[ Pedersen Self-Loading Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here again at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
that are coming up for sale in their December of 2014 Premier Auction.
And one of the really freaking awesome ones is this .276 calibre Pedersen self-loading rifle.
This is best known as being the primary competitor against the M1 Garand
back in the 1920s and early 1930s when the M1 was being developed,
when the US Army was looking for a self-loading combat rifle.
It was of course designed by John Pedersen, who was a quite renowned and well versed
gun designer from the period, the early 1900s.
He had worked extensively with Remington, among other companies.
One of the other guns you may recognise him from is the Remington Model 51,
which was a pretty cool, and reasonably successful little pocket pistol early on.
Remington recently of course ... redeveloped and re-released it,
and it didn't do so well the second time around, but that's not Pedersen's fault.
So Pedersen's rifle came very close to actually winning US military acceptance.
And we could have done worse.
The M1 is a better rifle, but the Pedersen here is pretty cool,
and has a lot of advantages of its own.
For one thing it's very short, handy, just a very comfortable rifle to handle.
It has good sights, as the M1 did. It has a very nice feel to it.
The problem it had was, frankly, its mechanism.
It's a little bit on the complicated and potentially liable to problems side.
So let's bring the camera around, because what we really want see is a close-up inside this gun.
So let's start by taking a quick look at the markings.
You can see on the side of the receiver here this says,
Pedersen Selfloader PA, Vickers-Armstrong Limited.
Vickers-Armstrong was the British company that manufactured this rifle.
The "PA" is the model ... designation that Pedersen gave to this version.
Alright, so the action on a Pedersen is most recognisably similar to that of a Luger pistol.
It's a toggle-locked action.
And when you fire the whole thing opens up like that, very impressive, very cool.
A lot of ... very precise machining went into manufacturing this sort of action.
So where the Pedersen differs from the Luger is that the Luger is a short recoil system,
where the barrel and the toggle lock ... stay locked together,
and travel backwards a few millimetres when you first fire.
The Pedersen rifle is not a short recoil system, the barrel is fixed, it doesn't move at all.
Instead, recoil force pushes straight on the front of this toggle assembly.
And the surfaces inside the various joints in the toggle
are precisely calculated and machined such that they delay the opening of the bolt
until the point that pressure has dropped to a safe level in the chamber.
So ... in some ways it's not even a locked action, it's a delayed blowback.
You might consider it similar to an HK, although it delays the blowback in a different way.
So, again, this just lifts up.
When you fire, recoil energy would do this for you.
As you push back on the bolt face, this toggle action will break, lift up,
(it's pretty stiff - which it would have to be to accommodate a full-powered rifle cartridge),
slides back.
Now of course this has an empty magazine, so it's going to lock open.
Normally, if you have a clip in there, it'd eject the empty cartridge and then load a new one.
The clip held 10 cartridges.
When you fired the last one it would automatically eject the clip, ... in that way just like the M1 design.
Be careful doing this, because I don't want Pedersen thumb.
So one other marking that I want to take a look at, because it's a little entertaining here.
The safety is a cross bolt in the front of the toggle here.
When I push it over, that of course is safe.
This position is ready to fire, and you can see that they misspelled "ready" on the lock.
Well they knew that, that wasn't a total mistake.
In the manual for the Pedersen every time it refers to the safety it spells it correctly,
and then it puts a star afterwards, and then has a little notation down at the bottom of the page
saying that it was spelled r-e-d-y on the actual gun simply because they ran out of space,
and they ... couldn't type the full word.
Why they didn't use the word "fire" instead I'm not sure.
But there you go, a little eccentricity of the gun there.
So the rear sight on the Pedersen is pretty nice.
It's an aperture sight, as was the M1.
Range adjustments are done with this spiral cam.
What we do is push down, and then we can rotate this to a different position, release the button.
That allows us to set the range.
And then there is a windage ... adjustment here on the side.
Same sort of thing, you push in on this keeper
so that you can rotate the adjustment knob.
Not quite as handy and quick and easy to use as the M1,
but does allow you very good adjustment on the sights.
And it does have a very rear mounted aperture sight,
which would be pretty good for very precise shooting.
Here's our front sight, pretty typical, nothing all that unusual about it.
It is a bit weird that the bottom of the front sight block is actually hollowed out.
That looks a little bit awkward in your sight picture until you get used to it.
So one of the main shortcomings of the Pedersen in action
was because it had this basically delayed-blowback mechanism,
pressure was still relatively high in the chamber when it went to extract cartridges.
And it required lubrication on the cartridge case in order to reliably extract.
