Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here at the Rock Island Auction House.
And coming up in their December of 2015 Premiere Auction
they are selling, among many other guns,
this really cool magazine-fed Gewehr 71.
Now if you're familiar with the Gewehr 71 you're going to either say,
"You're crazy, there's no magazine on the 71."
Or you're going to say, "You fool, that's the 71/84 with the
tube magazine adopted to replace the Gewehr 71."
In fact this is neither of those two, this is an experimental
external horseshoe-shaped magazine which you may have
seen some black and white pictures of in an older book.
But this is actually one of the magazines that was developed,
patented by the the Ludwig Loewe Company,
and trialled against a number of other types of magazine in the early 1880s when the German
government, the German military, was attempting to come up with a way to give the Gewehr 71 some repeating firepower.
So let me step back just a moment.
The Gewehr 71 was the first Mauser rifle adopted by the German military.
It was a single-shot, 11mm rifle. Pretty basic and simple.
And it was adopted in 1871 right when the German state kind of coalesced,
or formally coalesced after the Franco-Prussian War.
It was a conglomeration of four major kingdoms and a bunch of smaller states into the actual nation of Germany.
They then promptly adopted this nice modern, breech- loading, cartridge-firing Mauser rifle at the same time.
Now watching the Turks and Russians fighting in the 1870s, ... the Turks had
Winchester lever action repeating rifles and used them to very great effect, this was at the siege of Plevna.
And international military observers watching that battle realised,
"You know what? This repeating rifle thing, that kind of makes a big difference. We need to look into this."
So a lot of different countries, Germany included, started trying to figure out how they could get a repeating rifle.
And ... if they could continue to use some of the rifles they already had and modify them, so much the better.
Now what they ended up adopting was a rifle with a tube magazine underneath the barrel,
basically the same sort of tube magazine as you have in a Winchester.
Also very similar to some other European rifles that were adopted around the same time, the Kropatschek and the Lebel in particular.
However, that was the end result of these trials.
During the trials, during the early 1880s, they had a number of different ideas going.
... The biggest ones: they tried a tube magazine under the barrel.
They tried a tube magazine in the stock, rather like an American Spencer rifle.
They tried this horseshoe-shaped magazine which we'll take a closer look at in just a moment.
And they also tried a vertical box magazine mounted externally on the rifle.
This one was obviously not the best option, obviously the best option was under the barrel, so that's what they went with.
But this is a really cool one to look at, it's sort of a very steampunk sort of
external lever and mechanical setup sort of device.
So without any further ado, let's take a closer look at exactly how this magazine works.
Alright, a few details about this rifle specifically, before we take a look at the magazine.
This was actually one of about 75,000 Gewehr 71s manufactured for the Prussian government
by the National Arms and Armament Company of London.
If you can make it out, that's this little teeny NAAACOL mark in a triangle where you would normally
have an Imperial or a government arsenal mark on the top barrel flat of the rifle.
It was manufactured in 1875, making this a fairly early example of the type.
And, in addition to having this magazine thing hooked on here, you can see that the bolt handle has been modified, like so.
Alright, so the way this works is that this whole horseshoe of a magazine has a follower and a spring in it, right here.
And what you would do is fill the whole thing up, all the way around here, with cartridges.
I don't know the capacity, I would suspect it is probably somewhere around 8.
... So the top cartridge pops up here, and
this little tab, right there, kicks it out to the side into the action of the rifle.
Now this is a modified single-shot rifle, so it doesn't have anything ...
Normally we expect the bottom of the action here to be open, to have a magazine or follower or something.
Because this was a single-shot rifle, this is just a smooth raceway.
So, the cartridge gets kicked into there, you then close the bolt,
lock it, and
push it down.
... That actually locks this cover plate under this little button,
right there, so now I can fire the rifle. I then open the bolt to extract the now empty cartridge.
And because this cover
(let's see if we can see it here),
because this cover is locked under that little button right there, all the remaining cartridges are held captive.
Until once I get the bolt back, so right here,
if you look at the base you can see that right here our ejector is kicking the empty case out,
right at the same time that this little finger which has been added to the bolt is hitting this lever.
This lever is going to pull back
on this tab, which is going to pull this button back, and release that cover on the magazine, like that.
When the cover pops up like so, it kicks another cartridge in here.
So I suspect you would have to work the bolt pretty briskly for this to run properly.
And what would happen is the empty case would get flung out the top just as the new case was getting rocked into the bottom.
So.
Again, when I then chamber the next round and when I close the bolt, that pushes the cover down,
and locks it in place until I open the bolt again.
And when it's fully open that cover plate opens again.
Now there is also one other feature.
Obviously something popular at the time was the magazine cut off,
so that you could load a magazine and then hold it in reserve until you really needed it.
This horseshoe magazine has one of those. ... Going to push this cover down.
If I rock this little lever over, it now holds that cover plate in position.
So even when I'm running this tab out of the way,
the cover plate remains locked and all the cartridges remain stuck inside the magazine.
Now something else I want to show you. We can actually take this magazine off, it is detachable.
I'm going to pull this tab back, slide it all the way out,
and the cover plate and thus the follower and the spring are being held in place by this.
I can then push in on this little button on the bottom, and the whole magazine assembly comes out of the gun.
So there's how it attaches, we've got a hook in the front and then a hook in the back.
Those lock into a modified plate on the bottom of the rifle.
There is that plate, so that's where the magazine locks in.
We then have our bolt handle there.
As I mentioned at the beginning the bolt handle has been modified, it's lifted up to clear the magazine.
However, if you have the magazine removed, this will function just like a standard Gewehr 71.
So you still have a fully functional single- shot rifle without the magazine in place.
Going back to the magazine we can get a little bit better view of how it's put together by having it off the rifle here.
So you have a follower up here, and a spring that just horseshoes its way all the way through this metal box.
I can open up this cover.
That allows the cover plate to pivot open so you can get a good view of it.
The follower is held in place by a little catch inside that prevents it from coming out.
Obviously, you can disassemble it by unscrewing these.
All of this is held together by screws, so it can all be disassembled.
So ... I think this was probably the least successful of the different attempts at a magazine-fed Gewehr 71.
But it's certainly one of the cooler looking versions, and very interesting to check out.
Well, thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
I certainly enjoyed having a chance to take a look at this
very rare and very interesting prototype rifle.
As you probably know if you watch the channel a lot, rare prototype rifles are really a specific interest of mine. So.
If you would like to take this one home and own it yourself, it is of course coming up for auction here.
You can take a look at the link in the description text below to see Rock Island's catalogue page on it.
If you're interested, if you like their pictures and think their description really is something that you need to own yourself,
well, you can set up an account, place a bid on-line, and best of luck to you.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]