normally you would use a tool and hold on to this and pull it back,
because the needle is broken off, I can just compress this against the table).
There we go. So now
the needle is held in place. Now this spring we use to control the position of
this inner tube in the main bolt sleeve, so let's put it in,
and it can only go in one direction, right there.
And now we have our bolt fully assembled. This is the fired position, and then
this is
the unfired position. This would be cocked, that would be fired.
Now if our needle was intact, in the fired position you would have quite a bit of needle
protruding through this firing pin hole. Of course the needle on this one is gone, so we don't.
OK, so we now have the bolt in the rifle, and in order to charge it
I would stuff a paper cartridge into the chamber here, I then push the bolt forward,
lock it over, and now there's still no tension on my firing pin (or the needle).
In order to prepare the gun to fire, I have to push this spring down and push that forward.
That's acting against the firing pin spring, that puts tension on it, and now it's ready to fire.
Now normally you probably wouldn't want to dry fire these, but this one has a missing needle, so not a big deal.
That's fired. You can see the needle itself sprung forward. Now in order to open the bolt I
actually have to release this. So I push down on the spring, pull that back,
then I can open the bolt, pull out any remnants of the paper cartridge and repeat the process.
One neat feature,
soldiers were issued spare needles and because everyone knew that the needles wore out,
what's interesting is the spring tension here is not actually on the needle itself, it's on the carrier.
So if I need to replace the needle, I don't have to disassemble the gun at all.
All I need to do is cock it,
and then I can unscrew the needle and pull it out of the gun and replace it.
So making that possible was rather clever on the part of Dreyse.
So the sights on these rifles were actually kind of surprisingly large.
This can be adjusted out to 1,200 (there's no spring tension left on this one),
but it would be a typical notch and post sort of sight.
Much more commonly, you would probably use ... this fixed sight or this much shorter leaf.
In theory this thing has a very long effective range, in practical use it really didn't.
Part of that was because soldiers didn't tend to actually aim them because of the gas blow by.
And part of that is that they weren't actually all that accurate.
These had a .61 calibre bore, but they actually fired a .53 calibre ball
with a, believe it or not, a paper mâché sabot.
So the sabot would actually engage with the rifling and spin, and then the bullet would be seated in the sabot,
so it would also spin, and as soon as it left the muzzle, wind resistance would pull the sabot away.
I think the idea here is you avoid leading and you avoid increasing pressure really as as the gun gets fouled,
because the sabot, made out of paper mâché, can very easily compress around fouling,
where a solid lead bullet the size of the bore
can develop high pressure fairly quickly after the bore starts to get fouled. Anyway,
... an interesting and reasonable idea, but in practical terms it had a very negative effect on the gun's accuracy.
One of the typical issues associated with paper cartridges is the need to somehow obturate, or seal the bore.
What you had was kind of a cone on the face of the barrel,
and then you had a recessed ring in the face of the bolt.
The idea is this surface would sit inside here and you get the beginnings of a decent seal just with metal to metal fit.
And I think the notion was that once you have this in place,
gas that does blow by is gonna go mostly forward.
Now it should also be pointed out before you get too critical of that, that this was still
dramatically better technology than a standard muzzle loader. When the Prussians and Austrians fought in 1866,
the firepower of these rifles just overwhelmed Austrian troops who were equipped with standard muzzle loaders.
You could load this easily prone. You could load it and fire it far faster than a muzzle loader.
So these rifles were a huge formidable advance in infantry firepower in 1866 against the Austrians.
But by 1870 the Germans were fighting the French, the French were armed with also a needle rifle actually,
but a much better one that had a good breech seal and was significantly more accurate.
And this was not up to the challenge of competing with the French Chassepot needle-rifle.
And of course in 1871, the Mauser single-shot cartridge rifle came on the market
and was adopted by the new nation of Germany to replace these needle-rifles entirely.
So this went from being a marvel of modern technology and a huge advance
to being obsolete in the period of really only a few years.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. Definitely not something you get to see every day.
And you know, what's kind of cool is there are people out there who shoot these guns.
You can actually make your own new paper cartridges, you can reproduce needles.
It's actually not that difficult, considering the age and obscurity of these rifles today.
And you know what? What would be cooler than be the first guy on your block to actually go out and shoot
the first bolt-action rifle used by a military. The Dreyse needle-gun.