Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at a very strange prototype shotgun.
I have no idea who built this, I have no idea when they built it,
I have no idea where they built it.
But it is funky and weird and different, and that's my kind of thing.
So, I will point out first this is a double-barrel, over/under shotgun.
And it's a bullpup shotgun, because the action is all back here,
way behind the trigger. The barrels in fact come all the way down here,
back to there. Let me show you up close.
Alright, let's start at the front. As you can see this is an over/under shotgun,
and then the wood stock that you see is two pieces of wood that are split on the bottom.
And in fact this whole gun is kind of in a bit of a poor state of repair.
You can't see the split on the top because there is this aluminium rib that has been
screwed in, along with a front sight bead.
We've got a little bit of checkering here, where you are supposed to hold the thing.
And ... the two pieces of wood here are held together by a whole series of screws down the length.
We've got our trigger mechanism here, along with a semi-pistol grip.
So it's a double-barrel, you've got two triggers, one for each barrel.
So one thing you notice when handling this is that it balances more to the rear than I would normally anticipate.
My hand is right at the balance point. In fact this thing is just barely not hitting the table at either end right now,
So it's very light out front and it's comparatively very heavy at the back.
There's nothing in particular here, just bringing up the back of the stock so that you have a continuous long sight rib.
Now the back is where all the cool stuff's going on. So we got some sort of mechanism here,
there's a gap in the wood right here. This is a big ol' pivot point.
And if we look at the butt plate we have a lever.
So when I pull this, you can see this block moves. That is what actually locks the breech of the shotgun in place.
And when I lift it all the way up, whoa, this pops up, there's our extractor.
And presto, we have the breech end of a double-barrel over/under shotgun.
So, there are your two barrels, this is your breech block, which snaps into place like that.
And opens like so.
So actually pretty cool.
There are no marking on this, with the exception of a hand stamped number 10 here on the breech block.
Alright, if that was all there was to this gun it would still be pretty cool,
you know, interesting design, clever idea, hey everyone likes a bullpup sporting shotgun, right?
Well, that's not all there is to it, because I was curious and so I took a look down the bore and I found this.
Now I've put a piece of white paper hanging on my backdrop there,
so that you have a little bit of light to reflect off of it.
And when you look through this you can't actually see out the bore.
You can see a little bit of light reflecting, but you can't see down it. And that is because these barrels are actually curved.
If you look at this gun from this perspective, you'll see that the barrels start off this direction.
And if they continued in that direction they'd come out over here, away from the gun.
However the barrels actually end up coming down this way.
So somewhere right here, in the middle, at the wrist, both barrels are actually slightly curved.
I think you can get a little bit better view of it from a little higher up.
So the barrels start out here,
and they have to come through this point under the back of the sight rib.
But then at some point they hit here, and have to follow this line.
So in theory that actually shouldn't impact accuracy at all, especially with shot,
because it's got a nice bit of travel straight at the ... second half of the barrel.
The front half allows it to build up velocity and it should go where it's aimed.
A very interesting solution to a problem that wouldn't exist except for the fact that
they wanted to drop the stock here to have a sight rib right on top of the barrel.
Well, like I said at the beginning, I don't know who made it, I don't know when, I don't know where.
I know pretty much nothing about it, except for mechanically how it works.
And it's only I think the second like deliberately bent-barrelled gun that I've ever run into.
The first, of course, being the German Krummlauf attachment to the Sturmgewehr.
And that's pretty funky and different. I gotta tell you when I first pulled this out,
obviously it caught my attention because it's weird and different,
but it did not occur to me until I went to actually look down the bores, and I went,
"My goodness, ... I can't actually see all the way down there. That's odd."
So, definitely someone creative, thinking outside the box so to speak.
So if you'd like to see more about this, or place a bid on it yourself if you are so inclined,
it is of course on Rock Island's catalogue page, you can find that on their web site.
In the description text below you can find links to their Instagram account and their YouTube page,
or YouTube account and Instagram page.
At any rate, there's cool stuff on both of those for you to take look at.
Thanks for watching.