[ von Steiger Revolvers ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
Kessler Auction House in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland,
taking a look at this really cool collection of
six very closely related Swiss prototype revolvers.
Now the backdrop to this story is that
in 1872 the Swiss military adopted
a new pattern of revolver.
It was a rimfire, black-powder, 10.4mm cartridge-firing revolver.
And like many revolvers of that time period, it was a fairly slow gun to reload.
Meaning it had a fairly low practical rate of fire.
Once you emptied the cylinder, well, it's going to take you a long time to get your next shot off.
And that concerned some of the military in Switzerland,
and they decided that there's got to be some way to improve the rate of fire of these revolvers.
And so they started looking for someone who could come up with a
pattern of revolver that could speed this up.
And that's where von Steiger comes in.
Von Steiger was born in 1818, lived until 1896.
He actually served in the Dutch ... Marine Corps from 1832 until 1836.
He was posted in and lived in East India, he lived in Africa,
he was actually in Brazil from 1850 to 1858.
And in 1858 he finally came back to Switzerland where he had been born,
and he formed his gun company in Thun.
Von Steiger's company would do a bunch of different sorts of work.
They did Milbank-Amsler cartridge conversions on rifles.
They actually manufactured Swiss Vetterli rifles,
you can find them today marked "von Steiger" on the side from the manufacturer.
And when the Swiss government went looking for a new faster-firing revolver,
von Steiger thought he might be able to get a contract for that.
One of his employees, a guy ... by the name of Koechlin [?], something like that,
had come up with a patented mechanism for ejecting the cases out of a revolver cylinder.
And that's what we have here, six different progressive iterations of the von Steiger revolver.
And these started in 9mm, then they went to 10.4mm.
And I think we should just show you these up close
because I know you can't see them very well from that angle.
So this isn't quite the very first von Steiger revolver,
but it's darn close, being serial number 2.
And these ... very first couple of guns actually had brass frames,
presumably that being easier to machine to get the system just right than a steel frame.
And you can see the auto-ejecting system on this.
You can see there's a little tab right here, and when I cock the hammer
that is going to rotate forward, where it will lock under the rim of the cartridge.
This is now the just fired cartridge coming out.
I'll show you up close on a later one exactly how this avoids hitting the rim,
but basically it slides in underneath the rim as the cylinder is rotating.
It's now under the rim, and when you fire the gun that tab comes back out.
The same spring that propels the hammer forward propels that tab backwards,
and that kicks the cartridge right out of that last chamber.
So ... each time you fire one case comes ejecting out of the gun.
Now the problem with this that was discovered, once they started test firing it,
was it actually shot cases straight back into the shooter's face.
Which is a little distracting and a bit of a problem.
So in the second model they would go on to fix that.
There are a couple of other features I should show you first, however.
The ... beginning batch of von Steiger revolvers were in 9mm and not 10.4.
There was some discussion of looking at a smaller cartridge for the Army.
Here on the left side is a little flat spring, this one's kind of worn.
But what that does is actually hold cartridges in the cylinder while they are rotating through,
it prevents cartridges from falling out. This also serves as your loading gate.
So the reason this is a flat spring
is so that you can put a cartridge right here in this little trough,
depress the spring, and load them one at a time into the cylinder there.
And lastly we actually have a manual safety here on the side.
So that engages, I believe forward is engaged, rearward is disengaged,
and that locks the hammer in place as well as locking the trigger.
If we look at the markings here, you can see W.V. Steiger (W. von Steiger),
Thun, which is where his factory was, and this is production number M2.
So this is one of the prototype models.
So here's the next version of the gun.
This is serial number 5, all of these 9mm guns are in the same serial range.
So it only took three guns, and frankly maybe less than that,
before they realised that this whole thing of kicking a case
back right into the shooters face was really a problem, so they added this.
This is just a little deflector,
so that when the case comes out it hits that and bounces off to the side.
And that should mean the problem is solved.
A few other changes on this, you'll notice it doesn't have a manual safety.
A ... lot of these revolvers will have a variety of different features to them
as they experimented with different elements.
You can still see the same spring-loaded sort of loading gate / retaining tab right there.
Now if we move up the serial number range a bit to number 25, we can find a better solution.
Instead of just having a little tab to deflect cases,
now there's a whole regular trough to really channel them out.
So the case will come back, and then bounce off to the right.
We still have no safety on this one.
Honestly the idea of manual safeties on revolvers is a little bit goofy and unnecessary.
I should say, these are all 5 shot 9mm revolvers.
They all have a cleaning rod in here.
We'll take apart one of the last ones in this series
and show you a few of the other mechanical details,
but we are holding the same basic form here as the ... earlier two.
So there's our basic progression, we're going to start with brass and no deflector.
And then we have a very simple deflector, then we have a nice deflection channel.
Now we're back with number 32, so a few more along, and we have a new safety mechanism.
Now, instead of a sliding button on the frame
that actually interacts with the fire control mechanism,
now we have an experimental safety here which locks into a tab in the cylinder.
So this is going to lock like that, right into that notch.
And interesting that it is for the left-hander very easily accessible.
I suppose for the right-hander it is as well, as long as you use your trigger finger for it.
This style of safety is actually kind of reminiscent
of Dutch police revolvers, which did something very similar.
In the Dutch case it was to keep track of blank rounds versus live ball rounds in the revolver.
On this it was probably just intended as a safety.
Other than that we have really the same exact style of gun.
Now these 9mm guns have all been done in the 1872 to 1873 period
when they were looking at 9mm.
That would change in approximately 1876,
when the military decided that it wanted to stick with 10.4.
