Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am at Legacy Collectibles today
because they have a very interesting, experimental,
prototype self-loading conversion of the 1903 Springfield.
Now this actually isn't so much a
conversion of the 1903 Springfield as it is
a self-loading rifle built using Springfield parts.
And we don't know who exactly did this,
we don't know exactly when, but I have a theory.
And I'll touch on that theory after we take it apart and I show you how it works.
However I think one of the most relevant pieces of information here when looking at a rifle like this
is to remember that in 1904 the US government
formally authorised Springfield Armoury to sell rifles to inventors.
The US government was really interested in getting private industry
and individual private inventors into developing the firearm.
So they were interested in, in particular, semi-automatic conversions,
as well as anything else that might prove useful to the US military.
And so what better way to encourage inventors to work on the US military's rifle
than to sell them rifles out of the arsenal, ... well, not necessarily cheap, but easy access.
"You want to do a weird conversion? Here, we'll sell you the rifle, and maybe it'll work out."
And if it doesn't, well it's not a big expense for the US.
So that is why you see so many of these sort of weird, custom, experimental ideas
from the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, all built on Springfield 1903 rifles.
Because that was easily available to people.
So with that aside, what we have here is a 1914 dated Springfield barrel.
The stock on this thing has been cut off by someone,
no idea when, no idea why to be honest.
Except that the thing is kind of excessively long,
and it's a little more convenient to move it around without the buttstock on it.
And then we have a really unique self-loading mechanism.
So let's take a look at that up close.
We take a quick look down the length of this thing before we start tearing it apart.
We have a Springfield Armoury 1914 barrel, this is specifically a February of 1914 barrel.
The stock has been cut to fit Springfield bands and hardware.
But it's not actually a 1903 Springfield stock, because the receiver of this gun
(which is about twice as wide as my camera field of view here),
the receiver is far longer than a Springfield.
... And there's no splice in this stock,
so someone custom made this stock, and did a pretty nice job of it.
And they made the front end look just like a Springfield.
... There are only a few parts of this rifle that actually came from the donor Springfield:
the barrel bands and nose cap, the barrel itself is the most important one,
and then also the rear sight.
So what we have up here is a folding charging handle.
I can pull this out and cycle the bolt with that, so that's cool.
It runs actually pretty smoothly, which is a little surprising for a lot of the guns like this.
On the back here ... this is our charging handle guide.
There's a notch here so that you can, in theory, lock the bolt open.
There is a stripper clip guide up here. It is missing the floor plate currently,
but this would have had a standard Springfield type, Mauser type, floor plate.
So it would have a 5 round internal magazine.
Remember that this is a prototype patent model sort of rifle,
this is not something that would have been adopted, even best case, in ... this configuration.
If the military liked it, they would have potentially looked at something like
giving it a detachable magazine, or making other changes.
So back here, this is the end of the charging handle guide, and also the recoil spring guide.
So the recoil spring is sitting in this channel along the side of the receiver.
We have a rear end cap here.
We have a little takedown lever that allows us to pull the rear end cap out.
There's not much on this side.
It originally would have had a screw locking the end cap in place, but that's missing.
This is a manual bolt hold open, ... in fact I can show you that.
We can open the bolt, and then press that down, and it will hold the bolt in place.
It's just a little lever right down there.
Right there.
So we'll go ahead and close this, because the next thing we're going to do (it's sticky),
the next thing we're going to do is actually take this apart and see how it works.
So the first step is I'm going to take off the trigger assembly.
And then I'm going to take off the stock, and then we can work on the metal by itself.
Alright, both screws out.
Now I can pull the whole magazine and trigger assembly out of the gun.
You can see we have the original Springfield magazine assembly here,
and then this receiver has been made very long to accommodate this mechanism.
And back here we have a hammer-fired firing system.
So it's very simple, there's a hammer spring right there, that's the hammer itself.
And when it comes back, it's going to lock under
that sear right there.
You can see that pulls back, you can see it just barely right up there.
A little hidden behind the side walls of the trigger.
But there is a semi-auto disconnector in here as well, so it's a semi-auto only rifle.
Take just a moment here and pull the handguard off, and then the stock.
Alright, we can take the handguard off.
