Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are going to take a look at
this pistol here in the centre, which is an interesting
little side note in the crazy, crazy story of the development
of the Roth-Steyr pistol from the Roth-Krnka/Theodorovic guns,
which we have sort of the tail end of here.
This guy is a Model of 1899/1902, using the
identification system from Mötz and Schuy, which by the way,
if you're interested in any of the guns like this from Austria,
that is absolutely your primo reference source.
It's in German, still worth getting even if you don't speak German.
Anyway, what we have here is a gun that was primarily manufactured and developed in 8mm, the 8x22mm cartridge.
That's what would end up being adopted by Austria in 1907, but not every country in the world actually used 8mm.
There were some countries, like the US, that wanted bigger calibres,
or like Great Britain that wanted to test this thing in .45 calibre.
So this is a monster hand-cannon of a Roth-Krnka in .45 calibre.
Now, it's not .45 ACP, it's ... not .455 Webley. This is 11.5mm Roth.
Let's take a closer look at it.
I think we can get a really good idea of sort of the transitional nature of this 1899/1902 Roth-Krnka
by putting it in comparison with the Krnka-Theodorovic that came before it,
and the Roth-Steyr that was ultimately adopted.
So if you look at this, you'll see that it's got the exact same front end as the standard Roth-Steyr,
but it's got the back end of the Krnka-Theodorovic type system.
So specifically in that we have a hammer here, where the Roth-Steyr has gone to striker fired.
So there's our front end similarity, obviously everything's the same.
They've gone to a fully shrouded barrel with a barrel bushing at the front. Front sight up there.
While the back end is still extremely similar to the early Theodorovic type.
The hammer, a de-cocker. Both of these, whether striker or hammer fired, are double action guns.
But with the hammer they can actually be cocked for single action as well.
... So if we take a look at the controls here, we have a rebounding hammer.
Namely it sits here in double-action mode. When I pull the trigger through it's going to cock the hammer the rest of the way,
drop it to fire. And then when I release the trigger the hammer rebounds back to here as a safety.
So that it's not resting on the firing pin, and if you hit the back of the hammer, it's not going to accidentally fire.
Now I can also manually cock it. You can see that that brings the trigger back.
We now have a lighter, nicer, single-action trigger pull for more precise shooting should I want it.
And if I want to get rid of that and go back to double-action mode,
I've got this control button here, which I'm going to pull down.
And that'll snap the hammer back to its double action position.
We have a couple of controls on this side. This one is our cartridge release.
So this gun does not have a detachable magazine, it has an internal magazine that is fed by stripper clip.
This is the stripper clip from the 8mm gun which holds 10 rounds,
...they used the same basic design, just scaled up for .45 calibre. And this version held 7 rounds of .45.
So you would put your stripper clip in there, strip your 7 rounds in.
If you wanted to unload the ammunition, because there is no way to take anything out the bottom of the gun,
instead the feed lip on the left side there can actually be depressed in using this lever.
So if you have ammo in the magazine and you push that lever in, all of the
ammo is going to come fountaining out the top of the gun. So that's how you unload it.
We then have a bolt release, so that you can actually drop the bolt.
That is this guy, drop it down and it's going to close the bolt and make it ready to fire.
I should point out the markings here, and this is all of them.
So this is a GR, Georg Roth, patent, and the serial number on this particular example is 120.
That's out of a series of prototype pistols, so they didn't make 120 of these .45 calibre guns.
They only made probably a couple. This is the only one that I'm aware of still existing.
I think the most impressive part of this is this really huge bore on the muzzle end of this gun.
Because it's not just a .45 calibre bore,
but then you've got the barrel, and then you've got the barrel shroud and that all just makes it look bigger.
That really comes through if you compare it to what we have on the right here, which is the standard 8mm Roth-Steyr.
This .45 calibre gun is really a behemoth.
Now the one other thing that I noticed on this pistol when I was taking a look at it
is that the rear sight is offset just a little bit to the right.
The front sight is not, the front sight is exactly centred over the bore.
And yet it's pretty clear from our sight picture that the rear sight is offset to one side.
And I was thinking about why would that be? And I came up with really only one hypothetical answer.
And that answer is based on the theory that this gun would be intended to be fired one-handed,
just because that's how things were done around the turn of the century.
And it would be fired right handed, because that's definitely how things were done.
Now, this is firing a ... 12.83 gram bullet, travelling at just over 200 metres per second.
That's basically 200 grains going at about 665 feet per second.
That's a relatively heavy, slow bullet, which means it's entirely possible,
especially when you consider the bore axis offset, how high this is over your grip,
that this gun is going to start recoiling while the bullet is still in the barrel.
And if you're shooting it right handed it's going to recoil up and to the left.
... I think there's a decent chance that that's going to mean that a lot of people are going to be shooting to the left.
Or they're going to be hitting to the left.
Because if they take a perfect sight picture with nicely perfectly centred sights,
that's great, pull the trigger, the sights are on.
However the gun's going to start moving while the bullet's still in the bore.
And by the time the bullet has left, which is what actually determines where it's going to hit,
the gun will have offset to the left just a little bit.
And the way you solve that is by moving your rear sight to the right.
And so I wonder if Roth and his testing guys came to the conclusion that it was
too hard or too unpredictable to try and explain this to testing commissions.
And instead decided to just physically offset the rear notch to accommodate it,
so that they didn't have to explain anything to anyone.
They just said, "You know, line up a perfect sight picture and you'll hit the bull's eye."
I don't know if that's actually the case. Of course, there's basically no ammunition of this sort available,
and this is the only gun and there's no way that the owner is going to let me take it out
and actually shoot it to test this theory, so it will have to remain a theory.
But I find that offset rear notch a very intriguing element of what is really a very interesting gun overall.
Just as a side note.
To touch on the American development, this of course was like 1902 pattern.
The Roth-Steyr was adopted by Austria in 1907,
and so they'd pretty much had that design finalised at that point. The US didn't test it until 1911,
and as far as I know there is no surviving example of the US test pistol.
Which was, interestingly, in a 10.3mm cartridge.
And it was tested at Springfield, and did atrociously badly.
They put it through an endurance test of 1,250 rounds, during which it suffered 191 malfunctions
of nine different types, and broke an extractor.
And they even tried higher pressure rounds and lower pressure rounds, and that didn't really help anything.
So the US decided after a rather brief trial there that, "We weren't so much interested."
Now the British clearly also weren't fundamentally interested either,
because they didn't go on to adopt it.
But it's very cool to be able to take a look at the over size, like extra big, version of the Roth-Krnka from British trials.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you like this sort of subject matter,
like I said at the beginning, definitely check out the book by Mötz and Schuy.
And thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]