And so von Steiger would produce a second batch of pistols in 10.4mm.
These were actually tested as early as 1872 by the Swiss Army.
And apparently they worked quite well, at least on the trials field.
They were very fast to shoot, one officer came out with a record of 10 shots in 20 seconds.
Which for what is effectively a gate-loading type of revolver, is in fact pretty darn fast.
Now with the [10.4mm] production guns the basic style stayed the same,
but of course the frame had to get a little bit beefier,
and the cylinder definitely got beefier as well.
However, we still have this same system of auto-ejection using this little tab.
In fact on this one you can see how, as I'm cocking the hammer,
that ejector tab is going forward in between cartridges.
Then the cylinder rotates the rest of the way,
allowing that tab to kind of sneak in under the rim of the cartridge.
Then when I fire, that tab pops back open.
And now lastly we have one further ... 10.4mm example of the gun,
and this is pretty much the final trials version of the gun.
This is the pre-production prototype, and this is what would have been produced.
Now these were never produced in quantity because they weren't actually chosen,
we'll get into that story in a moment.
But this is the final version, so I'm going to pull this one apart
and show you some of the other mechanical details of it.
So we can start by unscrewing the cleaning rod here, that's the lock for the axis pin.
So that's our manual ejector rod or a cleaning rod.
Once that is out, I can then rotate this and remove the cylinder pin.
Then we're going to put the revolver at half-cock and the cylinder just drops right out.
One of the downsides of having an automatic ejection system on a revolver
is that it requires a substantially more complicated cylinder.
You can see all the additional cuts in here required to give space to that little ejector finger.
It's interesting to note that they actually went and numbered the cylinders, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Now for accessing the lockwork,
if we take a look at the pistol we can see this little open slot in the back, and a screw here.
And that is a give-away that this side plate comes off.
That of course requires a screwdriver, and that would be a foolish thing to have
for a military service weapon right? Something that requires special tools?
Well, von Steiger thought of that.
We have this rotating lanyard ring here, but if I push it in,
it ... locks into this plug in the bottom of the grip, which I can then unscrew.
And what do we have in here ... (very tightly in there),
but a couple of tools.
For one we have a cleaning jag that screws onto the cylinder axis pin.
And we have a folding screwdriver.
So I can take the screwdriver, and unscrew ... that side-plate screw.
Now with the screw out, if it's too tight to get the side plate off
I can actually use the screwdriver as a little leverage wedge right there.
Pop this open and, presto, there are my internal components.
Here on the side plate you can see the ejector finger,
and how it gets cycled back and forth.
And then inside we have this whole mess of lockwork.
This ... is definitely not a super-cheap revolver.
This thing has a lot going on inside, and it would have been a fairly expensive gun to produce.
However, a really nice gun.
And there you go, one von Steiger revolver.
I'm not going to open up all of the other five for you, they are all basically the exact same.
Same system, same disassembly, same internal mechanism.
Just the changes as we've seen to the ejector system and the calibre.
Here's a view of the lockwork without the cylinder in place.
So we've got the hand to start cycling the cylinder.
We've got the ejector, and we've got then the lock that rises up to lock the cylinder in place.
Then of course when you fire, the lock stays in place as long as the trigger is held.
The ejector comes back. And when I release the trigger, the hand retreats and the lock drops.
So seeing how that is supposed to function is cool and all,
but what you guys really want is an actual demonstration I'm sure.
And in this case I actually have a piece of empty 10.4 Swiss brass.
So I can load it here as if it were a live cartridge.
There we go. And then cock the hammer, we would fire that one.
So it's now been fired. I cock the hammer for the next round.
Now the ejector is under that, and when I fire it - boom - it goes flying out.
Let me zoom out a bit so you can see that from a little more distance.
Got that. This is a double-action revolver.
There it goes. It is flying directly towards the camera,
but note that I am back here and the camera is over here.
If we are directly behind it, it's going to kick the case out
to the right so that it doesn't hit the shooter.
Like so.
There it goes off to the right.
Ultimately, all of this talk and development about
... auto-ejecting revolvers would come to naught.
What the Swiss Army finally decided on was a much simpler system.
It was the Abadie system as ... developed into a Swiss revolver by, I believe then Colonel, Schmidt,
who was actually running the Waffenfabrik Bern plant.
And what the Abadie system does is basically when you open the loading gate
the trigger is disconnected from the hammer so it only rotates the cylinder.
Which means you can open the gate and use the trigger
to cycle the cylinder through one shot at a time.
And it does substantially increase the speed of reloading,
while also being much simpler than any of these auto-ejecting systems.
The Swiss would keep that revolver, that would be the 1878 pattern revolver in 10.4mm.
And then it would very quickly be replaced with the pattern of 1882 revolver,
which was basically the same sort of system,
but in a new 7.5mm cartridge, a much smaller revolver cartridge.
So in total, von Steiger revolvers, they didn't make more than a couple of dozen.
We have a really good sampling of the whole production series here.
From basically the very first model, through to the trials version in 10.4mm,
and this was pretty much the end of the line for von Steiger revolvers.
It's really cool to get a chance to look at these.
I did mention at the beginning that I am at the Kessler Auction House,
however, as some people are probably going to recommend,
these guns are actually earmarked for a museum here in Switzerland.
So I don't know if they'll be on display or not,
but they will actually be going to a museum and not into a private collection, for better or worse.
Anyway, thanks to Kessler for letting me take a look at these.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you did, do consider checking out my Patreon account.
It is the folks there supporting me at a buck a month that makes it possible
for me to travel to places like Switzerland and bring you guys
really cool prototype revolvers like these.
Thanks for watching.