When investigating a rifle like this, one of the first things
that can give you a really good idea of what you're looking at is
simply removing the handguard. It allows me to see
that there doesn't appear to be any sort of gas port on the barrel.
We also don't see any wear back here that might indicate that the barrel moves,
which would be indicative of a recoil operating system.
Now because we've got the trigger guard out, I can take the stock off.
There we go. This is a nicely inletted stock. As I said there's no splice in it,
so someone made this all from scratch.
They've given it a couple of reinforcing pins through here.
And the stock looks really good, other than the buttstock end being cut off for some reason.
But looking at this cut, this is an old cut.
I don't know when it was done, but it wasn't all that recently.
Now we can disassemble the back end of the rifle.
We've got this, now you can see what that actually does.
It's just a little latch back here, so if I pull this down far enough...
I'm going to use a plastic punch to hold that latch down.
And that allows me to remove this rear end cap.
There are the remains of what I think was a leather buffer
on the back for when the bolt hits this.
Next up we're going to remove the end of the recoil spring guide.
This is held in place by a lug, and then just secured by a screw.
So taking the screw off will not cause this to spring out, but you never know.
I took this apart before we started filming so I would know what I was looking at,
and I was very careful to hold onto this that first time.
But now that I know it - this pulls forward, there we go.
So you can see this lug here sits in that little recess, that holds it in place.
We've got a guide rod and this little end cap.
And then the main spring for this thing is rather long,
and sits in this compartment in the side.
Alright, now we're getting somewhere.
Now in order to take the bolt out, I actually have to leave the charging
handle in its folded position, because it runs in this cylinder.
So we're just going to push this back, which gets a little wonky.
(Push it back. Use a brass punch in there.)
This is our charging handle guide, and it's going to prevent
the bolt from coming out of the receiver, which is a good thing.
In order to manually disassemble it, what we can do is rotate that up,
and then I can pull it out.
And you can see there's the folding end of the charging handle.
That releases the bolt, so I can pull it now out of the gun.
That assembly is also kind of held in place by this spring catch.
There we go. There is our bolt assembly.
So this is really the key element in the system.
So the way this gun works mechanically is when the bolt is travelling in the receiver,
both lugs are vertical like this. These lugs always stay vertical.
They are actually held in place in the receiver, right here, and can't rotate.
Alright, now we have a cam pin here
that's going to cause this front section, the bolt itself, to rotate.
This has a single locking lug on it, which is this big bar,
which locks into this space.
So the locking surface for the rifle is the rear of the ejection port opening, right here.
Right off the bat that's not great for a high-pressure self-loading rifle,
well for a high-pressure rifle at all.
You ideally want symmetrical locking lugs.
Not everything has them, granted. There are a lot of tilting bolt firearms,
like the FAL for example, that don't have symmetrical locking lugs.
But if you've got a rotating bolt you can generally do it, and it's a better idea.
Now the front of this thing, the bolt head,
actually is a separate component that can slide back and forth.
And you can see the extractor can slide with it.
We also have a spring-loaded firing pin in the back.
You saw that this was hammer fired, so that's what the hammer hits.
When this goes into battery, this is going to lock in place like that.
And there's just a slight gap, right here.
Alright, now when this fires we have a little bit of a gap up here,
and the cartridge, of course, is going to push back on this.
And when it does, remember this whole piece
(you can see the continuation of this piece here),
the bolt face is going to push on it.
So it's just a little tiny bit of movement, but if you watch right there,
when I push here, that opens up.
That doesn't seem like much, but it's a really hard, really fast, push on that bolt face.
(See if I can...)
So it's going to be more like that.
And what you see there is that the initial impulse starts this moving,
and it's got a lot of inertia to it because of how fast the pressure of firing pushes on this.
And that's going to cause that cam pin to force a rotation between these two parts.
Well, this back part is held rigid by the gun.
So the rotation when it happens forces this to accelerate backwards,
and the locking lug here to rotate upwards.
And it's going to do that until the locking lug is vertical.
Then the locking lug is unlocked, and this whole assembly can travel backwards,
which will extract the cartridge.
Now there's a fundamental question of ... what exactly is happening
that allows the bolt face to move backwards?
