Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Rock Island
with a Volcanic pocket pistol, and
the real subject of today's video - this little loading tool.
Now a Volcanic really actually presents kind of a weird conundrum,
and that is: how do you carry ammunition for it?
How are you going to reload it? Because I'll be honest,
I never really thought about this until I ran across this cool little tool.
Volcanic cartridges are relatively fragile things, ... they are self-contained cartridges.
You have a bullet, and the base of the bullet is hollowed out and has a powder charge in it,
and a primer on the back.
And the back end was sealed, depending on the era,
maybe by metal but sometimes just by cardboard.
... I mean, these cartridges were fragile enough that when they were actually packaged and sold
they were sold in metal boxes to protect them.
So, ... well OK, you can load five in this case into the pistol
and carry it around and that's fine, but how do you carry a reload?
I guess you drop them loose in your pocket, but that's ... a pretty clumsy method.
And so someone came up with this,
and made it themselves as their own little speedloader for a Volcanic.
Let me show you how this works.
What we have here are six pewter tubes that have been soldered together.
They're hollow, and there is a base plate that is soldered in place on the bottom.
And then on the top here we have a sliding cover
that allows you to open up one tube at a time in sequence.
And these are the right diameter to store .31 calibre Volcanic cartridges.
The Volcanic was made in .31 and .41 calibre,
this particular example is a .31 calibre Number 1, a pocket pistol.
And this is, I expect, the pattern of gun that this loader would have been made for.
Now, it's a little interesting that ... the barrel starts here,
the loader is actually longer than the magazine capacity.
So to reload this you pull the follower tab all the way up to the front,
and this front section that retains the follower and magazine spring when you do that,
this rotates around the barrel, pivots around the barrel.
So you can open it up, and you could then take your loading tool here,
(let's close it off down to just one tube),
and you could take this and then dump the contents directly into the magazine tube.
So you would load this with the bullets pointing that way,
so that when you empty it into the gun they're in the correct orientation.
And then you simply rotate this back in line.
The follower at that point will stay up here
because there will be a stack of cartridges in the magazine tube.
But then it's loaded and ready to go.
So it's a little curious to me that these tubes are a bit longer than the actual magazine capacity.
This would hold 30 rounds at 5 per tube.
The other size available in the Volcanic
was a substantially longer barrel that ... would hold 10 rounds.
And I don't think this would hold quite 10 rounds,
although I don't have a pile of .31 calibre Volcanic cartridges to actually test it out with.
But it's simple, it's kind of an ingenious thing.
As far as I've ever been able to tell, nothing like this was ever offered for sale
by any of the companies that made Volcanic pistols during their relatively short lifespan.
So this is almost certainly something that was done by an individual owner.
Obviously the soldering here is a little bit amateurish.
Very much indicative of a one-off manufacture that someone made
because they saw a need and figured out a way to do it,
and built themselves a solution.
To me this is one of those really neat sorts of things that just sheds a light on people
actually using some of these historic firearms in their time.
When this was new, and ... when this was the hot, practical sort of thing,
questions like this come up that we don't think about today.
You don't think about this because, frankly, most people who own a Volcanic will never shoot it
because ammunition is extremely rare and extremely valuable.
And a lot of the ammunition probably wouldn't work today
even if you wanted to try and use it because it's 150 years old, or older.
And so people don't maybe think about: how was this actually practically handled in the field?
And the answer to that question often involves cool little hacks like this one.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, I thought this was pretty neat.
Thanks for watching.