Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
Canadian War Museum up in Ottawa
taking a look at the strangest Ross you will ever see.
This is a semi-auto, I don't even want to say conversion,
this is a Ross M10 bolt around which
a semi-automatic rifle has been built.
And what's particularly interesting is that this rifle was actually
specifically requested by the British War Office in 1913.
They ... were looking for semi-automatic rifles to test.
And Sir Charles Ross was one of the guys who got a letter saying,
"Hey, we're looking for semi-auto rifles. Would you like to submit something?"
And on fairly short notice he actually managed to get this submitted into the trial.
Which seems pretty crazy given how unique it looks.
But I think you'll see once we look at this up close,
a lot of the manufacturing on this is such
that it could be done on fairly short notice for a one-off prototype rifle.
Like, there weren't any specific forgings that had to be developed for this rifle.
Now the British military was looking for semi-auto rifles to test, of course,
and this went into trials in 1914, in fact May of 1914.
So, two and a half, three months before the beginning of World War One
the British actually tested this, along with some other experimental semi-autos.
The test began with Ross's representative firing 25 rounds, which is one full magazine.
Presumably to prove to the testing committee and officers that the gun wasn't going to explode.
The trials committee then fired another 283 rounds through it. That was the extent of the test.
I don't have any documentation on the exact results,
but of course these weren't ordered, ... there wasn't any further trial.
283 rounds is a non-round number and kind of low for a test,
which suggests that something went substantially wrong.
Usually for a gun like this that would be, say, a broken bolt,
or some other broken critical component
that forces the test to be abandoned at that point.
Again, I don't have any actual reference of that, but
that's typical and that seems reasonable for this firearm.
So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at how on earth this thing works.
Because there's actually more Ross 1910 in here than it looks like.
Alright, there is no way this whole thing is fitting on camera in one shot.
So there's the back end.
Cycling forward here, there's the front end.
We have a magazine that is not directly vertical on the gun,
but it comes off at an angle to clear the sights.
You can see that there is a front sight,
right up here, just offset to the left of the action.
There is no corresponding rear sight: this is an early trials rifle.
We have a magazine release here. It is missing the magazine release spring,
but otherwise works. And the magazine itself is missing its follower and floor plate.
However, you can see a number of things here.
Each one of these holes is marked for capacity, and it's a total of 25 rounds.
Which is actually quite remarkably high for a shoulder rifle in 1913.
If you look at the back of the magazine,
you'll notice a distinct resemblance to the British SMLE magazine.
So, same sort of profile here, same sort of locking lugs.
In fact it would be interesting to see if this would actually fit in an SMLE.
I don't think it would, because I think this magazine has actually been converted to .30-06.
Or ... the gun is in .30-06, we'll touch on that in a minute.
Now if you're trying to figure out how on earth
this came from a bolt action Mark III Model 1910 Ross,
the easiest way to see it is actually to flip the gun over and look at it right here.
This is the bottom of your receiver. That is the front where the barrel comes in.
Then you have a bolt that comes in right there.
So ... Ross basically took his bolt-action system, flipped it upside down
(which is why the magazine is on top),
and turned it into a select fire rifle.
So there are a couple of pictures of one of these,
(one that was actually flipped over with the magazine coming out the bottom)
firing with 3 shell casings in the air. So it was definitely a select fire gun.
Don't know the rate of fire, and I don't see any obvious controls.
So it's possible this particular example is only semi,
it's possible this particular example is only full-auto, hard to say.
Now where a gun like the Huot,
or most conversions of straight-pull bolt-action rifles to self loading,
have some sort of shield on them to protect the shooter from the bolt,
what has been done on this instead is the whole receiver has been lengthened.
Really like you would expect of any native semi-automatic rifle.
There's a cap here at the end that held a spring buffer
to cushion the last bit of travel of the bolt.
This is hammer fired now. So this is a substantial diversion from the original
bolt-action system, which was striker fired.
So this fires from an open bolt, you can pull the bolt handle back, it will lock in place there.
And you can clearly see the Ross pattern bolt sticking out.
When you pull the trigger, the bolt drops, hammer drops, fires the system.
The gas system: there's of course a gas port up here in the barrel,
comes down to a gas piston here.
Comes all the way back through this nice heavy handguard,
to this point.
You can see the operating rod coming out the back, where it is connected to the bolt.
And when we cycle this back,
the op rod connects to the bolt body right there.
And that's how the whole thing is linked together.
The pistol grip (and it's interesting this is actually a
thumb-hole grip by today's standards, with a rather long metal frame stock)
this is really not common for a firearm of ... the pre-world War One period.
However, it is very similar to the Lewis gun pistol grip,
which may very well be where Ross got the idea for it.
We know of ... one other Ross prototype semi-auto conversion,
and that was also done by Ross with a Lewis style of cooling system.
So he clearly was aware of the Lewis gun, and it looks like he copied the grip for this one.
Now I had briefly mentioned the construction methodology here,
how typically getting a new prototype gun out within a short period of time
is difficult if it's a completely new design like this.
But if we look at this, we have sheet metal plates here that have been screwed together.
This magazine assembly was largely sheet metal and has been welded.
You can see some of the little defects from the welding down here.
So this was fabricated from pieces and parts
in a way that was easy enough to manufacture quickly.
Back here on the left side of the receiver,
you can see that the junction between the receiver side and the receiver top
is actually a series of mortice and tenon joints like carpentry.
So there's no specific fancy new forging that requires a lot of tooling to develop.
Instead the one forging was probably ... a Ross rifle receiver forging that was modified.
And then you can mortice and tenon on some side plates here
to hold the receiver extension and the fire control group.
Now this particular version has a magazine that is a bit longer than .303 British.
And we know from some correspondence from Charles Ross
that he actually submitted this design to Springfield for testing in the United States in 1917.
This particular rifle actually ... is in the Canadian War Museum now,
but they got it from the Patton Museum at Fort Knox.
Putting all this together, I think it's quite likely that this one is chambered for .30-06,
and it's one of the guns (possibly the only gun),
that Ross sent to the United States for testing.
... Well, clearly it didn't do any better in US testing than it had done in British testing,
it wasn't ultimately accepted, and the trials rifle stayed in the United States
where it ultimately ended up in the Fort Knox museum.
And then later, in the 1970s or '80s, came over here to the Canadian War Museum
when they, at the behest of a researcher, requested it
actually from Fort Knox. Which is a pretty cool chain of provenance.
So, a truly weird looking firearm.
Very cool to get to take a look at it.
A big thanks to the Canadian War Museum up in Ottawa for the opportunity.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
If you ever have the chance up in Ottawa, definitely take the time to stop in at the War Museum.
They have a whole bunch of interesting exhibits that change periodically,
as well as having an excellent display of military vehicles all the time.
Thanks for watching.