Now ... that's been the case with other military rifles,
and usually the solution is to put a little oiler pad, or oiler bottle,
built into the ... magazine mechanism of the gun.
And those systems have always been problematic,
they always attract dirt and grit, and they never function all that well.
Pedersen recognised that ...
and he came up with a different solution which was much more elegant,
and, frankly, not a totally bad solution.
He ... developed a way to coat the cartridge cases with a very thin layer of a very hard wax.
So this wax wasn't sticky, it didn't pick up dirt.
In fact you almost have a hard time noticing that it has been applied to the cartridges.
But it did serve the purpose of lubricating the case during extraction.
With that ammunition the Pedersen rifle was totally reliable.
However that was a major mark against it in military trials.
Ordnance Department officers didn't like the idea of having the need for lubricated ammunition.
Alright, while we have the Pedersen rifle here, there's one other area of gun history
that I think is kind of misunderstood, and I want to address it before we conclude the video here.
And that's the question of calibre, and the Garand versus the Pedersen.
Now when John Garand started developing his rifle,
he was working in .30-06 because that was the standard military cartridge of the day.
And his very early guns were actually of this pretty unique, unusual, primer-actuated design,
where the primer of the cartridge would actually move back
and operate a small piston when the rifle fired. And that's what ... operated the gun.
Now, as Garand was developing that, John Pedersen showed up with his idea.
And also with his idea for a smaller 7mm (or .276) cartridge.
And that attracted enough interest from the Ordnance Department
that they brought him on board to develop that rifle at the same time.
So early on Pedersen was working in .276, and Garand was working in .30-06.
However, Garand ran into problems with some of the military ammunition
not being quite properly set up for his primer-actuated system,
and had to redesign the whole rifle.
And what he did was redesign it in .276 calibre,
which had kind of taken off ... with some popularity among the Ordnance Department.
Not with everyone, but with enough people that it seemed to be the way to go.
And since his rifle wasn't working well with the existing .30-06 ammo, why not?
So Garand redesigned his gun ... from primer actuated
into the style that we know today, with a long-stroke gas piston.
When Garand did that, the Ordnance Department had the prescience to suggest that
well, yes, he should build I think it was 20 prototype Garand rifles in .276 for testing.
He should also build one in .30-06 just to see if it worked.
So Garand did that in the mid-1920s, and had a .30-06 rifle.
So by 1929 the testing between the Pedersen and the Garand had finished, the Garand had won.
And at that point the Garand was still in .276 calibre, it had a 10 round capacity,
it was a slimmer and lighter gun than the M1 that we know today.
It was chosen as the rifle to be used.
And there was going to be a little bit more development on it, just to bring it to
... just right for military adoption.
... However, before that could happen
Douglas MacArthur, who was at the time Chief of Staff of the Army,
got wind of what was going on, and he ... basically wrote a memo suggesting
that he thought it would be foolish to change from .30-06 to .276, primarily for logistics.
The Army didn't have a whole lot of money at this point,
it was a fairly small organisation, didn't have a lot of R&D funding.
And the idea of having to start over and stockpile an entirely new cartridge for the infantry rifle,
which of course would probably also mean coming up with
.276 calibre versions of all the other guns that the infantry used,
the light machine guns and the heavy machine guns,
that didn't seem like a prudent financial choice.
And so MacArthur "suggested" that maybe it'd be a better idea to stick with .30-06.
Well, a suggestion from the Chief of Staff of the Army goes a long way,
and that was enough to change the course of Ordnance Department development.
And they took his suggestion and ran with it, and told Garand,
"Well, now we need your rifle in .30-06."
Happily, because Garand had actually built that one developmental version
several years before, it didn't really impede the rifle.
He was able to move from .276 back to .30-06,
the development there had already been done,
and it didn't take that much work ... to make the change.
So, a lot of people think that MacArthur's decision to go to .30-06 is what
scrapped the hopes of the Pedersen rifle, that's not actually the case.
The Pedersen had been out of the running for 3 years before that happened.
The last tests were done in 1929, and MacArthur's memo came out in 1932.
So I hope you guys enjoyed the video.
There are very few of these Pedersen rifles out there, and it's
always really a treat to get to take a close look at one.
They are fantastically machined rifles, and just gorgeous to appreciate.
This is of course for sale, this is an auction house.
So if you're interested in adding this particular rifle to your own collection,
maybe you're going to be one of the few people out there who owns one and actually shoots it,
you can go ahead and click the text link below.
That'll take you to Rock Island's catalogue page on the gun, you can read their description,
and see their photos, and go ahead and place a bid.
Or make some plans to come out here, and take a look at it in person.
Thanks for watching guys.