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 a really cool rifle
that is coming up in their April of 2020 Premier Auction.
This is a Colt Franklin and it is ... not a conversion.
It is a rifle designed from the ground up by Colt, patented in 1884, and it uses a 9 round detachable box magazine.
Well, detachable hopper magazine perhaps, because there's no spring in this.
It's chambered for the .45-70 cartridge, and a grand total of 50 of these were made for trials.
Now this was designed by a ... General William Franklin, he was a Civil War vet.
And just after the Civil War he was elected a Vice- President of Colt, and he would work at Colt until 1888.
So just a little bit after this rifle was designed.
He came up with this. The action as I said is not a conversion, it is however very similar to the French Gras.
It uses the bolt ... handle root as a locking lug.
But really the cool thing about this is the magazine.
So let's just dive right in and take a closer look at that magazine.
So the magazine is offset to the left side of the rifle here so it can have centre-line sights.
It holds 9 rounds as I mentioned. The action itself is, well, it's just a single-shot bolt action.
It uses the root of the bolt stem here as a locking lug in the receiver. You've got an exposed striker.
Like I said, very similar to the Gras. Opens up like so, and it is a cock-on-close action.
Now let's take the magazine out and take a closer look at that.
So the way we do this is actually pull straight backwards on the magazine and lift the nose up.
There's a little spring detent in the back here. So if I pull this back, I can lift the nose up and pop it out.
There's your magazine, we've got witness holes for all 9 rounds, and there's sort of a serpentine track.
So it would be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine.
And you would load this kind of by dropping rounds in and jiggling them down to the right place
until you've got all 9 rounds in there. And then we have a little cover plate here.
This one is tight, and I am not going to be the dude who breaks this. So I'm going to leave it there.
But what you could do is push this tab over and that would close off part of the magazine
and prevent rounds from falling out. So you could carry ... multiple loaded magazines.
You can see the track in there to ensure that the rounds follow the correct path.
And then looking at the gun, we've got a couple of hooks in here that are going to control feeding.
So basically this hook is going to prevent the rim end of the cartridge from falling down.
This is going to prevent the bullet from falling down at the front of the cartridge. So,
when we close the bolt these are exposed. They prevent a round from coming down until
the bolt is actually locked in place.
Now they retract and the next round in the magazine is free to fall into this hopper.
When we open the bolt,
as soon as the bolt is unlocked, before it's even started moving,
this claw comes out which is going to prevent a second round from falling.
Remember we still have an extra cartridge in here,
so there's not really a place for a second one to fall in at the back.
But you don't want a ... cartridge to tip down at the front.
So the bolt is going to continue coming back here, and at the very end of travel, right there,
this ... rear hook is going to come out.
And that will hold the rear end of the next cartridge up while the round here rolls down into the action.
You'll notice that there is a ... cutout on the bottom. That's where the empty brass ejects out.
And as far as I can tell, what it does is use the weight of the next cartridge
to help push the empty case down out of the action.
And then the next cartridge is going to be big enough that it's going to be held up here,
so that it doesn't fall out itself.
It's also going to be sitting a little bit forward where,
if we look at this on the bottom, this ejection port widens as it goes back.
And the rim will actually sit in here and prevent the
... about to be chambered full cartridge from falling out, unless it comes all the way back.
So kind of a little bit of a finicky system there to ensure proper feeding and ejection,
but it does appear to have worked pretty well.
I should also point out of course, with the advent of magazine rifles
the US military, and many other militaries, were concerned about ammunition expenditure.
And they wanted magazine cut-offs, and the Franklin does do that.
... The little spring detent right in here acts to hold the magazine in this position if you don't want to feed.
Because it's offset, cartridges can't drop in.
So here you can open and close the bolt and load single rounds one at a time,
and then when you decide that you do want to fire from the magazine you just push that in.
The sights on this are pretty similar to the 1884 Trapdoor.
I think a lot of people would assume that this rifle is a conversion of something to use a magazine,
when in fact it is a completely made from scratch, newly designed rifle.
These are US marked here, because they were government property for trials.
We have inspector's initials, or someone's initials, on the stock there. Not quite a standard inspector's cartouche.
And then in little fine print up on the back of the receiver we have the Colt name.
And an inspection mark on the rear of the barrel.
And there are our inspector's initials once again on the front of the receiver.
So as I mentioned earlier, only 50 of these rifles were manufactured by Colt.
They were run through a series of trials by the US Army and US Navy in 1887 and 1888.
They fired a total of some 4,000 rounds without any substantial problems.
Actually this thing did really well in testing, and so as you would expect the military
proceeded to place an order for none of them.
Which really is not unusual of military trials.
I suspect the issue here was, regardless of how well it performed on the range,
this box magazine is a little bit delicate, and it's just hanging out there asking to be damaged.
There wasn't a real high opinion of enlisted men in the military at the time,
and I think people looked at this and went, "Well that is immediately going to get
dented, or knocked off the rifle, or otherwise messed up by troopers."
And so, frankly, it doesn't really surprise me that they would have rejected this idea
regardless of how effectively it actually ran during trials, so.
Most of these were destroyed. It's actually because of the diligence of a Colt collector
who was interested in Colt firearms way back, basically when these were made, starting in the 1890s through the 1920s.
I think it's this one man who's responsible for most of the surviving Colt Franklins because he got his hands on a couple of them.
At this time in history, stuff like this when it was rejected from trial would
often be either returned to the manufacturer, or simply sold as surplus on the open market, often at auction.
So, that is the story of the Colt Franklin.
It is definitely one of the more distinctive and cool Colt rifles of the period.
If you're interested in it yourself, it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island at the end of April 2020.
You can check out their pictures and description and everything in their catalogue on their website.
As well as everything else that they've got in the auction.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]