And as I see it, there are two possibilities.
One of them is that ... basically the headspace of the case is left non-fixed, I suppose.
So when the when thing fires, the whole case moves back and pushes this.
That's probably most likely.
The other possibility is that the case actually sticks in the front and stretches,
and that stretch gives it enough extra length to do that.
A guy named Francis K. Young, who we will talk about in a minute,
developed a rifle specifically based on a stretching case as an operating system.
Which sounds crazy, and ... kind of is crazy, but he did do that.
And this is rather similar.
So whether the case stretches or physically moves, I'm not sure.
But I think that's how this was supposed to work.
Now, we've got a lot more travel in this than ... can actually happen
when the bolt's locked into the rifle.
I would show you that, but it's way up inside the gun,
and there's just no easy way to see it with the camera.
We also have this spacer plate, which seems unnecessary.
And I suspect that these elements are here because the designer was experimenting with
just how much of this space was necessary to get the gun to run properly without rupturing cases.
And so I think he started rather long, he added a spacer,
and was tinkering with the depth at which the chamber was cut past the locking surface,
so past this ... datum, how deep is the barrel face?
So how far forward does the front of the bolt here sit?
And if you were going to make this system work, that would take a lot of trial and error.
And I think that's what was going on when the rifle reached its current configuration.
Most likely, unfortunately, the inventor discovered that this didn't really work,
and so he left it in a condition that probably isn't totally reliable,
and either abandoned the idea or, more likely,
went on to a different iteration that required starting with a new rifle.
Now there's one other similar system that I think we ought to touch on here,
and that's John Garand's primer activated system, or piston primer style of gun.
And that's the one that I think a lot more people are familiar with
because, well frankly, it's a system that actually did work, although it wasn't formally adopted.
The way that we can tell that this is not a primer activated gun
is by the fact that the whole breech face here moves.
On a primer activated gun your headspace is fixed, and is proper and safe,
and the cartridge case does not move.
Instead the primer acts as a little tiny piston,
and the primer pushes back out of the case head.
And so on a primer activated gun we would expect a very small diameter piston
that's ... the same diameter as the primer in the centre of the bolt face.
That piston would move, and that movement would cause something to unlock.
This, because the breech face is fixed, the primer can't back out of the [case]
because, well, it's flush with the rest of the case head.
Instead, the entire cartridge case, or at least the back half of it,
has to move in order to activate this.
So that's the difference fundamentally between primer activated and Franklin Young's weird ideas.
Alright, so there's the whole gun laid out, less the stock.
Definitely a really interesting piece, I love looking at these early semi-auto designs.
So let's talk about where this may have come from.
Now I said I had a theory on who made this,
and my theory is it's a guy named Francis K. Young,
who was patenting and developing ideas very similar to this in the early 1920s.
In fact, the Institute of Military Technology has a fascinating Franklin Young prototype rifle
that's not quite the same mechanism as this, but pretty darn similar.
And it's similar enough, and this is similar enough to some of Francis Young's patents that,
while I have no definitive proof that this is his,
it doesn't perfectly match any of his patents, but the time frame is right, the mechanism is right.
If I had to take a guess I would go with Francis Young as the developer of this rifle.
Now, ... there are a bunch of reasons why this
didn't eventually see any military service, or adoption, or commercial adoption.
... All the systems that involve moving the primer, or moving the case,
or stretching the case in the chamber, these things are all not really great ideas.
Far inferior to the ideas that would take over, things like gas and recoil operation,
and so that's why we never see this.
It would be way too dependent on really good quality ammunition,
made to exactly the right specification.
And there's a lot of potential for burst cases and other problematic
things should the system go wrong, so.
At any rate, it's really cool to get a chance to take a look at a rifle like this,
they are very few and far between.
And I think they are a fascinating look at the ideas of the 1920s,
before people really knew ...
how do you do a self-loading rifle in a high-pressure cartridge like .30-06.
Well, people experimented with all manner of different ideas, and this is one of them.
So, a big thanks to Legacy Collectibles for giving me access to film this for you guys.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, or if you're interested in particularly
World War Two historical firearms, definitely check out their YouTube channel.
They have a bunch of other cool stuff you can take a look at.
Thanks for watching.