hi guys thanks for tuning in to another
video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian
McCallum and I'm here today at the Rock
Island auction company taking a look at
some of the little tiny guns that they
are going to be selling in their
upcoming May of 2017 premier auction
this is a remington writer magazine
pistol and if you haven't seen one of
these you should because they're really
cool
this was patented in 1871 by josef rider
who was one of the engineers or chief
engineer for the remington company and
was involved in a lot of their projects
he has a bunch of patents for some
different varieties of guns he did a
single-shot pistol for remington as well
he was involved in the engineering of
the improvement of the rolling block a
lot of work for remington but this I
think is one of his most interesting
designs because this is a repeating
pistol to magazine-fed
and actually kind of has a lot of
similarities to what we would see in
Europe around this same time that would
lead to the development of the
semi-automatic pistol what we saw in
Europe was a lot of ring trigger often
to magazine-fed
manually operated pistols and this is a
tube magazine but instead of having a
ring trigger it's got kind of a normal
spur trigger and it's actually got a a
cocking piece in addition to its hammer
we'll take a look at this up close in
just a moment but this was manufactured
from 1871 until 1888 and they were not
serial numbered but about 15,000 of them
were manufactured so that's a reasonably
successful gun for Remington certainly
not a commercial failure and what it
brings to the table is it actually has a
capacity of five rounds in its two
magazine of 30 32 caliber rimfire extra
short cartridges the same cartridge that
you would use in one of those Chicago
palm protector pistols and it is a small
and especially a very flat pistol very
easy to carry this would have been a an
excellent gentleman's pistol if you
didn't want just one or two shots in a
derringer but instead wanted repeating
firepower it is a very compact little
pistol isn't it
so the way this thing works is we have
two levers up here and the rear one is
the hammer although you can't really
access it by itself which is fine
because you don't need to this one is
the basically the action lever and what
we do is pull that back that's going to
[ __ ] the hammer and it is going to cycle
a cartridge out of this magazine tube up
into the barrel and chamber it so where
do we start on this let's start with the
magazine itself if we rotate this down
rotate that pin out of the way we can
pull this out we have our magazine tube
it's got a spring and follower inside
and yes believe it or not this holds
five full rounds thirty two extra short
was as the name implies a very short
cartridge so that goes in there then
this piece also acts as the breech block
so when I want to cycle it I have to
push it down first and then backwards if
I just push it directly backwards it
won't move that's important because this
is what locks the breech that prevents
the gun the cartridge from just
exploding out the back when you fire so
when I do this we push down this will
pull the case out of the chamber and
that empty case rides on top of that
little narrow metal rail there when I
pull this all the way back that rail
pops up so that's going to lift the
spent case up out of the action we then
have a cartridge from the magazine tube
sitting underneath this top narrow rail
and on top of that slightly thicker
lower rail when I let this forward and
it's under spring tension the whole time
that is going to chamber the next
cartridge when it goes all the way
forward you can see that the ejector
drops down ready to pick up the next
cartridge from the magazine tube right
here then our hammer is cocked that's
the firing pin right there you can't
really see it because it's inside the
frame all the time once you've got it
cocked you can then pull the trigger
drop the firing pin which fires that
cartridge and then you're ready to push
down extract
lift a new cartridge into place chamber
it gun is cocked locked and ready to
fire again now you might look at this
and wonder about the front sight because
you cut this big locking piece in the
way that you certainly can't pull down
you know on a on a something like an old
revolver of this period you'd have a
rear sight notch in the hammer so that
it showed up and lined up when the
hammer was cocked in this case this has
to be there so what did they do well
they turned that into an aperture sight
so you look right through that hole
Center your front sight blade on your
target and you've actually got a
remarkably decent sight on this thing
now to go along with those nice sights
the barrel was rifled this one's in not
great condition but you can see the
rifling right there it's kind of worn
away on the rest but this was a rifled
firearm so you might think you know
smoothbore actually would have been a
legitimate option I think for something
that was intended for use it as close a
range as this almost certainly was but
no Remington went ahead and rifled them
so that would have you know what you
might have actually been able to shoot
that pretty effectively with that sight
now some descriptions that you see will
talk about this being you know a really
early example of a tube fed repeating
pistol in the US which it kind it well
as a pistol yes as a firearm in general
now not so much this was patented in
1871 and it has a different style of
lifting mechanism which made it viable
to patent because the the hunt
volitional repeater predates this by
quite some time frame as a tube-fed gun
and then of course we have the the
commercial production versions like the
1860 Henry the 66 Winchester the Swiss
vedder Lee predates this as a tube fed
cartridge gun but this style a tube fed
handgun was not particularly popular
here in the United States it's much more
common in Austria for example so it's
really neat to see this Americanized
version of the concept one last
interesting on a feature fact about
these things is that quite a lot of them
were sold as engraved examples so
finding one like this
that is nickel-plated nickel was common
but nickel but unembellished is actually
harder than you might imagine
blue it is very rare the vast majority
of these writer magazine pistols were
nickeled but a lot of them are
embellished so if you're interested in
having one that is plain like this very
nice on the outside in fact take a look
at the description text below you'll
find the link there to rock Islands
catalog page on it and I believe there
are actually one or two others in this
auction so if you do some searching the
catalog you can find those as well and
now place a bid on the website over the
phone or you can come here and
participate in the auction life thanks
for watching