Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
they're going to be selling in their upcoming
May of 2019 Premier firearms auction.
And this is a bit of a mystery gun.
It's also a needle-fire rifle, which is super cool.
So there are two main needle-fire rifles that have
gotten major production and attention in history.
And they're the Dreyse, manufactured in Prussia,
and the Chassepot, manufactured in France.
And the whole needle-fire concept was one of a great many cartridge systems developed
before the traditional brass cased centrefire cartridge that ... we're familiar with today.
So the idea of a needle-fire was actually a paper cartridge, a combustible paper cartridge
(the original caseless ammo, sort of),
with a primer inside the cartridge, either at the base, or up in the bullet depending on the design.
And then your firing pin, of course, would have to penetrate into the cartridge to hit the primer (or the percussion cap,
whatever the design style was), and so what you ended up with was, instead of a sort of, you know,
round nosed firing pin like we're used to today, you had a very sharp needle-like firing pin
in order to punch through the cartridge case. Hence the name needle-fire. Now,
aside from those two major versions of needle-fire rifles that were actually adopted and used in large numbers,
there were other experiments and even small-scale adoptions. The Italians had some needle-fire rifles.
But it's never been a particularly popular system, it just existed for this very brief period in history.
What we have here today is a needle-fire, paper cartridge conversion of an existing percussion rifle
developed by a guy named Merckelbagh. So let's take a closer look at how this thing works.
So what we have here is a percussion style of system, old-school style of of lock plate,
very much an old style of trigger-guard. Bands on the other side to keep the lock plate in place.
And then, where we should have a percussion cap, we instead have a spring-loaded firing pin.
And, of course, a bolt handle sticking out of what should be a solid barrel.
So the way this guy works is you can lift the bolt handle up vertically, pull it back
slightly, and then it actually pivots vertically out of the gun.
This then allows you to load your paper cartridge into the breech,
push it at least flush with that, and then you can lower the bolt down,
push it forward to seat it all the way in the chamber, lock it down to the side.
Now this one's a bit loose, but when you pull the trigger and drop this,
this firing pin is going to go down, it's going to push on a connecting rod in here, which will push the needle forward,
and that has the effect of locking the bolt in place. So it's still a little loose, but it can't actually come up.
You can see the firing pin doing that right here. So when I lift the hammer back,
this firing pin retracts under spring pressure. When it goes forward,
it's actually in just a little bit of a groove in the back of this bolt assembly and prevents it from rotating.
Now we don't have very much information about this because there are very few markings on it.
We do have these Belgian proof marks. We have some sort of serial number, Z30, on top.
And then most usefully we have a nice little name on the bolt itself, 'L. Merckelbagh'.
'Brevete' means patent, and this has a Belgian proof on it as well. So when this gun was converted
they would have reproofed the bolt, and most likely these are reproofing stamps as well.
On the other side of the bolt we have a similar marking 'J. Bertrand' and, without any actual evidence,
I'm going to hypothesise that that is the name of the shop that actually did the conversion work.
Merckelbagh patented it and ... contracted out to other people to actually convert guns.
I could be wrong on that, but that seems the most likely scenario.
Unfortunately, the lock plate itself is devoid of markings that might give us some further hint into where this came from.
We do have one serial number on the butt plate here, but that would be from the original
rifle that was converted and that doesn't really help us at all.
And if we move forward, some of the other features include a pretty standard old style of sight,
goes out to 1,000 metres. Calibre on this is 17.6mm. We have pretty typical
iron hardware, sling swivel up here at the front,
old-style nose cap set up for a socket bayonet, cleaning rod, front sight, etc.
The interesting part of course is the bolt. So let me go ahead and remove the bolt head.
Take that screw out, that is the toggle joint. So I can then peel this guy out.
We can then also take out the back section which just sits in there, held in place by the front section.
You can see the firing pin working right there, the first piece in the firing pin connection.
That piece comes into here, pushes this down, which pushes that little tongue forward, like so,
and then that pushes this forward, which pushes our needle out
into the cartridge. This is a pretty short needle, suggesting that
the primer was in the base of the cartridge. And that is the way that the Chassepot worked.
Now to further disassemble this, we're going to take out this little retaining screw.
That simply serves to keep the obturator here in place. The way that needle-fire systems worked
(or at least the way that the Chassepot worked, which this copies), is that it has a rubber obturator here,
and what's basically a pressure plate here at the front.
So when you fire, this plate gets pushed inward which compresses this rubber obturator,
that forces the rubber (because it has to go somewhere, if it's going to get shorter in this dimension,
it gets wider in this dimension), which causes it to create a nice tight gas seal
against the walls of the back of the chamber, and that prevents gas from leaking out.
This does wear out over a couple hundred rounds, and so you would need to replace this every few hundred rounds.
Now you can do that in fact by doing what we just did. You take out that screw,
that screw sits down in here and prevents this from coming off. We can then take this off.
This obturator is very old and it doesn't want to come past this, so I'm gonna leave it on there,
but you can see exactly what's going on there.
And we can then pull out our firing needle, has a nice big spring on it.
You don't want this thing to go forward into a cartridge when you chamber it,
that's what the return spring is for. So there's our needle.
And there is our complete Merckelbagh needle-fire conversion system.
I should mention that the original base rifle here is a French model of 1822.
Those actually started out as flintlock weapons, which were converted to percussion guns,
and then this one has been of course converted to needle fire. It's interesting, these have this cool
scalloped relief on the side of the stock to allow you to get a better
... cheek weld, better sight picture on the rifle, which is kind of distinctive of that pattern.
Merckelbagh conversions do exist on other rifles. This appears to have been a
limited commercial attempt to convert old technology, old firearms into newer technology
firearms, i.e. the needle-fire system, and it didn't work.
It wasn't successful in any significant commercial scale, as such attempts generally are not.
I was able to find almost nothing about Merckelbagh himself.
There are at least a few other of these rifles out there, or these conversions on a variety of different host rifles.
As for Merckelbagh himself, the one listing that I found was a very old patent listing which lists a patent,
I believe it was 92251, to a Merckelbagh of Paris for a ... breech-loading firearms conversion,
or firearms improvement system. And that headline would seem to match this conversion system,
although I was unable to actually find the original patent.
That patent was granted in July of 1871, which ... gives us a little bit of date context, and that would fit.
The heyday of needle-fire systems ... really ended by the mid-1870s.
The French adopted the Gras, the Dreyse was well and truly obsolete by that point,
and the brass metallic cartridge was obviously becoming the wave of the future,
the technology that was going to stick around and work well. So, it'd be really cool
if this had been developed in Paris, of course, it wasn't. We know this has Belgian proof marks on it,
but it sounds like Merckelbagh was probably of French origin working in Belgium.
At any rate, very cool to take a look at an unusual
needle-fire conversion system on a rifle.
This is of course coming up for sale here at Rock Island. So if you're interested in having it yourself,
take a look at their catalogue, you can check out their pictures and description.
Although I suspect they won't have a whole lot more information than I do here, there's very little
written and documented about this sort of thing.
At any rate, you can check out this and everything else that they have coming up for sale.
Thanks for watching.