Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here again today at the Rock Island Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns in their upcoming April of 2015 Premier Auction.
And I found a particularly cool trials bolt action in this particular catalogue.
This is a Blake rifle. These were designed by a man named John Blake living in New York.
And they were initially submitted to the US 1892 rifle trials.
This is the trial that ultimately led to the adoption of the Krag–Jørgensen rifle.
And Blake was actually one of kind of a small number of domestic
American entries into this competition.
Unfortunately for him he wasn't the winner,
but his rifle has a bunch of real interesting features: in particular the magazine system.
So why don't I just go straight into bringing the camera back here,
and let's take a closer look at all the neat stuff on this rifle.
So the elephant in the room, so to speak, with the Blake rifle is its magazine.
So let's start right there, and get right to the really interesting part.
This is just a cover door, it's got a little spring-loaded tab.
When I take this open, I see this thing.
This is a 7 round, at the time it was typically called a "packet",
today you could call it an "en bloc" clip, sort of.
It kind of defies definition, because there have been
very ... few other rifle designs that actually use something like this.
The idea is simply that these spring-loaded tabs
hold 7 cartridges around the circumference of this.
You can see it has ratchet teeth on it, rather like a revolver cylinder.
What would happen is every time you cycle the bolt of the rifle,
it would mechanically index this one position.
So you didn't have any feed spring involved in feeding cartridges into the rifle,
it was all done mechanically with positive force.
Blake thought that was a very significant item in his design, a significant benefit to his rifle.
This did have some other benefits as well.
... For one thing you could adjust different overall length.
You didn't have to worry about bullet tips hitting primers like in a tubular magazine.
And it was ... a very tolerant design.
... Basically anything that you could fit into the chamber, you could fit into this.
And it wouldn't matter if some of your cartridges were
in different shapes or different lengths than others.
Now the downside is that this packet is a little bit tricky to load.
We've got two little semi-circular cutouts, here, and back here.
This tab ... basically in revolver parlance, this is the hand.
When you open the bolt, in fact I can show you that right here,
when the bolt is fully retracted
that hand lifts up just like that.
So the hand lifts up, that indexes this, causes it to rotate,
because that hand is grabbing on one of these.
It goes that way.
And then when the bolt goes back forward,
that hand drops down so that it's ready to do the same thing again.
Now when I put this packet in, presumably loaded,
what I have to do is ... get one of the teeth under that hand,
and then seat the back catch.
And then the front one sits in its place.
So I got it in pretty easily that time.
This is not the sort of thing you can just randomly drop into the magazine compartment though.
And that was one of the Army's complaints about it.
Blake also his idea was that soldiers would carry a whole bunch of these pre-loaded,
just like clips or magazines.
The Army, their counter point was that they thought these were
too weird and bulky and awkward to be easily carried.
So that's the magazine compartment.
One other side benefit though that probably wouldn't come up very often, but is a real thing.
If you should get a double feed, very easy to clear.
Drop this open, pull the packet out,
and it is no trouble to clear any ... malfunctions in the rifle.
So, I have pulled the bolt back now to where it's just starting to engage that hand,
you can see when I open it the last bit of the way, it rotates that feed packet.
We now have what would be a cartridge in line with the bolt.
You run the bolt forward,
close it, lock it. This has four locking lugs on the front of the bolt.
(It's a little bit stiff.)
You can see two lugs here, and there are two on the opposite side.
Those rotate into locking lugs in the front of the receiver.
And then we also have a bit of a lug right back here,
it's a little hard to see behind the wood there,
but the bolt handle acts ... basically as a safety lug, locking into the receiver right there.
So a very safe design. You can see that there are gas ports in the top here.
And in addition, the front of the bolt face (see if I can get you a view of that),
the front of the bolt face is slightly recessed,
so that it completely encapsulates the case head.
So should you have a ruptured case in this,
the design does a good job of protecting the shooter from any vented gas.
It is a cock on opening system.
Drop the bolt that way. That leads to a bit of a stiff lifting of the bolt.
You have to put in a fair amount of force to open the bolt after it's been de-cocked or fired.
You can manually re-cock the gun.
Blake wasn't necessarily a big fan of doing that, but it was something that the Army wanted.
And then our bolt release is right here.
It's pretty strong. I'm not going to mess with it too much on this rifle
because of course I don't want to break something before this goes up for auction.
We have another control, right here.
You'll notice we have two markings, we have rapid, and we have single.
On rapid the hand operates as you have seen,
rotates the cartridge packet and allows you to fire.
If we move this to single (it's pretty stiff as well),
what this does is actually disable the hand. ...
Now, when I open the rifle up you can see that the hand
is down here, and I can't move it.
When I open the bolt, it doesn't do anything.
That's because I'm in single-feed position where it no longer rotates this packet.
So that allows you to have 6 rounds loaded in the packet ready to use,
and then continue firing just by single loading each individual cartridge.
This was again an element that a lot of military authorities liked to see in rifles at this period,
an ability to fire the gun as a single shot, and keep the magazine in reserve.
And we're back in business.
Our rear sight here is graduated out to 1,800.
You can see there is some windage adjustment available on the rear sight.
But it's not simple. What you would do is actually loosen these two screws,
adjust the windage as necessary, and then tighten the screws back down.
So it's there for zeroing the gun, not trying ... to account for wind on a particular day.
The front sight's pretty nice, it's a bead on a nice tall post out there.
Now the ... 1892 trials didn't go well for John Blake.
The Army decided not to adopt this rifle, they adopted the Krag–Jørgensen instead.
So Blake came back in 1895 and submitted this rifle to the US Navy trials.
The Navy also turned it down, they adopted the 1895 Lee Navy straight pull instead.
So Blake put this on the commercial market.
It was available in a number of different calibres.
The very first calibre that he used was actually for the Army trials, he called it .30 Blake.
And it was effectively just a rimless version of the .30-40 Army, or .30-40 Krag cartridge.
Once this went into commercial production you could get it in that calibre,
you could get it in .400 Blake, just a little bit larger version of the same thing.
You could get it in .30-30, you could get it in .30-40, you could actually get it in .236 Lee Navy.
Since he'd gone to the trouble of getting barrels made for the Navy trials,
I suppose he figured there was no reason not to offer it commercially in that cartridge,
since the work was already done.
Not very many of these sold. You could get them in four different grades, from A down to D.
Price would range from $50 to $100.
Interestingly, if you got a grade A rifle,
it was actually guaranteed to be able to hit a 4 inch target at 200 yards
if you were using black powder cartridges.
If you used smokeless, it was guaranteed to hit a 6 inch target at 200 yards, potentially better.
Kind of interesting that they had different guaranteed standards for different types of powder.
Ultimately, not very many of these were made, they were not all that successful.
A lot of interesting ideas, but I think ultimately this wasn't
quite well enough developed to be successful.
This packet loading system has some very interesting potential to it,
but it just wasn't well enough developed at the time to be accepted by a large military force.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
It's not every day that we get to take a look at a rifle as interesting and innovative as the Blake.
If you'd like to add this to your own personal collection,
take it out, hand load for it, shoot it, or just admire it on the wall,
you have the opportunity to do so, because this is of course coming up for sale.
If you check the link in the text description below,
that'll take you to Rock Island's catalogue page for it.
You can see their high-res pictures, their cataloguer's description,
and have everything you need to set up an account, place a bid on it.
Or search the catalogue for anything else you might be looking for.
Thanks for watching.